Re-reading Robert Jungk's superb Brighter than a Thousand Suns at the moment* , the seminal account of the Manhattan Project (and its 30-year background) by an Austrian Jewish*** physicist in those years who interviewed basically everyone involved over the subsequent decade (it has its shortcomings and biases, but as a near-contemporary synthesis it's hard to beat).
The relevance here is the extent to which most of those brilliant physicists and chemists did not trust their own or any other governments one single inch, from the early '30s when the neutron cascade became a real possibility, right on to the end of the war and beyond.
It's a story of continual fear about how states might use their work, both in the democracies and totalitarian states, with brave and principled resistance at every stage. Even in the (completely misguided) belief in 1942-3 that the Nazis would have their own Hydrogen Bomb within the year, the motivation of those few Manhattan participants that were actually aware of what they were working on was to create a MAD-style counter that would remove the choice to use such a weapon from everyone's hands.
Even as the first successful test was still a top-level secret, project physicists, engineers and technicians were holding illegal polls and signing petitions begging their governments not to use the bomb they had worked so hard to build. The overwhelming consensus was that a demonstration should be as far as it went, either on US soil with invited Japanese observers, or in Japan itself, followed by an opportunity to surrender.
So my point is to draw a clear line between scientists, science and governments, even in times of darkest crisis. Scientists are indeed flawed, greedy, arrogant, fallible people, just like all the rest of us. Science as a collection of epistemologies and resulting ontologies works hard to counteract those human weaknesses through constant review, repetition and refinement, and it will eventually win out, but in the moment it is still embedded in our imperfect societies, and in the practical limitations of time and space.
Most critically, politicians will ignore, elevate, distort and deploy 'the science' without reference to scientists' expertise or concerns, just as it suits them. In theory reality will eventually expose their manipulations as such, but again, in time.
So getting to the truth of 'the science' and its practical applications can never be easy, especially as a layperson who can grasp only the executive summary, at best. But even as a layperson, it simply has to be the best statistical bet to try to filter out government (and opposition) spin and listen as directly as possible to the majority of scientists than to random voices and their choruses on the internet who largely exist outside of any system of check or accountability.
And failing that, Pascal's wager applies to almost all our current dilemmas. What do you have to lose if you're wrong, versus what do you have to gain if you're right.
*If you never have, do - histories don't get more gripping**
**Feynman's firsthand account is a lot more fun, but being Feynman, it's all about Feynman. Which is a major positive, but a minor negative.
*** I mention this because the charity he extends to colleagues who could reasonably (if not necessarily accurately) be accused of collaborating with the Nazis is quite extraordinary in this llght. Heisenberg, for example, is afforded long footnotes in his own words to explain what he paints as momentary failures and necessary compromises in a career of "passive resistance" as head of the Nazi's Uranium Group.
