Samuel T. Cohen dies; invented neutron bomb

LOS ANGELES - Samuel T. Cohen, the father of the controversial tactical nuclear weapon known as the neutron bomb, which was designed to kill people and other living things but inflict minimal damage on buildings and other property, died Sunday at his home in Brentwood.

He was 89 and died two weeks after the removal of a cancerous tumor from his stomach, according to his son Paul.

A conventional nuclear weapon releases massive radiation and heat that incinerates humans and inanimate objects, leaving behind radioactive debris that contaminates the area for years or decades. A neutron bomb, or enhanced-radiation weapon, in contrast, has only about one-tenth the explosive power of a comparable fission weapon, and most of its output is in the form of neutrons - tiny neutral particles that can pass through walls, vehicles, tanks, armor and other inanimate objects with little or no damage.

But those neutrons cause lethal damage to the nuclei of living cells, killing combatants quickly.

Because of its limited range, however, there is little danger to nearby civilians and little or no residual radiation to threaten the environment after the battle.

"It's the most sane and moral weapon ever devised," Cohen said in an interview with the New York Times shortly before his death. "It's the only nuclear weapon in history that makes sense in waging war. When the war is over, the world is still intact."

Critics, however, took a different view, charging that the limited damage associated with the neutron bomb would make nuclear warfare more acceptable and that, in turn, could lead to full-scale nuclear retaliation.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev called the neutron bomb the ultimate capitalist weapon, built "to kill a man in such a way that his suit will not be stained with blood, in order to appropriate the suit."

In 1981, however, President Ronald Reagan ordered 700 neutron warheads built to oppose the massive Soviet tank force that had been strategically positioned in Eastern Europe. He viewed the bomb as the only tactical weapon that could effectively stop the tanks without also destroying much of the continent. The weapons were later dismantled in the face of widespread protests and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

France, China, Russia and Israel are also thought to have produced neutron weapons, but it is not known if they still have any.

Samuel Theodore Cohen was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Jan. 25, 1921, to Austrian Jews who migrated to the U.S. by way of Britain. When he was 4, the family moved to Los Angeles, where his father worked as a carpenter on movie sets. Young Samuel suffered allergies, eye problems and other ailments, and his mother put him on a rigidly controlled diet, regular purges and daily ice-water showers to toughen him up, and fed him so much carrot juice that his skin was often yellow.

A brilliant student, he studied physics at UCLA, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1943. After joining the Army, he was posted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for advanced training in physics and math, then selected for work on the Manhattan Project.

Although he never received a doctoral degree, he calculated neutron densities on "Fat Man," the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

After the war, he joined the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, and spent most of his career there. He said that the inspiration for the neutron bomb was a 1951 visit to Seoul, South Korea, which had been largely destroyed in the Korean War. In his memoir, he wrote: "If we are going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?"

He designed the neutron bomb using pencil, paper and a slide rule given to him by his father for his 15th birthday.

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, the former Margaret Munnemann, two sons, a daughter and three grandchildren.