Technological advancement in many areas need not equate to the same pathways of technological advancement nor pursuit of the same technologies we have historically produced. There is a lot of, call it luck, in the advancement of any given field of science, many discoveries are made by individuals who refuse to take no for an answer and others due to happy accidents.
We owe much of our rocketry technology to one Germanscientist who took Nazi money and worked through a series of near continuous disasters because he had a dream to go to space. He perfected a technology that very few people around him thought could ever be successful only because of his personal obsession. Without someone in his position, with his drive, proving that it could actually be done space rockets may have been consigned to history's giant list of "stuff that would be great if only it worked". Once there was a consensus that the technology didn't work more reasonable governments wouldn't throw good money after bad chasing it. Especially not in a history burdened with a staggeringly expensive development program that went nowhere and no example of what a working ballistic missile can actually do as a weapon beyond exploding on the launch pad.