12.01.10
Sam Cohen, father of neutron bomb, passes
No better way to say it, from Secrecy blog:
Nuclear physicist Sam Cohen died Sunday at age 89, the Washington Post reported in an obituary today. Cohen, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, conceived, designed and advocated development of the neutron bomb, a high-radiation anti-personnel weapon.
He cordially despised the Federation of American Scientists, which didn’t stop him from writing and calling us regularly to discuss his bodily ailments, the history of nuclear weapons, classification policy, and whether or not former Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary was the devil’s spawn.
Steve Aftergood references Cohen’s self-published autobiography entitled “Shame,” an utterly frank and self-lacerating recollection of his life travels.
Among the material already mentioned, the first edition contained Cohen’s fascination with the fictional substance, red mercury, which he — and many others — thought was real in the Nineties, going so far as to warn of it on television and in various news stories.
“We Should Be Terrifed!” was the title of one chapter in Cohen’s “Shame.”
“Specifically, at issue here is an extremely small pure-fusion mini-neutron bomb, roughly the size of a baseball, which in all probability the Soviets designed years ago with the knowledge of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Mafia and what used to be called the KGB have been smuggling the technology and even the bombs themselves to known terrorist states and others who feel the need for them — at a price, a big one,” he added.
“The triggering material, known as red mercury, is a remarkable non-exploding high explosive which technically is one of a very special class of so-called ‘ballotechnic’ explosives which apparently Los Alamos has been investigating (at the classified level) in nuclear weapons research … Red mercury produces vastly more energy per pound than conventional explosives but does not explode in the conventional sense …Instead, upon being detonated, it becomes very hot, extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen [also in the mechanism] and a pure-fusion mini-neutron bomb.”
Red mercury was not real. Although things said to be it have been used as bait to sucker people in the clandestine arms trade.
And the fascination with ‘ballotechnic’ explosives like red mercury was consequentially so great DARPA once funded now utterly discredited research into the possibility of making a golf-ball sized superweapon composed of a related material.
In later years, Cohen published an updated and re-edited version of “Shame.” Although the story of red mercury did not make it to the second copy, the book remains a captivating read.
The FAS notice on Sam Cohen is here.