They tend to gravitate to industry- more specifically (at least in the circles I am familiar with) the military industrial complex... I have NO desire to work on things that will kill people, or to work on things I pray will never be used...

But some... some people get a thrill out of that- they seek it out... I never understood that. Its a perversion, in my opinion. A couple of times I was faced with a choice- which way I would go. So far I have thankfully been able to choose to work for research, exploration, increasing humanity's understanding...

I don't kid myself... almost ANY work - particularly work using lasers in the way I use them- has 'dual-use' potential- a knife wielded by a surgeon can save lives, but if in the hands of a thug it brings death... But I like to think that- by working on the projects I have worked on- I have kept my hands somewhat clean.

I guess I can see the attraction to working on the 'dark side'- it pays better, you have access to more resources, you get to work on the literal bleeding edge of technology. I can see how the thrill of that challenge would be seductive. To work on solving challenging problems that %99.99999 of humanity is not even aware of... you could become so intoxicated by that, that you manage to forget that the end goal is to kill people.

Its not so much that I fear it would be too hard to work on such things... I fear that I might find it too easy. I don't want to discover that I am a person that can do that and sleep well at night.

My job description oscillates between scientist and engineer- the line between the two is fuzzy. You are correct that pure engineers have a higher percentage of conservatives in their ranks than the scientists. Maybe it has to do with the fact that scientists are more likely to embrace ideas and ideals - a long term view that all knowledge is useful in the long long term, while engineers are more focused on near term applications...

I once worked at (but not for) an institution that did a lot of defense related work (my work was NOT defense related)... A talk was given there by the scientist leading the Event Horizon Telescope project (this was ~2010 long before they got that famous image of the black hole). At the end of that fascinating talk, some A-hole asked him contemptuously "But what practical use is all this!? That a lot of brain power being spent on something that has no practical uses!"

The scientist gave some examples of how the work required advancing technology to make it possible and how that advancement could benefit other areas ... but finished by saying something like "But I am NOT going to apologize for basic research, its worth doing solely for improving our understanding of the universe"

I clapped harder for that than I have for any other talk I have been to. For some brilliant neanderthal who spends his life and his gift of genius working on better ways to make a more lethal weapon to belittle the work of someone trying to unravel mysteries of cosmology was infuriating to say the least.