Talk:Samuel T. Cohen

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Basic information missing

Does Samuel Cohen have a birth date? Where was he born? What was the title of his thesis? Was he married, did he have children? The article is lacking fundamental information on the person Samuel Cohen. 62.117.25.104 20:18, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Samuel T. Cohen was born 1921 in Brooklyn, New York, and he lives in Beverley Hills, CA. Perhaps someone can call him and find out, or got to the vault/library of UCLA and dig up his PhD thesis to check the title. He might not mind genuine enquiries, although he is obviously 85 now (if still alive). Charles Platt writes in August 2005 Cohen was very friendly[1]:

"... my cell phone rings. The inventor of the neutron bomb is on the line. "Charles, this is Sam," he says, sounding elderly and erudite. "Did you hear about Edward?"

"In his inimitable fashion, Sam Cohen, who really did invent the neutron bomb, is notifying me that Edward Teller has died after a long series of health problems. Sam was on first-name terms with Edward for about fifty years, since the days when they worked on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos during World War II.

"It occurs to me that something must be seriously wrong with the world when a former guru of American nuclear policy seems to have so much time on his hands, he can find nothing better to do than chat with a semi-retired, little-known science journalist sitting in the middle of nowhere in a dead pickup truck carrying an unprocessed cargo of dirty laundry."

Cohen writes he was born on a kitchen table. 172.188.8.221 18:43, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

POV

The current edition of the article reads as if it was taken from Cohen's book, with very little attribution as such, much of which is fairly looney in my opinion and not substantiated by any other sources. I'm happy to give it a work over but in the meantime it needs to be marked as problematic. --Fastfission 00:00, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I Agree, especially the part on the soviets seem highly biased. I'm currently trying to write the german site for Samuel Cohen. I would like to have closer Information on his birth date, what the "T." in his name stands for and if there is any reliable source for the vatican peace medal. Also I find it hard to believe that he helped the french to built neutron bombs and would like to have more details on that. Wouldnt this kind of technology transfer be a violation of US laws? 62.117.24.140

Well, those are some of the exact concerns I have with this at the moment. --Fastfission 15:36, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Cohen didn't give American classified information to the French in 1978-9. He makes it abundantly clear if you actually read his books and interviews that the neutron bomb is a concept. The French had the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear bomb in 1966, and the help Cohen gave was just concerned with helping them deter the 4-to-1 Soviet superiority in tanks in Europe.

NATO had in 1974 released Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons to NATO including France, and that deals with the neutron bomb radiation effects. See [2].

172.188.13.147 (talk · contribs), the ipt.aol.com anon possibly near Brooklyn

I share the concerns of Fastfission about this article and the ipt.aol.com anon's apparently POV-pushing edits.---00:11, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Message posted to my talk page

The message below was posted to my talk page, but it probably belongs here. --Fastfission 21:11, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I see you have highlighted the Samuel Cohen article as biased and loony. I was passing yesterday and also saw it was a bit biased, but the other way. It said "you can help by expanding it" so I added some info with sources tagged, so it is not a point of view, but based on facts now.

The Soviets in the 1970s had a five to one tank superiority in critical parts of Europe, and they wouldn't have been so keen to reach the arms reductions agreement of 1986 if Reagan hadn't put cruise missiles, "star wars" hoaxes, and the neutron bomb on the table.

In addition, the technical facts cast an entirely different light on the whole nature of the neutron bomb, from that popularly presented as a bomb killing millions by radiation. People think it is intended for capitalist domination of Russia, leaving the buildings intact. When you look at the 1 kt yield, and the military purpose of the weapon, it is not all that bad.

If nuclear weapons are still needed nowadays, possibly a step forward would be discriminate ones in proportion to the threats being deterred. (By the way, the WT-1317 report link to the Cohen page by Triffet and LaRiviere debunks much of the fallout myth in Glasstone and Dolan. Glasstone and Dolan don't tell the truth about the gamma ray energy spectrum, or the proportion of gamma radiation due to Np-239, U-237 etc., giving the t^-1.2 decay rate. A couple of days after the Zuni shot the local mean fallout gamma ray energy had dropped to 0.2 MeV and remained low for days. In any high yield bomb containing U-238, the energy falls very low. Every source there is in the public, particularly the fas reports, treat Glasstone and Dolan as a bible. It is a cut down version of Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons which is used for offensive purposes, so it does not spend much time getting the basic facts of fallout right, such as the quantitative effects of neutron induced activities and fractionation. This is not so good for civil defence, as it exaggerates the problem. If the bomb is so big that a vast area is contaminated to a lethal extent, the gamma ray energy is likely to be low enough that even modest improvised sheltering for a few days would offer good protection. So Glasstone and Dolan is bunk.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.213.131.156 (talk • contribs) 18:39, 28 December 2005

