Samuel T. Cohen - Biography

Biography

Cohen's parents who immigrated from London, England. He was born on January 25, 1921 in Brooklyn and raised in New York City. He studied math and physics at UCLA before joining the Army after Pearl Harbor. In 1944 he worked on the Manhattan project in the efficiency group and calculated how neutrons behaved in Fat Man, the atomic bomb that was later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. After the war he studied for his Ph.D. at Berkeley before dropping out to join 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 personally 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, but during Ronald Reagan's presidency, Cohen claims to have convinced Reagan to make 700 neutron bombs, 350 shells to go into the 8 inch (200-millimeter) howitzer and 350 W70 warheads for the Lance missile.