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with the demand for new weapons and military countermeasures. In Stalin’s Soviet Union scientists served at the pleasure of the state, especially after the mid-i930s. In the United States scientists negotiated a system that was at once more benign and complex. They could do whatever research pleased them, as long as they could interest the government, a university, or industry sufficiently to fund their projects. Failure to achieve significant results was disappointing, but it was unlikely to mean arrest. In times of national emergency, and war in particular, scientists’ value to the state made their status skyrocket—until such time as their own scruples, or the end of the war, or the generals’ suspicion of them, highlighted their desire for independent research and thus their long-term unreliability as agents of a specific national cause. American scientists were subject to the market, the state, and their own ambitions, with all the freedom and uncertainty such relationships implied.

6. The ethical obligations of scientists

Behind the issue of the scientist’s relationship to the state there lurk several questions. Does the scientist have a responsibility to serve her nation if she is asked to do so by her government? Is there an obligation for all citizens to put aside other loyalties, including that to the scientific republic, in the event of what is judged by political leaders a situation requiring national service? Or do scientists have the right, or even the obligation, to weigh the ethical or moral import of what they are being asked by the state to do, and to refuse to serve if they find their government’s cause or means of attaining it ethically or morally wanting? These are fraught questions that bear, of course, on a scientist’s decision to help build a weapon like poison gas or an atomic bomb.

It is possible to suggest that there is no need for individual handwringing over these questions. In an authoritarian state, naturally, citizens have no choice: they can be, and usually are, conscripted into service. In a pluralist state, conscription can occur during time of war, as in Britain in 1916-18 and the United States in 1942-5. More often, and even during war, the pluralist state must ask its citizens for their help. It must persuade them that an emergency exists, or great danger looms, and that their involvement in the war effort is essential to ending the emergency or warding off the danger. Citizens in a democracy must be its defenders; all must do their part as shareholders in a system that protects and rewards them. Young men (and sometimes women) must fight, farmers must grow more food, workers must shoulder the wheel to increase industrial output, and scientists must contribute their expertise to the war effort. Moral considerations do not apply because the state itself, and the international system in which it participates, are amoral. Governments decide what to do based on national interest, not on what is right or just or moral. This is the realist paradigm of government, expressed most extremely by Benedetto Croce (an admirer of Machiavelli), and more plausibly during the twentieth century by the American scholar/diplomat George Kennan. The combination of state coercion or political obligation and a belief in the need for realism in international affairs makes the scientist’s choice easy: one serves the state because one ought to do so, and because there is no need to make a moral decision when doing so.36

But it is precisely during wartime that the realist paradigm falters, for war by definition raises moral issues of the profoundest sort. These start with the justice of the war itself. Scientists in an authoritarian country cannot assume that a war entered into by their government is popularly condoned or based on generally accepted principles of international law: dictators are known to flout these standards of right and wrong. (Authoritarian states are not always in the wrong when it comes to fighting; the Soviet Union was engaged in self-defense after Germany attacked it in June 1941.)