Sam Cohen: The Truth About the Neutron Bomb: The Inventor of the Bomb Speaks Out. New York: William Morrow, 1983.
In the early years of the Reagan Administration, the proposed buildup of American nuclear weapons stockpiles provoked a backlash which took several forms. Among these were the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement in the United States and the demonstrations against deployment of short-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. At the time, the Warsaw Pact forces commanded by the Soviet Union outmatched those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The ‘neutron bomb’ (originally conceived in the late 1950s by physicist Sam Cohen of the Livermore Laboratories) was intended to redress this imbalance by threatening ground troops with destruction while causing less (although still substantial) damage to buildings and other structures. This capacity inspired a memorable Soviet propaganda line, which described the weapons as “the capitalist bomb, which kills people while leaving property intact.” Given the fact that the Warsaw Pact forces would have destroyed both people and property (a telling commentary on the character of Communism), the witticism fell a bit flat.
By the twenty-first century, the neutron-bomb technology had been countered by improved armor for tanks. Never deployed, the weapons themselves no longer form part of NATO stockpiles. This notwithstanding, the controversy raised important moral issues concerning military technology. The review below was published in Chronicles of Culture, Volume 7, Number 10, October 1983.
“This book marks the first time a ‘nuclear hawk’ has defected from the American nuclear establishment,” the blurb-writer exclaims, with customary dustjacket urgency. One expects another “what have I done?” lament by a guilt-ridden nuclear physicist, stuff guaranteed to make its author a celebrity on the church-and-college lecture circuit. Some partisans of disarmament will surely buy it, hoping to confirm their prejudices.
I hope they read it. For Sam Cohen resolutely disdains to conceive of himself as Dr. Frankenstein. After working at Los Alamos during World War II, he became a specialist in radiological warfare, inventing the neutron warhead in the late 1950s. “Speaking candidly and truthfully, I will say that I’ve never had any moral qualms or feelings of guilt about my pursuits in this military field. I have always believed that the United States must have strong and effective military forces—especially nuclear forces. His patience with dovish colleagues is limit; “many respected scientists… know better intellectually but are emotionally helpless to look objectivity at issues involving the military use of nuclear radiation.” Or, still more bluntly: “[T] here has been one thing that particularly impressed—better still, depressed—me about most renowned American scientists. This is their ability to be impeccably careful and responsible when working in their fields of specialization (if they’re not, their colleagues will catch them and even punish them) but their sloppiness and irresponsibility when giving their scientific opinion on nuclear weapons when they have an ideological bias against them, because they know that their colleagues, who share their bias, don’t give a damn when they do.” Among these are scientists now prominent in the ‘nuclear freeze’ campaign: Dr. George Kistiakowsky, science adviser to the president in the Eisenhower Administration, whose “strong ideological conviction that a nuclear test ban was imperative” led him to support the first such ban (1958), abrogated by the Soviet three years later; Dr. Jerome Weisner of MIT, who campaigned vigorously for John Kennedy and evidently has maintained his partisan allegiance; and Nobelist Hans Bethe, who claimed, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, that the hydrogen bomb could not be built. At very least, Cohen can further dispel the popular illusion that scientists speak to us, well, scientifically when they engage in politics.
Cohen divides his book into two sections. The first four chapters contain his account of the neutron warhead’s invention and the controversies attending it. The Pentagon had wanted nuclear warheads that would generate a powerful blast, intense heat, and radiation—in that order. Cohen wanted to reverse that priority, for two purposes: to develop a warhead whose high radioactivity would cause the explosive in an incoming nuclear warhead to decompose (the Sprint anti-ICBM missile resulted, “many years later”); to develop a short-range missile warhead whose intense but short-lived radiation would make it “the first battlefield weapon… in history [which] would allow a guaranteed, highly effective defense against an invading army without producing wholesale physical destruction of the country being invaded.”
The Pentagon, particularly the Navy, championed the neutron warhead from 1959 to 1961, not so much because it cared about the weapon itself but because it wanted to end the Eisenhower/Khruschev proposal for a nuclear test ban. Then as today, the Soviets denounced neutron technology, with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev averring, “This is the morality of monsters!” Similar protestations from the community of conscience recurred until September 1, 1961, when the Politburo announced a unilateral end to the ban, followed by “the most massive series of tests the world has ever seen.” Having arranged their experiments in advance while the Americans as it were busied themselves with inactivity, the Soviets briefly gained a lead in nuclear weapons technology. (Cohen has the good manners not to insist that readers associate this tactic with current Premier Andropov’s recommended ‘freeze’). After this debacle, the Pentagon no longer needed the neutron warhead as a weapon in bureaucratic warfare; interest in it disappeared until the mid-1970s.
