extremely bright man, Hall that autumn was sitting on the edge of an intellectual precipice. He was a socialist in outlook, an admirer of the Soviet Union, but not yet a formal communist, and neither was he disgruntled or unhappy with his work or his station in life. No one recruited him. But all that year he had listened to “older” scientists—in their late twenties and early thirties—talk about their fear of a postwar arms race. On one occasion, sitting at the same Fuller Lodge dinner table with Niels Bohr, he heard Bohr’s concerns for an “open world.” Prompted by his conclusion that a
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