The scientists were beginning to find out the limits of their power. They might have become, as C. P. Snow had noted, the “most important military resource a nation state could call upon,” but in the end they had little control over the consequences of their work; they pursued the unknown, like great explorers, because it was there. But more and more, they ventured into a world filled with moral ambiguities, if not pure terror. Yet no one exercising political power in the United States or the Soviet Union was very interested in the piety or guilt of the scientists. This was a hard lesson. In
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