The Profits of Fear by Charles Platt Prologue: Nuclear News on Route 66 ---------------------------------- I'm cruising into the small town of Williams, Arizona, heading for the laundromat, when my pickup truck coughs and dies, leaving me stranded at the side of old Route 66. 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. Finally he scored a hit with Ronald Reagan, who initiated a project along the lines that Cohen had in mind, until George Bush, Senior, reversed the policy at a total cost approaching $1 billion. For those who wonder how neoconservative think tanks managed to incite empire-building conceits that fomented a renewed war in Iraq, Cohen's experiences fifty years ago turn out to be unexpectedly relevant. Named by concatenating the words "research and development," RAND attracted world-class scientists such as John von Neumann, Herman Kahn, Edward Teller--and Sam Cohen. In Cohen's words, RAND's objective was "to challenge the stultified mentality of the military brass who already had begun planning for the next war on the basis of the last one, even though we had entered the Nuclear Age. (Quotes in this text are taken from personal conversations with Sam Cohen and from his autobiography.) While RAND's own official history claims that its studies were distinguished by "scrupulous nonpartisanship with rigorous, fact-based analysis," Cohen's assessment of his former colleagues is a bit less flattering. We had to "stop worrying and love the bomb," as Stanley Kubrick put it in his subtitle to the nuclear black comedy _Dr. Strangelove_--and some grim one-liners from _Thinking the Unthinkable_ actually were used as dialogue in the movie. Sam Cohen had been a friend of Kahn's during their college days--in fact, he had brought Kahn into RAND--but friendship couldn't blind him to the defects he saw in the study. He recalls finding calculations of bombing accuracy based on guesswork, assessments of Soviet military strength that seemed grossly exaggerated, and estimates of bomb damage that Kahn had simply invented. "I suspected that Herman had put out his study more for effect and notoriety (which he sure got) than for substance," Cohen wrote later. Kennedy suggested that he might have to bomb Moscow if the Soviet Union didn't pull its missiles out of Cuba, anyone could see that nuclear drama had infected players up to the highest levels of government. LeMay now ran Strategic Air Command, and when Cohen enjoyed a frank conversation with him, the main thing the general really wanted was "a bomb that will wipe out all of Russia. "Not that they would be masters of the world if they built such bombs and we didn't," says Cohen. As Cohen puts it, "Our policies, which since World War II have gotten us into war after war--none of them successful or in our true interests--have remained the same." Nevertheless the fate of the Trade Center somehow helped to justify deployment of stealth bombers, cruise missiles, tanks armored with depleted uranium, and many more state-of-the-art munitions including massive (conventional) bombs which George W. The Most Moral weapon ------------------------ Sam Cohen might have remained relatively unknown, troubled by ethical lapses in government and the military but unable to do anything about them, if he had not visited Seoul in 1951, during the Korean war. The question I asked of myself was something like: If we're going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their surviving inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?" This concept seemed quaint in a new era where everyone and everything was at risk of being vaporized in a nuclear exchange, but Cohen saw no reason why nukes had to be massively destructive. _If_ wars were liable to recur (which Cohen thought was probable), soldiers were going to use weapons of some kind against each other, and everyone would benefit if the weapons minimized pain and suffering while ending the conflict as rapidly as possible. This was the battlefield weapon that came to be known as the neutron bomb. Those who receive a non-lethal dose will recover after a period of intense nausea and diarrhea, and Cohen estimated that their risk of subsequent cancer would be no greater than the risk we experience as a result of exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke. A Nuke by Any Other Name --------------------------- Since the United States refused to abandon South Korea, and a handful of neutron bombs might force the North Koreans to surrender with the same rapidity as the Japanese after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cohen thought his concept should receive an enthusiastic welcome, especially considering that it would create virtually no radioactivity or collateral damage. The neutron bomb suffered from a terrible stigma: It was nuclear. Ever since the United States had bombed Japan, American strategists believed that using any nuclear device against any Asian people "would bring down on us the wrath of the civilized world," as Cohen put it. The theory was not supported by evidence, but seemed so entrenched, Cohen was forced to conclude that if battlefield nuclear weapons were going to be used anywhere, "it would have to be somewhere other than Asia and against a different kind of people; Cohen was like a parent of two belligerent ten-year-olds who sees them brandishing guns at each other, takes the guns away, and gives the kids cans of pepper spray instead. As a realist, Cohen might argue that kids always pick fights with each other, and your best hope is to minimize their risk of injury. It would kill people without damaging real estate, implying (incorrectly) that Cohen regarded real estate as being more important than people. In an era where the counter-culture had turned "capitalism" into a tainted word, the neutron bomb became stigmatized as "the ultimate capitalist weapon," as if a bomb that only killed people was somehow worse than conventional weapons that inflicted terrible wounds _and_ created environmental devastation _and_ killed people. The situation now changed radically, because Morse had the political savvy and connections