The US has 14 ballistic missile submarines, and just one of those submarines has sufficient firepower to decimate an entire continent.

… and those submarines only represent about half of our deployed nuclear arsenal.

We only agreed to nuclear arms constraints that still left us with civilization-destroying capability, preserved our ability to keep improving and modernizing that arsenal, and locked out non-nuclear powers from development (and didn’t fully succeed at that).

Does that seem like a successful analogous example to you?

If anything, it’s a much better analogy for regulatory capture and incumbent-entrenchment, not successful “pacing” of dangerous technology.