Then two cities got wiped off the map in intentional runaway nuclear reactions.
A whole generation of physicists learned the hard way that if you don't make hard sciences at least a little like those types of things, you may lack the framework to realize when you're being co-opted into a machine that kills... That "pure" science takes huge moral risks if it believes itself to be detachable from the world it is trying to explore.
Credit where credit is due, they responded to the new challenge (https://pugwash.org/).
p1 - treat physics as a discipline p2 - two cities get wiped off the map
There are many more variables that are relevant here, and in times of justified war like WW2 things are different. Consider a war scenario where your physicists spent all their undergraduate study time learning about identity politics and writing political preambles on their papers in order to get their papers even looked at.