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Shame

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Dr Samuel Cohen spent his life trying to blunt the forces of disaster, and to turn nuclear weapons into a means of ending all war for once and for all.

Unlike Dr Oppenheimer and Dr Teller, Cohen never acquired the influence to publicise his innovations widely or forcefully enough to reach success.

Motivated by childhood problems and shame, he was able to endure the ridicule and dismissals which were the hallmark of being the inventor of the neutron bomb.

On 11 July 1956, on a barge in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll, a nuclear test codenamed Redwing-Navajo was conducted. The bomb had a total yield of 4.5 megatons, but the surprising thing was that only 5% came from fission. It was 95% clean.

Dr Hans Bethe two years later wrote, in the 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" (Bethe was the Working Group Chairman), page 9:

"... 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."

On 12 July 1958, the Hardtack-Poplar shot on a barge in the lagoon yielded 9.3 megatons, of which only 4.8% was fission. It was 95.2% clean. It was the clean Mk-41C warhead.

Dr Cohen, at the RAND Corporation, visited the weapons laboratories and worked on a very low yield clean weapon. Because the case thickness needed in a hydrogen bomb is proportional to the cube root of the total yield, the thickness is minimal for very low yields.

For a 1 kt clean bomb, the case thickness needed is so small that a large fraction of the neutrons - which from fusion have a high energy (14 mega electron volts) escape.

Hence, Cohen had just invented the neutron bomb. Various ways of getting it to work were tried and tested. The problem was igniting fusion with a sub-kiloton yield. Instead of lithium deuteride for fusion, some designs required the very expensive lithium tritide, or a mixture of the two.

However, it is known that a compromise is possible. The small total yield in any case minimises the size of the fusion charge needed, and keeps the cost reasonable.

The major propaganda against the neutron bomb has sought to falsely assert that it creates "radiation" in the sense of fallout. By being air burst and by having a low fission yield, it averts any significant fallout. For air bursts, the fission products decay and diffuse to background radiation level before they enter the lower air layer and are deposited by rain months later. By comparison to today's stockpiled 475 kt nuclear warheads, the neutron bomb is both safe and peaceful.

We have to have nuclear weapons to counter the possible threats from proliferation states, enemies, and terrorists. But we don't have to go throwing high-fallout 475 kt warheads about. Until the next Cold War, we should take up Dr Cohen's idea and replace all the nuclear weapons in the stockpile with credible deterrence: neutron warheads.

People who attack Dr Cohen's neutron bomb in ignorance should be ashamed of themselves. We like in an age of ready sycophants, of fools. The 1 kt neutron bomb kills but doesn't create severe fallout. A 475 kt warhead blasts window glass into children's eyes, melts their faces and contaminates their playgrounds.

Will the world be a better place with 1 kt neutron bombs replacing high-yield stockpile warheads? Yes, it will.

Detonated at 500 m altitude, any 1 kt nuclear bomb produces a peak overpressure at ground zero of less than 6 psi, and at 2 km the blast is just 1 psi. The neutron bomb reduces both of these figures, and avoids severe thermal burns. What it does do is to produce 15 times the prompt neutron doses of a normal fission weapon, deterring terrorists, deterring massed tank invasions, etc. Detonated underground in an earth-penetrator warhead case, the neutron bomb has the energy to pack a punch at a hardened target without producing a significant fallout danger.

No weapon is perfect. But the neutron bomb is as near as makes no difference. Dr Cohen should be taken very seriously indeed.

It's freely available on line as the author wants, at athenalab dot com and elsewhere.

It's the story of the author's dysfunctional upbringing, followed by his career in nuclear weapons beginning with the Manhattan Project, his tenure at the RAND Corporation, and his invention of the neutron bomb. The author felt isolated as a child, and then later as an adult with his persistently realistic look at something that almost no one he met wanted to discuss: how a nuclear war would actually play out, and how we and the rest of the world would emerge. This is a personal and cynical account of America's nuclear history and the asinine ways in which some of the gravest decisions imaginable were made.

Mr. Cohen didn't push the bomb because it was his pet invention; he invented it after being sent to Korea to observe a modern "limited" war firsthand, and seeing what was needed.

The neutron bomb is easy to understand. It's like a Claymore mine except that the ball bearings (neutrons) are much harder and tinier. It has no nuclear effects on the target --but that only holds true when it is properly burst at altitude so that the ground is beyond the reach of the small atomic blast required to propel the neutrons. Neutrons are so tiny that most of them fly right through tank armor and buildings unimpeded, the way most bird-shot would fly through a cyclone fence. But when a neutron hits something its own size and weight, namely a hydrogen nucleus, it's like a billiard ball colliding with another. Hydrogen is found in hydrocarbons, i.e. organic molecules --the molecules of life that you and I are made up of. In that case, neutrons radiation can be deadly, but survivors recuperate within a month or two, and things on the ground are pretty much as they were.

