Even a few years of delay can make a big difference if you are in the middle of a major war. If Galston hadn't published his results and they weren't found until a decade or two later, the US probably wouldn't have used Agent Orange in Vietnam. Similarly with chlorine gas in WWI, atomic bombs in WWII, etc. Granted, delaying the invention doesn't necessarily make the overall outcome better. If the atomic bomb wasn't invented until the 1950s and we didn't have the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then the US or USSR would probably have been more likely to use them against each other.