Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the risk is real. Imagine the US made phones for Russia during the Cold War, and the phones were so complicated and full of microcontrollers that reverse engineering and ensuring that a backdoor wasn't in place was impossible. Do you really think the US wouldn't have taken advantage of that? The specific technical risk is unknown, though. There are thousands of microcontrollers in a modern advanced electronic de…
The phones have access to the raw data. The towers shouldn't have access to the raw data, because presumably it's encrypted. If it isn't, it's game over anyways. Not really comparable. You could make an argument about metadata, which is much more questionable from the get-go.
The parent comment was talking about being able to take advantage of the situation by making the enemy use your devices and then incapacitating their infrastructure at the perfect moment by activating the killswitch on those devices.