Experts must always be firmly controlled by men with rather perhaps less nimble and exact minds but men with broader minds and well-established characters.

Your father had a lot of people round him in the war who today would be called managers, who were at the time some of them unorthodox.

Well, once he said scientists should be on tap, but not on top – a little-known remark of his.

You think he had his scientists under control? What about Lindemann – don't you think he got a bit too much influence?

He was never allowed to interfere in politics; I often heard my father say to him ‘Now, now, Prof, that's politics. You mustn't interfere in that.’ He did have a lot of influence because he was able to translate complicated scientific facts and theories in a way my father could understand.

But certain arbitrariness must and will remain; there often comes a point when it has to be recognised that we lack the knowledge to make an important decision and that someone will have to make the decision before we can possibly hope to get that knowledge. The function of a scientist as a scientist does not extend into this field. Responsibility for making decisions which are basically indeterminate and must take unassessable factors of human attitudes into account is the proper field of executive authority. […]