By the end, he came across as saying (at least to me) that since nukes could be used to stop communism, nukes were a bad idea ;-)
That's just a matter of personal opinion (with which I, along with about everyone on this forum disagrees). A more apt analogy to some of the attitudes around here would be Rhodes saying something like 'nukes could be used to stop communism, therefore the theories governing nuclear physics are junk science'.
Yes, that would be a better analogy. As it happens, I was not trying to make an analogy, but a segue to another topic--that of the curious role of authority in science, even though argument from authority is logically invalid.
(Often people use argument from authority as a shortcut in science, i.e. "Van Vleck knows all about magnetism, so read his book and you're likely to find a refutation of your error. I'm too busy or lazy to look it up right now, so I'll just throw the name at you.") Let us call this "reference to" authority.
That works when the name cited really has investigated and covered a point in dispute, or could do it "in short order" if asked.
But when there are disagreements on philosophical *underpinnings*, or when one is borrowing prestige from one area to comment on another area, then the argument reverts to being classical "argument from authority" and loses validity.
Richard Rhodes (to my mind) did this by flaunting superior social and historical knowledge of the people involved in the Manhattan project to gain credence, and then using that credence to pronounce "Nukes are bad." But authority to make *that* statement does not necessarily derive from either connaître of the individual scientists at Los Alamos, nor savoir of the minutiae of neutron-capture cross sections as a function of density... But in the heat of crevo threads it's often hard to tell the difference between the legitimate "reference to" authority and the illegitimate "argument from" authority.
Cheers!