Talk:Samuel T. Cohen

message: Does Samuel Cohen have a birth date? Where was he born? What was the title of his thesis? Was he married, did he have children? The article is lacking fundamental information on the person Samuel Cohen. 62.117.25.104 20:18, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Basic information missing 

message: The message below was posted to my talk page, but it probably belongs here. --Fastfission 21:11, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Message posted to my talk page 

message: Here's an example which highlights some of my specific concerns:
Hans A. Bethe supported clean nuclear weapons in 1958 as Chairman of a Presidential science advisory group on nuclear testing :
"... certain hard targets require ground bursts, such as airfield runways if it is desired to make a crater, railroad yards if severe destruction of tracks is to be accomplished... The use of clean weapons in strategic situations may be indicated in order to protect the local population."  (Dr Hans Bethe, 27 March 1958 Top Secret - Restricted Data Report to the NSC Ad Hoc Working Group on the Technical Feasibility of a Cessation of Nuclear Testing (Bethe was the Working Group Chairman, page 9).''
Now, first of all, Bethe was just the chairman on this committee, so saying that this is a quote of Bethe himself is somewhat misleading (11 people were on the committee, who knows who wrote it). But even assuming we change its authorship to being primarily the committee itself, we still run into the problem that this is not a document outlining support for clean weapons per se. It merely lists them as one of a dozen reasons why a nuclear test ban might be problematic. It is not a "recommendation" for testing a specific weapon; it is a recommendation against a more general test ban. This was of course a major concern amongst the laboratory heads in the late 1950s (Edward Teller resigned from LLNL's directorship in order to better campaign against the test ban). This has very little to do with Sam Cohen at all, and very little to do with the neutron bomb. It certainly doesn't deserve the causal role it is being given here, where it is being used as the instigator of the testing of the first "clean" weapons.
Personally I think this is clearly a violation of WP:NOR even if the document is available on a website. WP:NOR does not allow the synthesis of new documents into a narrative unless they have been already so synthesized by reliable secondary literature. This is also an example of why I don't like additions of this sort to articles -- picking and choosing documents based on a few sentences in them shows a lack of understanding of the historical method and the importance of contextualization. --Fastfission 15:51, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "... Bethe was just the chairman of the committee..."  Similarly, Bush is "just" the President of America, and Hitler was "just" the leader of Germany.  It is an interesting POV of yours that a committee chairman is not responsible for anything.  Does this mean Hitler never personally stuffed people into gas chambers because he was too busy doing the paperwork for that, similarly Bush never fired a bullet to start a war and so wasn't responsible for Iraq, and so on?  So your POV about leadership revises the history of these other subjects.  Or, far more likely, your POV is just limited to one particular committee chairman, Bethe, how convenient.  Clean weapons research led directly to the Sam Cohen neutron bomb in 1958, so there is a big connection.  This just shows that you don't have the facts yourself on this, and are thus out of context.  Have you actually read all of Sam Cohen's books right the way through?  If you discount as inadmissible "secondary" sources books like those of Cohen from being considered in an article the topic of which is Sam Cohen, then your POV on what is a valid POV is simply crackpot, no offense intended!  172.201.134.207 09:32, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: My point is that without knowing Bethe's personal opinion is incorrect to attribute this to him based simply on his chairmanship of the committee -- a point which I noted could be avoided by better attribution, and certainly without all of the hyberbole you are throwing at it. In any case the overall point still stands that the report does not advocate what it is claimed to. Without a secondary source showing that this particular report lead to clean weapons research -- it seems like an unlikely jump to me -- it is original research to postulate that it did. If there is a secondary source for these assertions, even if they are Cohen's books, they need to be cited. --Fastfission 15:42, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Quotes out of context

message: Does a headline like "Christians supported low yield clean anti-tank bombs..." belong here? I see a mention of Pope John Paul II, but no evidence that Christians in general supported these bombs. I would wager that there was no particular correlation between one's religious faith and one's opinion about neutron bombs.
*Well, whether there is or not, the headline is very poor, and this is one of the reasons it has a POV tag on it for the moment. --Fastfission 17:56, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Offensive to Christians 

message: An anon has used the ipt.aol.com domain to edit the article and also this talk page, using IPS apparently geolocated near Brooklyn, New York and including the following
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If our Brooklyn anon is personally connected to Cohen, as seems to be the case (number of children, etc.), this might be a good time to say so.
---CH 00:04, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Edits by ipt.aol.com anon from (?) Brooklyn

message: Does anyone have any indication this thing exists? It sounded odd to me that a pope would give out peace prizes for weapons research, so I googled it and there's not a single other hit. No admittedly ir's supposedly from 1979 so that's "pre-net", but if this was something that was given out to more than one person you would expect some mention of it. Maury 15:09, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I have to admit I've become totally suspicious of this, along with a lot of Sam Cohen's other claims. Frankly I just haven't seen very much independent verification of who he says he is and what he says he has done. All stories about Sam Cohen seem to end at Sam Cohen. He doesn't show up in any independent literature on bomb development that I have ever seen, and I've never seen him mentioned in any literature/documents by Livermore or Los Alamos. I have seen references that RAND was working on ER weaponry in the late 1950s, and Cohen claims to have been involved in it then and there, but that's as close as I have been able to get in my own lookings into this. It's very possible that this history is rendered obscure by the secrecy surrounding weapon design, but I also get the sinking feeling that it might just be bull of some sort... --Fastfission 19:57, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

text: Another weird thing is that Cohen made a big flap about the W87 pictures in the Cox Report, but he appears to have been very wrong on a number of points despite claiming to speak with a lot of authority. Maybe it is a simple mistake, maybe he is getting old, maybe...? --Fastfission 20:38, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  What medal of peace? 

message: This guy is an obvious nutcase.  Why no mention/discussion of that?
"Terrorists have 100 Soviet-made mini-nukes" yet they've never set off a single one?
"Saddam Hussein had 50" of these mini-nukes, and yet he was caught hiding in a hole in the ground, his sons were blown away with anti-tank rockets, and he was hanged like a cheap Christmas ornament?
He promotes nonsense pseudo-physics, and no one calls bullshit?
Absurdity, thy name is Wikipedia.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.28.169.227 (talk) 09:06, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Anonymous rant

message: The lead claimed "Samuel Theodore Cohen... was an American physicist who invented the W70 warhead and is therefore generally credited as the father of the neutron bomb".  No inline citation was provided for the claim that Samuel Cohen invented the W70.  It is not subsequently mentioned in the body of the article.  It is not mentioned in the W70 article.   It is not mentioned in the LA Times obituary.  I have removed this claim from the article. -  Crosbie 18:10, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Invented the W70' claim 

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