The physicists & engineers didn’t identify the MAD inevitability from developing nukes. The public did.
I’m not demonizing the physicists or engineers here either, how were they to know what the outcome of their developments could be?! But the public at large contains people who have other ways of looking at new technologies other than “this is innovative!” or “this will end the war!” this will be profitable!”. It’s these outsider viewpoints that are needed for the public to decide if laws are required in order to robustly protect the public from that new technology.
In specific implementation scenarios, these debates are pointless because we have the nukes & chemical weapons examples from recent history. The ethics are clear. I’m more speaking about developers of new technologies alerting the public at large about potential risks involved with their technology that would make robust laws protecting the public from misuse of their technology prudent.
But, in saying that, there are examples of programmers who could have alerted the public in the public interest, but kept their mouth shut instead such as the developers who developed the emissions cheat software for Volkswagen. Worse, they knew that their actions would lead to deaths among the populations in which those cars were sold because emission-related deaths have been intimately understood for decades now. That is a crime that was perpetrated at the frontlines of software development. Those guys knew what they were doing and their “secrecy” is nothing more than a bloody conspiracy to murder. They didn’t give a fuck how many have died from the emissions released by their cars during the decade they were on sale because “I’m just doing my job building the software I was asked to build” is an adequate excuse in their book.