Just as a prerequesite to discussing content, please make sure you are aware of our policies of WP:NPOV and WP:NOR. With that out of the way... there is of course no problem with adding information to the article. I think some of your information added is good and should be kept. The problem I have with the information is primarily in its verifiability outside of Sam Cohen's own publications, because in my mind he is not the most reputable source on himself or his own history, as he seems to change his story quite a bit and makes a lot of unsubstantiatable claims. I don't think Glasstone and Dolan is "a bible" but dismissing it as "bunk" is not the appropriate response either, as much of it is quite sound even if some aspects of it are problematic. I am not one of the people who think the neutron bomb was "intended for capitalist domination of Russia", of course, and that was never an objection of mine. --Fastfission 21:17, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Quotes out of context

Here's an example which highlights some of my specific concerns:

Hans A. Bethe supported clean nuclear weapons in 1958 as Chairman of a Presidential science advisory group on nuclear testing [3]:

"... 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." (Dr Hans Bethe, 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).

Now, first of all, Bethe was just the chairman on this committee, so saying that this is a quote of Bethe himself is somewhat misleading (11 people were on the committee, who knows who wrote it). But even assuming we change its authorship to being primarily the committee itself, we still run into the problem that this is not a document outlining support for clean weapons per se. It merely lists them as one of a dozen reasons why a nuclear test ban might be problematic. It is not a "recommendation" for testing a specific weapon; it is a recommendation against a more general test ban. This was of course a major concern amongst the laboratory heads in the late 1950s (Edward Teller resigned from LLNL's directorship in order to better campaign against the test ban). This has very little to do with Sam Cohen at all, and very little to do with the neutron bomb. It certainly doesn't deserve the causal role it is being given here, where it is being used as the instigator of the testing of the first "clean" weapons.

Personally I think this is clearly a violation of WP:NOR even if the document is available on a website. WP:NOR does not allow the synthesis of new documents into a narrative unless they have been already so synthesized by reliable secondary literature. This is also an example of why I don't like additions of this sort to articles -- picking and choosing documents based on a few sentences in them shows a lack of understanding of the historical method and the importance of contextualization. --Fastfission 15:51, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"... Bethe was just the chairman of the committee..." Similarly, Bush is "just" the President of America, and Hitler was "just" the leader of Germany. It is an interesting POV of yours that a committee chairman is not responsible for anything. Does this mean Hitler never personally stuffed people into gas chambers because he was too busy doing the paperwork for that, similarly Bush never fired a bullet to start a war and so wasn't responsible for Iraq, and so on? So your POV about leadership revises the history of these other subjects. Or, far more likely, your POV is just limited to one particular committee chairman, Bethe, how convenient. Clean weapons research led directly to the Sam Cohen neutron bomb in 1958, so there is a big connection. This just shows that you don't have the facts yourself on this, and are thus out of context. Have you actually read all of Sam Cohen's books right the way through? If you discount as inadmissible "secondary" sources books like those of Cohen from being considered in an article the topic of which is Sam Cohen, then your POV on what is a valid POV is simply crackpot, no offense intended! 172.201.134.207 09:32, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My point is that without knowing Bethe's personal opinion is incorrect to attribute this to him based simply on his chairmanship of the committee -- a point which I noted could be avoided by better attribution, and certainly without all of the hyberbole you are throwing at it. In any case the overall point still stands that the report does not advocate what it is claimed to. Without a secondary source showing that this particular report lead to clean weapons research -- it seems like an unlikely jump to me -- it is original research to postulate that it did. If there is a secondary source for these assertions, even if they are Cohen's books, they need to be cited. --Fastfission 15:42, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nobody cares about Bethe's personal opinion, and the article doesn't make any claims about personal opinions. It states Bethe was chairman of a committee which said this and that. I don't care what Bethe's POV was, nor does the article. It is about Cohen, and the name of the chairman was Bethe which is a fact not a POV. The report DOES advocate clean weapons testing, as quoted. This is vital to understanding the way that year Cohen invented the neutron bomb. Fastfission are you a "hyperbole" holocaust denier requiring to see proof that Hitler personally gassed the Jews and claiming all evidence is not proof? You sure talk like one: "show me Hitler's signature" blah, blah, blah. There are a lot of these ignorant fanatics around, but please keep to the facts. The report demonstrates the attitudes towards clean weapons research prevailing in 1958 which inspired Cohen that year to produce the neutron bomb. That report of the Bethe-chaired committee is NOT quoted to prove that Bethe invented the neutron bomb or designed clean nuclear weapons, but to show that this research was in hand by the mainstream bomb designers in 1958. 172.188.13.147 10:47, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Offensive to Christians

