"Much, I imagined, like members of a religious order would, I shared with my colleagues a sense of brotherhood, living and working with others for a transcendent cause. In fact, those former Manhattan Project scientists who stayed on in weapons work, as well as their successors at the nuclear weapons labs, are often described by others (not admiringly) as a secular priesthood. In part that’s a matter of their knowledge of secrets of the universe, arcana not to be shared with the laity: the sense of being an insider, the seductions of secrecy, to be counseling men of power. An article on the new “military intellectuals” likened RAND consultants in Washington and the Pentagon, moving invisibly across bureaucratic boundaries opaque to others, to the Jesuits of old Europe, moving between courts, serving as confessors to kings. But above all, precisely in my early missile-gap years at RAND and as a consultant in Washington, there was our sense of mission, the burden of believing we knew more about the dangers ahead, and what might be done about them, than did the generals in the Pentagon or SAC, or Congress or the public, or even the president. It was an enlivening burden."