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Ari's Reviews > F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb
F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb
by
by
"Confessions" is a good title for this book. It's mostly a memoir, but it's unusually reflective, unusually intimate, and unusually disjointed. The opening sections, describing how he was abused by his mother as a child, were painful reading. The last quarter of the book is largely "what I would do if I were president" -- and the answer is startlingly Trumpy, but not particularly convincing. Along the way, there are many apologies to friends who Cohen broke off contact with.
Cohen was a junior worker at Los Alamos (in uniform) and then after the war, made his career in the military-industrial complex, moving between institutions like RAND, Lockheed, and the Pentagon. He was a military analyst, not a scientist, and most of the people who mattered to him were in the military or intelligence community, not the scientific.
In the late 1950s, Cohen noticed that a small nuclear bomb, set off at the right altitude, would produce a strong neutron pulse, but very little blast damage or fallout. Far from being "a capitalist weapon to spare cities and kill their people", Cohen always intended this as a tactical weapon against enemy troops. It was to spare civilians, not kill them.
At a time when American nuclear strategy was mostly "megatons on cities" and when any sort of nuclear weapon was politically controversial, pushing for tactical weapons was a very lonely fight. Much of the book is about Cohen's repeated experiences of rejection, sometimes polite, sometimes nasty, sometimes apologetic as he tried to spread the gospel of, as he says, "discriminate nuclear weapons."
Cohen, by the time he wrote his memoir, was intensely bitter about American military decision making. He scolds Herman Kahn and his whole school of quantitative analysis for shoddy work; he's dismayed at members of congress more interested in reelection than in the best weapons; he's appalled by politicians who negotiate arms control treaties with only very flimsy intelligence to confirm whether the other side is following them. And he's outraged by people who work on think-tank and DoD analyses that are designed with the conclusion in mind at the start.
I thought the book was interesting and eye-opening, though somewhat too self-involved. It would have been better with an editor, but you get the memoirs you get. Worth reading if you want to understand how defense decision-making happens.
Cohen was a junior worker at Los Alamos (in uniform) and then after the war, made his career in the military-industrial complex, moving between institutions like RAND, Lockheed, and the Pentagon. He was a military analyst, not a scientist, and most of the people who mattered to him were in the military or intelligence community, not the scientific.
In the late 1950s, Cohen noticed that a small nuclear bomb, set off at the right altitude, would produce a strong neutron pulse, but very little blast damage or fallout. Far from being "a capitalist weapon to spare cities and kill their people", Cohen always intended this as a tactical weapon against enemy troops. It was to spare civilians, not kill them.
At a time when American nuclear strategy was mostly "megatons on cities" and when any sort of nuclear weapon was politically controversial, pushing for tactical weapons was a very lonely fight. Much of the book is about Cohen's repeated experiences of rejection, sometimes polite, sometimes nasty, sometimes apologetic as he tried to spread the gospel of, as he says, "discriminate nuclear weapons."
Cohen, by the time he wrote his memoir, was intensely bitter about American military decision making. He scolds Herman Kahn and his whole school of quantitative analysis for shoddy work; he's dismayed at members of congress more interested in reelection than in the best weapons; he's appalled by politicians who negotiate arms control treaties with only very flimsy intelligence to confirm whether the other side is following them. And he's outraged by people who work on think-tank and DoD analyses that are designed with the conclusion in mind at the start.
I thought the book was interesting and eye-opening, though somewhat too self-involved. It would have been better with an editor, but you get the memoirs you get. Worth reading if you want to understand how defense decision-making happens.
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