that Cohen lacked. -------------------- Morse began promoting Cohen around Washington, and Cohen found himself making presentations to politicians instead of the defense contractors, academics, RANDites, and Pentagonians he had dealt with before. He reminded Cohen that although the fight against communism was important, "the first duty of a politician is to be elected." In Cohen's estimation, "Had the bomb been a big ticket multibillion dollar item that could have been produced in Mississippi, his interest in it might have been diferent. Supposedly he was an expert on all things nuclear, but his response may have bothered Cohen more than any other. Cohen took grim solace when Leonid Brezhnev denounced him publicly as an "international war criminal," but the vilification he received in his own country was hard to endure. Confronted with bad press, venal politicians, and world leaders who still seemed hooked on the drama of weapons that would cause as much destruction as possible, Cohen concluded that neutron bombs would be built only if the United States got itself into a conventional war that imposed an intolerable financial burden while creating unacceptable casualties among American troops. "We had close to a half million American casualties in Vietnam," Cohen recalls, "and by this time the Livermore laboratory had put in a proposal to Washington stating that they could manufacture a couple hundred neutron bombs. Of course, no one can predict the number of bombs that would produce any specific result, but I believe that considerably less than 200 neutron bombs could have ended that war." Once again, however, Cohen found himself thwarted by theories and prejudices that made this unacceptable. The neutron bomb was still nuclear, the Vietnamese were Asian, yet even this wasn't the biggest issue. According to conventional wisdom, any small nuclear weapon was dangerous because the nation that used it would encourage other nations to use theirs, and a back-yard nuclear squabble would escalate to a full-scale nuclear war. Since Cohen's hypothetical weapon was nuclear-based, it could not be used. Physicist Freeman Dyson had suggested a spaceship powered by small nuclear bombs. By then, however, Cohen had given up trying to deal with the State Department. "Everyone at RAND was now totally against battlefield nuclear weapons," Cohen recalls. Warfare as a Biological Function ----------------------------------- Long after the Vietnam War reached its miserable end, Sam Cohen's cheerleading for the neutron bomb achieved unexpected results. Alas, the way in which the neutron bombs were built totally perverted Cohen's original plan for them. The larger of the two designs was actually so big, Cohen calculated that it would inflict devastation on the same scale as the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Stocks of American neutron bombs were retained for a couple more years, but George Bush Senior finally made a policy decision to eliminate _all_ battlefield nuclear weapons, and thus "the most moral weapon ever invented" was scrapped without benefiting anyone other than the defense contractors who built it. "Otherwise," says Cohen, "we're going to go on poking our nose in all over the world, supposedly to preserve freedom. By "realistic" Cohen means small nuclear warheads that would explode over an American city to knock down all incoming missiles. As Cohen puts it, "Apparently it's okay for the other side to destroy us with nuclear weapons but it's fundamentally wrong for us to defend ourselves with non-destructive (to ourselves or anyone else) nuclear weapons." The Global Consequences of Child Abuse ----------------------------------------- The first time I heard Sam Cohen's name was in 2000 when I happened to catch Michael Reagan's AM hate show, or "talk show" as he prefers to call it. He had read a book titled _Shame_, which was Sam Cohen's autobiography, and he seemed to think it was one of the most bizarre and remarkable memoirs he had ever seen. Supposedly Cohen had pursued a lifelong obsession with radiation weapons primarily as a neurotic response to a miserable childhood dominated by a demonic mother. _Shame_ was the ultimate exercise in has-beenism, chronicling a career that had elevated Cohen to a position of immense influence in national policy-making before he suffered his downfall into obscurity. "I can hardly wait to read his obit.") I remember also listening to a speech by renegade British politician Ken Livingstone, a one-time Member of Parliament whose disarming candor rivals even that of Sam Cohen. The difference between them and Sam Cohen is that Cohen fell into the world of government almost by accident, and admits his neuroses no matter how bizarre they sound. To the well-intentioned liberals who constitute the primary population of publishing companies, Cohen's text said, in effect, that the behavior of nuclear policy makers was delusional bordering on insane. Finally, in a coup-de-grace that could hardly fail to repel any book editor who had perhaps expected a scholarly or academic work, Cohen explained in some detail that he developed his "most moral weapon" because on some visceral level he liked the idea of inflicting the same nightmare of vomit and diarrhea that had been inflicted upon him by his mother. I have never been very interested in writing conventional journalism, and Sam Cohen obviously wasn't a conventional subject for a feature. As children of the Bomb we lived in everyday fear of annihilation for more than a decade, and during that time nuclear weapons remained the news topic in the western world, like a hit album that never dropped out of the charts. Sam Cohen illustrates his skepticism toward nuclear treaties by telling the story of a negotiation in which Soviet representatives did not even know how many nuclear warheads their own nation possessed, because the Politburo didn't trust them with this information. After being empowered by nuclear weapons like his predecessors, he suddenly found himself as a Commander in Chief with no enemy to fight. In a system such as this, clearly there was no place for Sam Cohen.