Reading the comments here my thinking has been revised. I'm no longer suggesting the elites were conspiring, at least initially, I'm suggesting the physicists were conspiring for ethical reasons. Some of them may have moved up the ladder and reached positions of some power. Physics is magic to most people, hiding possibilities in math and technicality seems possible. Anyone who has written code professionally has probably been faced with similar decisions, biases can be encoded, and you have to decide how you are going to approach these things. For example, do you add a race field to the medical database or not? In 1990 it was often left up to the programmer. Sometimes things are decided far below the level of the people running the show. Regardless, I do think my theory is far fetched, innate curiosity seems likely to have caused some people to explore further regardless of the risks, and an overt conspiracy that eventually reached high levels seems likely to have been soon discovered.