How can a man be still if he sees such a great wrong being instigated?''It's difficult, but it's necessary,' Professor While insisted. 'Science must go on unhindered, and if we bring politics into our work we will cease to be scientists.''Will we cease being human?' MacGregor demanded with the rudeness of justifying himself. 'Should we hand over our affairs to men we despise?''I suppose that is unanswerable.' Professor White was an deep into it now as MacGregor. 'But when we dabble in politics we suffer what you are suffering now, and it isn't worth it. Is it?''I don't know,' MacGregor said morosely.'Then why destroy yourself?' 'I don't believe a man has much choice any more,' MacGregor said. 'There seems to be some kind of a battle going on for any existence, science and all.''You may be right,' the Professor said. 'We are certainly facing a situation of terrible choice. Only yesterday the physicist chaps back from America brought in a petition to sign against control and secrecy of information and research in nuclear physics. Once they start on this secrecy business there is no telling where it will end. It was bad enough when we were working at Tennessee. We cannot have those ignorant politicians telling us what we must do.''They are already telling us what we must do,' MacGregor argued. 'The military control so much research that the phyusicist are becoming straight-out weapon makers and nothing else.''It's not the physicists' fault...''Then why don't they stop working for the military. Now they are talking about radio-active dust clouds and the biologists are producing concentrates of bacteria for wholesale disease-making. What's the matter with them? Have the Generals got them so scared that they meekly do as they are told?''Weapons are a part of life,' the Professor commented sadly, 'and since the politicians refuse to be peaceful, at least they ask for weapons and give us a chance we would not otherwise have of making enormous strides in costly research.''Perhaps. But don't we care how the products of our research are used?''You are looking for logic where there isn't any,' the Professor said. 'It isn't science which shapes the world, young man.''No sir, but we are part of it.''Really a very small part of it. The ultimate decision on human affairs lies outside science. We may be part of it, but if you are looking for the deciding factor in the shape of existence then I don't know where you'll find it.
James Aldridge, The Diplomat
morality, science-and-weapons