[JadeNB]

> Gödel was second-to-none in analytic ability and he was paranoid. What made him so certain that nuclear chain reaction was a distant possibility? If it were anyone else, I'd say they were just trying to comfort themselves by not thinking about terrible consequences. I wish I knew what made him come to the conclusion he came to.

The universe does not subscribe to rigorous, certain analysis. Being an unparalleled genius in mathematics can make you too certain of the applicability of conclusions deduced from axioms about the real world; in mathematics axioms are true because you decide to work in a model of them, but the real world usually doesn't care to cooperate with the axioms that make sense to you. My suspicion would be that that's what happened here.