Samuel Theodore Cohen[1] was an
American physicist who invented the
W70 warhead, more popularly known as the
neutron bomb died from cancer he was , 89.
(January 25, 1921 – November 28, 2010)
Biography
Cohen's parents were Jews who immigrated from
London, England. He was born on January 25, 1921 in
Brooklyn and raised in
New York City. He studied math and physics at
UCLA before joining the Army after
Pearl Harbor.
[2] In 1944 he worked on the
Manhattan project in the efficiency group and calculated how neutrons behaved in
Fat Man, the
atomic bomb that was later detonated over
Nagasaki, Japan. After the war he studied for his Ph.D at
Berkeley before dropping out to join the
RAND Corporation.
[2] At
RAND Corporation in 1950, his work on the intensity of fallout radiation first became public when his calculations were included as a special appendix in
Samuel Glasstone's book
The Effects of Atomic Weapons. Cohen was personally responsible for recruiting the famous strategist
Herman Kahn into the
RAND Corporation.
[3]
During the
Vietnam War, Cohen argued that using small neutron bombs would end the war quickly and save many American lives, but politicians were not amenable to his ideas and other scientists ignored the neutron bomb in reviewing the role of nuclear weapons.
[4] He was a member of the
Los Alamos Tactical Nuclear Weapons Panel in the early 1970s. President Carter delayed development of the neutron bomb in 1978,
[5] but during
Ronald Reagan's presidency, Cohen claims to have convinced Reagan to make 700 neutron bombs, 350 shells to go into the 8 inch (200-millimetre) howitzer and 350 W70 warheads for the Lance missile.
[6]
'Clean' nuclear tests
In 1956, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower announced the testing of a 95% 'clean' (2-stage) fusion weapon, later identified to have been the 11 July
Navajo test at Bikini Atoll during
Operation Redwing. This weapon had a 4.5 megatons yield. Previous 'dirty' weapons had fission proportions of 50-77%, due to the use of uranium-238 as a 'pusher' around the lithium deuteride (secondary) stage. (The fusion neutrons have energies of up to 14.1 MeV, well exceeding the 1.1 MeV 'fission threshold' for U-238.) The 1956 'clean' tests used a lead pusher, while in 1958 a tungsten carbide pusher was employed.
Hans A. Bethe supported clean nuclear weapons in 1958 as Chairman of a Presidential science advisory group on nuclear testing:
[7]
... certain hard targets require ground bursts, such as airfield runways if it is desired to make a crater, railroad yards if severe destruction of tracks is to be accomplished... The use of clean weapons in strategic situations may be indicated in order to protect the local population.
– Dr Hans Bethe, Working Group Chairman, 27 March 1958 "Top Secret - Restricted Data" Report to the NSC Ad Hoc Working Group on the Technical Feasibility of a Cessation of Nuclear Testing, p 9.
In consequence of Bethe's recommendations, on 12 July 1958, the
Hardtack-Poplar shot of the Mk-41C warhead was carried out on a barge in the lagoon yielded 9.3 megatons, of which only 4.8% was fission, and thus 95.2% "clean".
Cohen in 1958 investigated a low-yield 'clean' nuclear weapon and discovered that the 'clean' bomb case thickness scales as the cube-root of yield. So a larger percentage of neutrons escapes from a small detonation, due to the thinner case required to reflect back X-rays during the secondary stage (fusion) ignition. For example, a 1-kiloton bomb only needs a case 1/10th the thickness of that required for 1-megaton.
So although most neutrons are absorbed by the casing in a 1-megaton bomb, in a 1-kiloton bomb they would mostly escape. A neutron bomb is only feasible if the yield is sufficiently high that efficient fusion stage ignition is possible, and if the yield is low enough that the case thickness will not absorb too many neutrons. This means that neutron bombs have a yield range of 1-10 kilotons, with fission proportion varying from 50% at 1-kiloton to 25% at 10-kilotons (all of which comes from the primary stage). The neutron output per kiloton is then 10-15 times greater than for a pure fission implosion weapon or for a strategic warhead like a W87 or W88.
[8]
U.S. Department of Defense manual on the neutron bomb
Cohen's neutron bomb is not mentioned in the unclassified manual by Glasstone and Dolan,
The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, but is included as an 'enhanced neutron weapon' in chapter 5 of the declassified (formerly secret) manual edited by
Philip J. Dolan,
Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense, effects manual DNA-EM-1, updated 1981 (U.S. Freedom of Information Act).
Provided that the weapon was not used in a thunderstorm, no fallout effects would occur from the use of a neutron bomb according to that manual, as the combination of 500 m burst altitude and low yield prevents fallout in addition to significant thermal and blast effects. The reduction in damage outside the target area is a major advantage of such a weapon to deter massed tank invasions. An aggressor would thus be forced to disperse tanks, which would make them easier to destroy by simple hand-held anti-tank missile launchers.
