With autonomous drones and cyberwar being the future of military power my bet in on AI experts. While the OP is about nuclear scientists, i think https://en.wi

With autonomous drones and cyberwar being the future of military power my bet in on AI experts. While the OP is about nuclear scientists, i think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull#Death assassinated by Israel for building the space gun for Saddam fits the story too. I think also somewhat related - i.e. it isn't only enemies who target strategic scientists - after having developed hypersonic missile (Mach 6) in the recent years, Russia put several top scientists and engineers who worked directly either on the project or its key technologies in prison on charges of spying. As the charges are outright bogus - one guy for example was convicted for publishing a scientific article describing results of his unclassified research funded by a European grant (and nobody said a word nor when he received the grant and was doing the work, nor later when the article was making its way through peer-review/publishing/etc. and for quite some time afterward) - it looks to me like they are preventatively making sure that the tech would have no chances to leak by putting those key people in prison once the tech got done in such a wrong way while also sending clear message to the rest.