But they became Nazgul in the first place by entering into a Faustian bargain.

The Nazgûl were experimental products. The example of the Dwarves shows that Sauron didn't always get what he wanted to achieve with the Rings of Power. In other cases he may have made conscious tradeoffs with his craft.

The excessive fear the Nazgûl produce is probably not really what Sauron wanted to achieve. Sure, such levels of fear can be useful in certain situations, but in other times fear gets in the way. The Nazgûl would have been much stealthier on their mission to recover the Ring if they didn't involuntarily radiate so much fear. I think Sauron was trying to create extremely powerful undead under his control, and the results with humans were so plain successful that even random civilians with ordinary spiritual senses could feel the unnatural death aura. I think Sauron really would have liked to have some capability to operate undercover though. It speaks much of the Witch-king's capability as a ruler that despite everything he managed to hold Angmar together and lead it successfully in multiple wars.

As for what Sauron would have liked to achieve, I think he would have liked a way to turn humans into Elves, under his control of course. The undead Nazgûl have all sorts of drawbacks that Elves don't have, but Sauron did the best he could.

'Spoiling nice fish, scorching it. Give me fish now, and keep nassty chips!’

Why did you skip Tar-tar, known for his stakes?

We are confronted with another theme. It is not a new theme; it leaps out upon us from the Dark Ages – racial persecution, religious intolerance, deprivation of free speech, the conception of the citizen as a mere soulless fraction of the State. To this has been added the cult of war. Children are to be taught in their earliest schooling the delights and profits of conquest and aggression. A whole mighty community has been drawn painfully, by severe privations, into a warlike frame. They are held in this condition, which they relish no more than we do, by a party organisation, several millions strong, who derive all kinds of profits, good and bad, from the upkeep of the regime. Like the Communists, the Nazis tolerate no opinion but their own. Like the Communists, they feed on hatred. Like the Communists, they must seek, from time to time, and always at shorter intervals, a new target, a new prize, a new victim. The Dictator, in all his pride, is held in the grip of his Party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.

The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)", radio broadcast by Winston S Churchill to the United States and to London, October 16, 1938.

but I know not whether their blades would still bite, for the Dead needed no longer any weapon but fear.

Wraith

1. An apparition or spectre of a dead person; a phantom or ghost...
2. An immaterial or spectral appearance of a living being, frequently regarded as portending that person's death; a fetch.

(OED: WRAITH n.)
The word is of Scottish origin, both meanings being traced back by the OED to a verse-translation of Virgil's Aeneid made in 1513 by the Scottish poet and bishop Gavin Douglas. Tolkien has taken the first sense and given it a particular twist: the Ringwraiths are a kind of living dead, invisible and completely controlled by Sauron by means of the rings they once wore.
"Long ago they fell under the dominion of the One, and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow. (LR 1. ii)"

Ringwraith is the commonest term, but we also find Wraith-lord and Wraith-king (LR iv. viii). And Frodo speaks with dramatic irony in LR 1. xi when he jokes: I hope the thinning process will not go on indefinitely, or I shall become a wraith. In early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, before the scope of the various rings of power was more precisely determined, there are references to men-, elf, dwarf-, and goblin-wraiths (HME VI. 78). Also in the drafts of Appendix A we read of 'a way beneath the White Mountains of Gondor that no man dared to tread, because of the fell wraiths of the Forgotten Men that guarded it' (HME XII. 267).

The earlier history and derivation of the word wraith is not known. However, there is an etymological possibility which Tolkien favoured, though it is not mentioned by the OED. It is conceivable that wraith might be descended from an unrecorded noun related to the verb writhe, the original meanings of which are 'to coil (something)' or 'to envelop or swathe (something). Writhe was at one time inflected on the same pattern as ride, with past tense wrothe and the past participle writhen (used by Tolkien to describe the hills behind Mindolluin: LR v. v). Just as the verb ride, past tense rode, is related to the noun raid, which is the Scots form of road, so writhe could be related to wraith.

The Ring of Words, Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. By Gilliver, Marshall & Weiner, Oxford University Press 2009

It's said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers.

Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."

I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

Transcript from Speakola