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Notes -
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Maybe yes? Or more specifically a middle-income thing- you need a workforce with some amount of training, tools, and quality control so that they can make the things work, but not too much or they'll expect better jobs. Working in a munitions factory seems like a terrible job- all the brutal, physical pain of working in a factory, plus the chance that it might blow up. 1st world nations can sort of solve that by using elaborate mechanization and safety controls, but that skyrockets the price.
Something that always shocks me is reading about artillery shell production in WW1. Britain was producing something like 100,000 a month at the start of the war, and that was insufficient, leading to the Shell crisis of 1915. They were able to masively ramp up production by recuiting a million women to work in munitions plants and crank out shells like crazy- more than 1 million a month by the end of 1915. France and Germany did similar things.
So today, after a century of technological advance and 4 years of the war in Ukraine, you'd expec their shell output to be even higher right? Well... not so much. It's like 500,000 for the UK and 1 million from Germany per year. People in 1st world countries really don't want to go to work mass-manufacturing explosives.
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