You'll find plenty of Physics students with whom you can have an advanced policy or philosophy discussion, but I've never met a Policy or Philosophy student with any Physics knowledge.

"Kennedy was fascinated by the Zeus debate, especially the way that scientists were lined up on diametrically opposed positions for or against the system. He commented to Wiesner, 'I don’t understand. Scientists are supposed to be rational people. How can there be such differences on a technical issue?' His fascination grew and he eventually compiled a mass of material on Zeus which took up one corner of a room where he spent hundreds of hours becoming an expert on the topic. In one meeting with Edward Teller, Kennedy demonstrated that he knew more about the Zeus and ABMs than Teller. Teller then expended considerable effort to bring himself up to the same level of knowledge. Wiesner would later note that the pressure to make a decision built up until 'Kennedy came to feel that the only thing anybody in the country was concerned about was Nike-Zeus.''

Most of the nuclear fission stuff that is simple enough that you might hope to analyze with back-of-the-envelope QM has so much energy that it tends to act like a classical particle of negligibly short wavelength (but not enough energy to bring QM back into the picture by QED creating new particles upon collision). And while there is probably various quantum mechanical stuff deeply involved in a power reactor in one way or another --- e.g., electrical conductivity tends to involve band theory, and water is often used as a working fluid and at a fundamental level its thermal properties depend on stuff like hydrogen bonds --- I doubt it was helpful for a naval nuclear reactors guy to try to analyze things at that level in the middle of the last century.