"Ouch!"
I laughed. "Take the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This journal has been coming to me ever since you guys got frightened by What-Hath-God-Wrought-Now. I've been reading it for so long that I maybe ought to carry a pocket radiation meter to be sure I don't read it too much. What is this noble publication? An inquiry, it claims, into the means for controlling atomic energy and assuring world peace."
"And a pretty complete, exhaustive inquiry, too."
"Is it? Is it even a scientific inquiry? The atomic bomb will never go to war by itself. Men will drop, toss, or convey it."
"Sure. And the Bulletin has taken up every known means by which people can be told what atomic energy is, and why it must be controlled, and how to do that. Every step of the debate in the House and the Senate—and the debates in the United Nations—has been followed. Every idea my fellow physicists could hit on has been aired—"
"With no result."
"No result, my eye! If we hadn't ganged up to make Congress see that atomic energy was more than a military matter—soldiers would control the whole business right now."
"Grant that. You did get the AEC appointed. The brass doesn't run the whole domestic show. But the world show is run entirely from the viewpoint of possible war."
"Do you expect the physicists to be able to do anything about Russia and the Iron Curtain—when all the statesmen of all the nations can't drive a pinhole in it?"
"Look. There are too many places where you lads aren't really scientific at all. You run a magazine to investigate ways for avoiding atomic war. Men make war. But never in your Bulletin did I once see an article about human motivations. An article by a top-notch psychologist. A digest, even, of the existing science of human personality—and how that might apply to war, to atomic bombs, to international relations."