The Truth About the Neutron Bomb; The Inventor of the Bomb Speaks Out

New York: William Morrow and Company, 1983. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 226 pages. Footnotes. Illustrations. DJ has slight wear and soiling and is in a plastic sleeve. Minor edge soiling. Samuel Theodore Cohen (January 25, 1921 - November 28, 2010) was an American physicist who is generally credited as the father of the neutron bomb. He was born on January 25, 1921, and raised in New York City. He studied mathematics and physics at University of California, Los Angeles before joining the United States Army after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1944 he worked on the Manhattan Project in the efficiency group at Los Alamos and calculated how neutrons behaved in Fat Man, the atomic bomb that was later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. After the war he joined the RAND Corporation. 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 responsible for recruiting the famous strategist Herman Kahn into the RAND Corporation. 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. 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. Derived from a Kirkus review: Cohen was the RAND Corporation physicist who in 1958 did the calculations demonstrating the feasibility of a neutron bomb: A tactical, "antipersonnel" weapon, that is, causing little heat or blast damage (hence little physical destruction), and having considerably less long-term radiation effect that thermonuclear weapons. Cohen relates his long, ultimately losing efforts to foster the neutron bomb--frustrated on the one hand by adherents of the Big Bang, on the other by the anti-nuke forces, and overall by "politics": Reagan's announced in 1981 that the US would produce neutron warheads, but not stockpile them in Europe--so as not to aggravate European objections to missile deployment. There follows: 1) an argument against US involvement in NATO (if we stay, they'll never defend themselves); 2) a defense of death-by-neutron bomb (better than being "burned by napalm, or crushed by blast concussion," etc.); 3) a brief for neutron weapons as against either all-out ground war or "blasting a city to smithereens."