War & Peace Quote by Barry Commoner

“An army of highly skilled scientists” is a deliberately loaded phrase, and Commoner knows it. He’s describing the Atomic Energy Commission with the vocabulary of mobilization: not a lab, not a research community, but a disciplined force. The intent is to puncture the comforting image of neutral experts in white coats and replace it with something closer to a command structure, where knowledge is organized, directed, and deployed.

Commoner’s subtext is a warning about how scientific talent can be absorbed into state power without ever needing to be “corrupted.” The scientists are “highly skilled,” which grants them legitimacy; they’re also an “army,” which implies obedience, hierarchy, and mission-first thinking. It’s a critique of technocracy that doesn’t deny expertise, it questions who gets to aim it. The line also implicates institutions: the AEC didn’t merely fund research, it marshaled people. That’s a different moral frame. Funding suggests curiosity; command suggests purpose.

Context matters: Commoner emerged as a leading public scientist in the Cold War era, when nuclear weapons, nuclear testing, and the rhetoric of national security fused science to the state. The AEC was both promoter and regulator of atomic technology, a conflict baked into its design. Commoner’s choice of “at its command” turns bureaucratic authority into something quasi-military, hinting that “civilian oversight” can still operate like wartime. The sentence works because it makes the invisible machinery of power visible, and it forces the reader to see expertise not as a shield against politics but as one of politics’ most potent instruments.