Micro-nukes, Samuel Cohen and Herman Kahn

[Jenny Lake]

Samuel T. Cohen, inventor of the "neutron bomb" tactical warheads, worked on the Manhattan Project as a young physicist and then went to work For RAND Corp. He recruited his friend Herman Kahn to come work for RAND after WWII. Kahn went on to work at Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Lab developing H-bombs with Edward Teller & company (also founding the Hudson Institute with Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen), while Cohen stayed with RAND producing fallout hazard calculations.

Samuel Cohen is quoted from a BBC program as saying, "When we started this systems analysis business, we stepped through the looking glass where people did the weirdest things and (used) the most perverse kind of logic imaginable and yet claimed to have the most precise understanding of everything". Cohen became a proponent of the existence of "red mercury" ,widely thought to be a hoax, and claimed its use in making mini-nukes of a lightweight and technically simplified construction.

Herman Kahn became a well-known futurist, proponent of "feasible and survivable" nuclear war, and produced the "Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace" (Dial Press, Simon and Schuster). Both Cohen and Kahn were incorporated into the composite .character of "Dr. Strangelove" by Stanley Kubrick along with associate Edward Teller. Kahn supposedly gave Kubrick the idea of The Doomsday Machine for the movie.

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from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Cohen

Red Mercury claims
More recently, Cohen has been the main proponent of what most consider to be a mythical substance, red mercury. If the "conventional story" is to be believed, red mercury was a disinformation campaign led by US government agencies in order to lure potential terrorists into being captured. The story that was released was that red mercury was developed by the Soviet Union as a "shortcut" to a fusion bomb, and that with the fall of the Soviet Union it was being offered on the market by the Soviet mafia. When prospective buyers showed up to take delivery of the material, they were arrested.

During the height of the story, in the 1990s, Cohen became a proponent of red mercury, claiming not only that it existed, but going further to claim that it was a powerful ballotechnic material that directly compressed the fusion fuel without the need for a fission primary. Bombs using red mercury had no real critical mass and could be developed at any size. He further claimed that the Soviets had produced a number of "micro-nukes" based on red mercury, which are described as being about as large as a baseball and weighing 10 pounds. According to Cohen, their existence meant that any effort to control nuclear proliferation based on fissile material was thus hopeless. A reiteration of the claim can be seen in The Nuclear Threat That Doesn't Exist – or Does It?, by Cohen and Joe Douglass in an 11 March 2003 guest editorial in Financial Sense Online.[2]

Cohen later went on to claim that 100 of these mini-nukes were in the hands of terrorists [6], and later that Saddam Hussein had taken delivery of about fifty of these devices, which he supposedly planned on using against the US forces as they approached Baghdad.

In the face of claims that red mercury was a disinformation campaign, Cohen has claimed that Russia has such weapons, "red mercury" exists as claimed, and the US, among the technical elite, take it seriously, while at the same time starting a disinformation campaign claiming "red mercury" is bogus in order to assuage the public. Independent confirmation of such claims in the article is lacking.