Cohen's backing of investigations into these controversial ideas won him some media attention after many years of being ignored. In 1992 he was featured in the award-winning BBC TV series
Pandora's Box, episode
To the Brink of Eternity, discussing his battles with officialdom and colleagues at the RAND Corporation. Cohen controversially argued: "When we started this systems analysis business, we stepped through the looking glass where people did the weirdest things and (used) the most perverse kind of logic imaginable and yet claimed to have the most precise understanding of everything."
[9]
Alleged support from the Pope for low yield tactical nuclear bombs
Cohen reportedly worked in France on low-yield, highly discriminate tactical nuclear weapons in 1979-80.
[10] He claimed that he was awarded a medal by
Pope John Paul II in 1979 for his bid to reform modern warfare.
[11] Author
Charles Platt reported in a 2005 profile of Sam Cohen that "...he showed me the Medal of Peace that he had received from the Pope in 1979."
[12]
At the time,
Warsaw Pact forces had a massive tank superiority in Europe (though NATO maintained an overall strategic superiority); the
Christian Science Monitor reported in 1981 that there were "19,500 tanks in the Soviet-controlled forces of the Warsaw Pact aimed at Western Europe. Of these, 12,500 are Soviet tanks in Soviet units. NATO has 7,000 tanks on its side facing the 19,500."
[13] A deterrent which was designed to minimise civilian casualties was a step away from the risk of indiscriminate warfare. The neutron bomb's killing by neutron radiation is different from the fallout of a normal high yield thermonuclear weapon because it can be controlled more precisely, restricted to military targets and kept away from civilians.
[citation needed]
The speed of modern warfare meant that the civilian population would be unlikely to be able to withdraw from combat zones and would suffer a large number of deaths in a nuclear war where the blast yields and fallout were significant. Because neutron bombs do not produce the indiscriminate blast (only 40
kilopascals at ground zero from a 1 kt blast yield detonation at 500 m altitude, and only 7 kPa at 2 km distance), heat and fallout damage of other nuclear weapons, they were more credible as a deterrent to Soviet tanks. However, many people believed that the very deployment of the neutron bomb threatened an escalation to full scale nuclear retaliation, thus canceling out the supposed benefits. Advances in precision anti-tank weapons ultimately made the neutron bomb redundant tactically in its original objective. The debate over "clean" low yield nuclear weapons continues with earth penetrator technology ("
nuclear bunker busters").
Red Mercury claims
More recently, Cohen was the main proponent of what most consider to be a mythical substance,
red mercury. If the "conventional story" is to be believed, red mercury was a
disinformation campaign led by US government agencies in order to lure potential terrorists into being captured. The story that was released was that red mercury was developed by the
Soviet Union as a "shortcut" to a
fusion bomb, and that with the fall of the Soviet Union it was being offered on the market by the Soviet mafia. When prospective buyers showed up to take delivery of the material, they were arrested.
During the height of the story, in the 1990s, Cohen became a proponent of red mercury, claiming not only that it existed, but going further to claim that it was a powerful
ballotechnic material that directly compressed the fusion fuel without the need for a fission primary. Bombs using red mercury had no real
critical mass and could be developed at any size. He further claimed that the Soviets had produced a number of "micro-nukes" based on red mercury, which are described as being about as large as a
baseball and weighing 10 pounds. According to Cohen, their existence meant that any effort to control
nuclear proliferation based on fissile material was thus hopeless. A reiteration of the claim can be seen in
The Nuclear Threat That Doesn't Exist – or Does It?, by Cohen and Joe Douglass in an 11 March 2003 guest editorial in
Financial Sense Online.
[10]
Cohen later went on to claim that 100 of these mini-nukes were in the hands of terrorists,
[14] and later that
Saddam Hussein had taken delivery of about fifty of these devices, which he supposedly planned on using against the US forces as they approached
Baghdad.
In the face of claims that red mercury was a disinformation campaign, Cohen claimed that Russia has such weapons, "red mercury" exists as claimed, and the US, among the technical elite, take it seriously, while at the same time starting a disinformation campaign claiming "red mercury" is bogus in order to assuage the public. Independent confirmation of such claims in the article is lacking.
Political involvement
Cohen spoke at an April 2000 fundraiser in
La Canada, California, for then-
Reform Party presidential candidate
Patrick Buchanan.
[15] Irv Rubin was prominently present at this event, with his organization, the
Jewish Defense League (JDL), and with members of the
Libertarian Party, to protest. The JDL posted Cohen's home phone number and address on its website, urging its members to contact him, to persuade him to stop supporting Buchanan.
[16]
In her address to the 2000 Reform Party National Convention, Buchanan's running mate,
Ezola Foster, cited Cohen's endorsement of Buchanan to refute the claim that the candidate was
anti-Semitic.
[17]
Death
He died on November 28, 2010 from complications of his
stomach cancer.
[18]
To see more of who died in 2010
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