By then, America’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union had yielded not a relaxation of tensions but a Soviet advantage in European ground troops so striking that even President Jimmy Carter noticed it. He planned the neutron warhead’s production and deployment, then reneged after Soviet ‘President’ Leonid Brezhnev, United States Senator Mark O. Hatfield, and other peace-loving souls inveighed against the ‘capitalist bomb’ that ‘destroys people but not property.’ “The problem,” Cohen remarks, “is that any agreement, tacit or explicit, to effect a mutual forswearing of N-bomb production is nonsense. There is no conceivable way by means of national technical verification, that such an agreement can be monitored.” Seismic sensors can detect the underground testing of warheads that explode by nuclear fission; they cannot detect the much smaller explosions produced by nuclear fusion in neutron warheads. An unverifiable treaty won’t amount to much.
President Ronald Reagan ordered the production of neutron warheads, but deferred their deployment in Europe until after land-based intermediate-range missiles (Pershing II’s and ground-launched cruise missiles) go into place. Impatient with diplomacy, Cohen argues that a weapon good enough to produce is good enough to deploy. This is not necessarily the case; scientists may not be any better at strategy than they are at purging their minds of ideological biases.
The book’s last five chapters consist of polemics on the military, political, and ethical problems associated with Cohen’s invention. He quickly disposes of opponents regarded as experts by the news media. To Herbert Scoville, Jr., one of the most-quoted ‘freeze’ eminences, who claims that irradiated soldiers will fight harder, Cohen replies that the soldiers targeted will become incapacitated quickly, and that by asking us to fear the possible behavior of soldiers on the periphery of the explosion Scoville “divert[s] the targeting issue to troops that aren’t targeted.” To Dr. Kistiakowsky, who claims that the Soviets could shield their tank crews against radiation, Cohen replies that indeed one can, “provided that you’re willing to incapacitate the tank” by overloading it with heavy armor. To Stanford University physicist Sidney Drell, who claims that a neutron warhead explosion would make the irradiated area “uninhabitable for long periods of time,” Cohen replies that “This is patently false,” that calculations show radiation declining to a safe level in a few hours. To United States Senator H. John Heinz, who claims that the neutron warhead is “literally dehumanizing,” Cohen replies, “Speaking for myself, if I were going to be wounded on the field of battle, I’d far rather be dosed by radiation than burned by napalm, or crushed by blast concussion, or have my body torn up by a land mine or fragmentation bomb.”
These arguments are not only persuasive, they are simple. Cohen argues that intellectuals think badly about war because they imagine suffering so vividly that their fear overturns their intellect. I am convinced that there is an additional problem; even when intellectuals master their fear, the basic simplicity of warfare befuddles them. It is too unsubtle for them to grasp, all this business of push coming to shove. They complicate matters beyond recognition, then take professional soldiers for bloody-minded dolt. Cohen, no professional soldier, is at his best when he thinks like one.
At his worst, he essays geopolitical strategy. His advertised ‘defection’ from “the American nuclear establishment” consists of an argument for isolationism. In a war with the Soviets, Europe and the Middle East would cost us more to defend than they are worth, he writes. So pull our troops out and use the money we save to rebuild our nuclear arsenal and strengthen our civil defense programs. These eminently American sentiments cannot amount to a serious policy for a commercial republic confronting a military oligarchy animated by ideologically-inspired fanaticism. Soviet domination of Europe and the Middle East would obviously give them control of two of our principal markets.
Even in its military aspect, Cohen’s isolationism must fail. He calls defending Europe impossible because the Soviets will try to destroy NATO’s nuclear defenses, including any neutron warheads in Europe, before the Warsaw Pact forces move in. But the Soviets warn that any NATO warheads hitting Soviet territory—and some surely would, even during an intendedly preclusive strike by the Soviets—will bring retaliation against the United States itself. If they mean that, they recognize that a European war would probably cause global war. They will not imagine they can win that war unless Western pacifists have their way. Nuclear weapons in Western Europe will tie America to its allies more firmly than at any time in the last twenty years. Europeans who fear this tie, who feel more threatened by our weapons and our policy than by Soviet weapons and policy may yet to decide to see more clearly. Cohen says they won’t; I suspect they will. We’ll see which one of us is right, but in the meantime it would be a bad mistake to insure defeat by giving up too soon.
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