nuclear-news

Immorality of nuclear weapons

the neutron bomb was designed to kill people with massive doses of radiation while leaving buildings, cities, whole countries pretty well intact…..Cohen’s death must surely highlight questions about whether we are facing up to the life-and-death realities of our increasingly nuclear world, or burying our heads in the sand.

Was Sam Cohen behind the most immoral weapon of all time? | Mail Online, 4 Dec 10, “……… a junior worker on the famed Manhattan Project, ……The supremely destructive device would be used twice on Japan, with brute power and terror, to bring a swift end to World War II.

And in the years that followed, Cohen would become the architect of what many would see as an even more monstrous weapon.

The bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crude, blunt instruments of destruction. Using the previously unharnessed power of atomic ­fission, they razed miles of human habitation to the ground, ­reducing people, houses, shops and factories to ash. It fell to Cohen to ­discover a way to refine this device into something more precise.

In the Fifties, Cohen — who died on Sunday aged 89 — invented the neutron bomb, a device that can still make the blood run cold.

Why? Because the neutron bomb was designed to kill people with massive doses of radiation while leaving buildings, cities, whole countries pretty well intact. It seemed as if he had created the supreme immoral weapon.

The Hiroshima bomb, which was tiny compared with the ones made in the feverish post-war arms race between Washington and Moscow, flattened areas more than four miles from the point of detonation. Cohen’s device would cause the same degree of devastation, but over just a third of a mile. Beyond that, buildings would largely ­manage to survive.

But Cohen ramped up the radiation dose, with the result that death for those exposed to the blast over many miles would be instant. As a bonus, that radiation would also be much more quickly dissipated in the atmosphere. Areas hit by the bomb would be inhabitable again rather than nuclear deserts.

Given a scenario that seemed to put infrastructure above human life, it’s no wonder that even many of those at the heart of the Cold War — U.S. Presidents such as Jimmy Carter among them —shuddered and drew back from this chilling prospect…….

It was Henry Kissinger who once observed: ‘The greatest paradox of the nuclear age is that the power [of leading nations] has never been greater, but it has also never been less useful.’

Cohen’s death must surely highlight questions about whether we are facing up to the life-and-death realities of our increasingly nuclear world, or burying our heads in the sand.

Was Sam Cohen behind the most immoral weapon of all time? | Mail Online

December 4, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, Religion and ethics