Does a headline like "Christians supported low yield clean anti-tank bombs..." belong here? I see a mention of Pope John Paul II, but no evidence that Christians in general supported these bombs. I would wager that there was no particular correlation between one's religious faith and one's opinion about neutron bombs.

Geary (talk · contribs)

Well, whether there is or not, the headline is very poor, and this is one of the reasons it has a POV tag on it for the moment. --Fastfission 17:56, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Edits by ipt.aol.com anon from (?) Brooklyn

An anon has used the ipt.aol.com domain to edit the article and also this talk page, using IPS apparently geolocated near Brooklyn, New York and including the following

If our Brooklyn anon is personally connected to Cohen, as seems to be the case (number of children, etc.), this might be a good time to say so. ---CH 00:04, 14 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What medal of peace?

Does anyone have any indication this thing exists? It sounded odd to me that a pope would give out peace prizes for weapons research, so I googled it and there's not a single other hit. No admittedly ir's supposedly from 1979 so that's "pre-net", but if this was something that was given out to more than one person you would expect some mention of it. Maury 15:09, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I have to admit I've become totally suspicious of this, along with a lot of Sam Cohen's other claims. Frankly I just haven't seen very much independent verification of who he says he is and what he says he has done. All stories about Sam Cohen seem to end at Sam Cohen. He doesn't show up in any independent literature on bomb development that I have ever seen, and I've never seen him mentioned in any literature/documents by Livermore or Los Alamos. I have seen references that RAND was working on ER weaponry in the late 1950s, and Cohen claims to have been involved in it then and there, but that's as close as I have been able to get in my own lookings into this. It's very possible that this history is rendered obscure by the secrecy surrounding weapon design, but I also get the sinking feeling that it might just be bull of some sort... --Fastfission 19:57, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Another weird thing is that Cohen made a big flap about the W87 pictures in the Cox Report, but he appears to have been very wrong on a number of points despite claiming to speak with a lot of authority. Maybe it is a simple mistake, maybe he is getting old, maybe...? --Fastfission 20:38, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Also some websites (http://boingboing.net/profits_of_fear.html) cite Paul VI, not John Paul II as the giver of the medal (hence hw would have received it before 1979 in that case)... but what I have noticed is that all websites copy wikipedia (or rather the wiki author probably copied one of the websites and they all report the same story verbatim)... and this is strange... there should be more than one indipendent report on this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.175.161.14 (talk) 12:31, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Anonymous rant

This guy is an obvious nutcase. Why no mention/discussion of that?

"Terrorists have 100 Soviet-made mini-nukes" yet they've never set off a single one?

"Saddam Hussein had 50" of these mini-nukes, and yet he was caught hiding in a hole in the ground, his sons were blown away with anti-tank rockets, and he was hanged like a cheap Christmas ornament?

He promotes nonsense pseudo-physics, and no one calls bullshit?

Absurdity, thy name is Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.28.169.227 (talk) 09:06, 3 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

'Invented the W70' claim

The lead claimed "Samuel Theodore Cohen... was an American physicist who invented the W70 warhead and is therefore generally credited as the father of the neutron bomb". No inline citation was provided for the claim that Samuel Cohen invented the W70. It is not subsequently mentioned in the body of the article. It is not mentioned in the W70 article. It is not mentioned in the LA Times obituary. I have removed this claim from the article. - Crosbie 18:10, 5 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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