I think nuclear physics then had more of an established paradigm than AI safety has now; from what I understand, building a bomb was considered a hard, unsolved problem, but one which it was broadly known how to solve. So I think the answer to A is basically “no.”
A bunch of people on the above list do seem to me to have actually tried before the project was backed by the establishment, though—from what I understand Fermi, Szilard, Wigner and Teller were responsible for getting the government involved in the first place. But their actions seem mostly to have been in the domains of politics, engineering and paradigmatic science, rather than new-branch-of-science-style theorizing.
(I do suspect it might be useful to find more ways of promoting the problem chiefly as interesting).
I think nuclear physics then had more of an established paradigm than AI safety has now; from what I understand, building a bomb was considered a hard, unsolved problem, but one which it was broadly known how to solve. So I think the answer to A is basically “no.”
A bunch of people on the above list do seem to me to have actually tried before the project was backed by the establishment, though—from what I understand Fermi, Szilard, Wigner and Teller were responsible for getting the government involved in the first place. But their actions seem mostly to have been in the domains of politics, engineering and paradigmatic science, rather than new-branch-of-science-style theorizing.
(I do suspect it might be useful to find more ways of promoting the problem chiefly as interesting).