Samuel Cohen (physicist)

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Samuel T. Cohen (born January 25, 1921 in Brooklyn , New York , † November 28, 2010 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American physicist . He is the inventor of the neutron bomb .

Photo of Samuel T. Cohen on Los Alamos National Laboratory photo ID

Childhood, youth and private life

Samuel Cohen's parents Lazarus and Jenny Cohen came from Austrian-Jewish families and immigrated to the USA via Great Britain . His father was a carpenter by trade, his mother a housewife. In 1925 the family moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Samuel Cohen attended school.

Cohen was married to Barbara Bissell from 1948 to 1952. In 1960 he married Margaret Munnermann for the second time. The marriage, which lasted until Cohen's death, had three children, two sons and a daughter.

Apprenticeship, first years of employment

Samuel Cohen received his PhD in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles . After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he joined the American army. In 1944 he was assigned to the Manhattan Project as an employee. His task was to calculate the behavior of neutrons inside the Fat Man atomic bomb , which was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 .

After the Second World War

After the end of World War II , he worked for the American think tank RAND Corporation , which was founded after the war to advise the US armed forces. In 1950 his calculations on the radiation intensity of radioactive fallout were published as an appendix in Samuel Glasstones and Phillip J. Dolan's book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons".

Cohen's idea of ​​a clean atomic bomb

Samuel Cohen was obsessed with the idea of ​​the neutron bomb as a clean bomb compared to other nuclear weapons . This formulation, which he helped shape, is based on the fact that neutron bombs draw up to 95 percent of the energy they release from nuclear fusion , which would greatly reduce the radioactive fallout and thus the long-term contamination of the area of ​​operation.

During the Korean War in 1951, he visited Seoul , which he got to know as a ruined city as a result of countless bombing raids, in which civil life had completely collapsed and the survivors had to drink sewage. In light of these images, Cohen decided to build a nuclear weapon that would be able to quickly decide a war without destroying civilian infrastructure for the survivors to the extent that conventional warfare or nuclear weapons destroy them.

He developed the idea of ​​a nuclear weapon based on fusion, which ideally releases all of its energy in the form of neutron radiation ( neutron bomb ). The radiation released in this way would kill all life in the immediate vicinity and, in contrast to conventional nuclear weapons, only leave behind short-lived secondary radiation.

He planned a weapon with an explosive force of one-tenth that of the Hiroshima bomb that, if detonated at an altitude of 1 km (3,000 feet), would kill all life within a mile (1.6 km) without cause severe explosion damage. In his eyes, such a weapon was more civilized than hydrogen bombs, with their enormous destructive potential. He is convinced that such a weapon would not leave any wounded or maimed, which he assessed as positive in view of severe war injuries. The victims would either die instantly or, in his opinion, recover from a period of nausea and diarrhea. He compared the risk of developing cancer as a long-term consequence of radioactive radiation with the risk of developing cancer from passive smoking.

Thus, in his eyes, the neutron bomb was a morally defensible weapon. A finding that sums up the following quote from him

"The neutron bomb has to be the most moral weapon ever invented."

For example: "The neutron bomb will be the most moral weapon that has ever been invented."

For a long time Cohen was unsuccessful in trying to convince generals and important senators of his invention. This was due, on the one hand, to a military tactic aimed at maximum destruction by the enemy, a strategy in which the neutron bomb does not fit, and, on the other, to the economic interests of the military-industrial complex in large bombs. Because these require correspondingly expensive and complex carrier systems, which in turn are labor-intensive to manufacture and thus secure jobs, which are reflected in the votes for the senators.

Vietnam War

During the Vietnam War, Cohen unsuccessfully promoted the use of small neutron bombs to end the war more quickly and prevent American losses. In his opinion, the neutron bomb was ideally suited ("a perfect fit") for the fight against the Viet Cong , whose guerrilla tactics consisted of seeking refuge in caves and forests and usually attacking them like a raid.

Cohen's vehement support for the use of neutron bombs in the Vietnam War ultimately led to the RAND Corporation separating from him in 1969 . Because there, as in the government, the view was held that the first use of nuclear weapons in an Asian country after the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not desirable because it would take the world view against the USA. The then Defense Minister Robert McNamara accordingly also ordered that no nuclear weapons - of any type - be used in the Vietnam War.

Cold War

In the early 1970s, Cohen was a member of the Los Alamos Tactical Nuclear Weapons Panel. After all attempts to convince the military of the neutron bomb had failed until the 1980s, the inauguration of Ronald Reagan opened up a new opportunity for Cohen in his endeavors to introduce the neutron bomb into the arsenal of the US armed forces. The arms race was at a new high point and the armed forces of the USA and its NATO allies were confronted with an overwhelming number of battle tanks from the Warsaw Pact countries.

In this environment, Cohen rose to become a political advisor to California Governor Ronald Reagan . President Jimmy Carter considered building neutron bombs in 1978 but ultimately declined. When Reagan became president in 1981, he reissued plans to build the weapon. In August 1981, Reagan officially ordered production. A total of 700 neutron bombs, 350 grenades and 350 W70 Mod. 3 warheads for Lance missiles were built .

In contrast to Cohen's original plan to detonate the weapons at great heights, these were built so that they detonate very close to the ground. The aim was to achieve a maximization of explosive damage desired by the military. In total, two different warhead types were developed. Even by Cohen's own calculations, the larger of the two types had an explosive power beyond that of the Hiroshima bomb . In addition, the weapons were planned for use in Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion. So they were supposed to be used on the territory of allied states and, contrary to Cohen's original draft, were designed to generate maximum explosive damage. This is in contradiction to his self-declared endeavor to minimize damage and avoid casualties among the civilian population through small-scale effects.

The emerging criticism of this type of weapon from the European allies meant that it was never stationed in Europe and thus strategically worthless, since it was always planned as tactical nuclear weapons , i.e. for use in the battlefield. Under Reagan's successor, George HW Bush , the entire arsenal of neutron bombs was finally destroyed.

After the end of the Cold War / Red Mercury

Samuel Cohen was the main proponent of the existence of so-called red mercury , a substance whose existence is not scientifically recognized. In the 1990s, Cohen claimed not only that the substance existed, but that it was an extremely powerful conventional explosive. According to Cohen, this could be used to replace the nuclear fission- based ignition mechanism of a hydrogen bomb . This would drastically reduce their size (so-called "micro nukes"). Cohen described these bombs as baseball-sized and went on to claim that the Soviet Union had built a number of these bombs. Based on these claims, Cohen took the view that any effort to non-proliferate atomic material would be a priori hopeless. He later claimed that 100 of these mini-bombs were in the hands of terrorists and that Saddam Hussein had 50 of them with the intention of using them against advancing US forces in the event of an invasion. As a result of such claims, some of which have been proven to be false, Cohen has been very controversial.

literature

Web links

swell

  1. ^ The New York Times: Samuel T. Cohen, Neutron Bomb Inventor, Dies at 89
  2. ↑ latimes.com: Obituary: Samuel T. Cohen dies at 89; inventor of the neutron bomb , December 2, 2010.
  3. ↑ Charles Platt: The Profits of Fear , accessed May 5, 2010
  4. ↑ BBC - ON THIS DAY: April 7, 1978
  5. ↑ Sam Cohen, Joe Douglass: The Nuclear Threat That Doesn't Exist - or Does It? ( Memento of the original from October 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Financial Sense, March 11, 2003. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.financialsense.com
personal data
SURNAME Cohen, Samuel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cohen, Samuel T.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist, inventor of the neutron bomb
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 2010
Place of death Los Angeles , California