How the bomb works and what it does takes up only three pages. The rest of the book introduces the reader to the many people that the author tried to sell his idea to. In almost every case, the author ends each episode by saying how ashamed he now is of how he dealt with that person. The more famous ones include former president Eisenhower, Pope John Paul II, the legendary genius John von Neumann, and others. The author doesn't seem to be just dropping names, though, admitting (for example) that he only saw J. Robert Oppenheimer in person once during his years on the Manhattan Project.

A web search turned up a photo of Trevor Gardner shaking hands with USAF General Bernie Schriever. The photo certainly seems to corroborate the text, and greatly enriched my reading about those two.

One notable exception to the author's shame: no punches are pulled on Linus Pauling, who "was barely interested in the scientific facts of nuclear weapon issues and almost always managed to fault the U.S. far more than the Soviets when bemoaning the nuclear arms race. For a guy whose scientific brilliance was beyond compare, he managed to ignore or make up the scientific facts surrounding the issues of nuclear war and the testing of nuclear weapons."

"Time after time Herman would nail Pauling to the wall for outrageous scientific distortion. On each occasion Pauling would shift gears and glibly change the subject, leaving poor Herman gasping for breath." I wonder if the author, with his history of induced diarrhea (by his mother), knew that Pauling advocated vitamin C mega-doses up to the "bowel tolerance limit"?

Ironically, the author virtually banished his book into obscurity by self-publishing it for free distribution. It didn't undergo the reviews and editing that would have improved the work. Grammatical errors and "mis-queues" caused me to pause and start sentences over. It is sometimes dull and repetitive, requiring patience. (Page 23: "sufficiently long enough.")

It still gave me a lot of insight about how nuclear weapons evolved. There's nothing terribly surprising here for those who have worked in aerospace. Mr. Cohen's invention underwent the same redneck caviling as any other new idea. (For example the AR-15, an innovative rifle that was mutated into the horribly unreliable M-16 and its derivatives by military curmudgeons who thought that the AR-15 should have a forward assist (to pick a change) just because it was something they were used to on their old rifles.) Likewise, when the neutron bomb was finally, grudgingly accepted to tip the U.S. Army's Lance missile, it was designed to detonate at ground level (ground burst) which defeats its purpose entirely.

The main points posited by the author:

* We don't really know how to fight a nuclear war with so-called "strategic" nuclear weapons, i.e. multi-megaton planet-busters (H bombs).

* It is a myth that nuclear weapons have to go in order for us to save ourselves in the Nuclear Age.

* While still in his twenties, the author gave a briefing to AF top brass including General Curtis Lemay himself. He reported what he describes as what the AF needed to know rather than what they wanted to hear. It was a big hit, and thus his career took off at RAND.

* As an offshoot of the USAF, RAND's reports were tailored to tell Air Force brass what they wanted to hear. What General Curtis Lemay wanted to hear was that we needed "strategic" nukes to wipe out an urban industrial center, as opposed to smaller-yield tactical weapons for use against enemy troops and armored columns.

* Reasons that the author posits the AF wanted strategic nukes: (1) If you kill enough of them they'll stop fighting; (2) In those days, strategic weapons were heavy and the USAF's heavy SAC bombers were the only means of delivering them. This shut out their rival, the Navy. And (3) the fear that the Soviets would develop an H-bomb first.

...The author doesn't mention this, but in fairness to Gen. LeMay, airplanes (especially after jet engines came along) were a reliable delivery method. Missiles were still pie-in-the-sky, and LeMay came from an era when complex systems often translated to unreliable junk.

Note regarding Harold Agnew (page 33): "He had been on the bomber that dropped the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima." He may have been on the plane at some other time, but he was not on that fateful flight.

He must have been high when he wrote this, or sniffing neutron fumes, or something.

Basic premise: Sam's childhood trauma caused by an overprotective mother and her application of a succession of
enema treatments caused Sammy to build a neutron bomb that causes uncontrolable
nausea, vomiting, DIARRHEA, and death. I don't know that I buy any of that,
but Sam Cohen is tight with Ziggy's ideas, so that's between the two of them.
For the reader, there's all the background at RAND & associated cold-war, Mil-Industrial
hi-jinks that plays out along the way. We get to meet some the other characters,
some really intelligent bumblers, who with Cohen, helped shape the policy of MAD, as well as
many other doctrinaire joys of the duck & cover era.

Reads like a breeze, full of anecdotes and insights, and leave you wondering if the neutron bomb as conceived by Sam Cohen (an important point indeed) could really have had an important roll to play in the next world war, instead of being relegated to
use by minor players like China. After such an event passes, and the world is covered in radioactive dust, wouldn't it have been ever so much better to just kill everyone, and save the infrastructure and environment? It's all about the real-estate, after all, isn't it?

Well, that's the argument that Sam makes, as well as the humane aspects of utilizing neutrons in military theater, killing the soldiers, and saving civilian populations (and Bambi/bunnies too we must assume) from deadly, long-lived radioactive fallout.

Have a nice Dieoff!