[RandomLensman]

Because they were not charge, if anything the more aggressive voices among them had bigger roles in the cold war. You can never rule some impact, but there was an awful lot of effort going into handling cold war dynamics where those scientists had no role in.

[jampekka]

In such complicated things there's nobody "in charge". Some policy documents etc may be signed by some person in some capacity but this doesn't mean that person dictated the thing in a vacuum.

There were many different voices from many different walks of life of course.

[RandomLensman]

There were huge research efforts and, of course, some people were in charge of those.