Samuel T. Cohen

Samuel Theodore Cohen (January 25, 1921 – November 28, 2010) was an American physicist who invented the W70 warhead and is therefore generally credited as the father of the neutron bomb.

Cohen's parents were Austrian Jews who emigrated from London, England. He was born on January 25, 1921, in Brooklyn and raised in New York City. He studied math and physics at UCLA before joining the Army after Pearl Harbor. In 1944 he worked on the Manhattan Project in the efficiency group and calculated how neutrons behaved in Fat Man, the atomic bomb that was later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. After the war he studied for his Ph.D. at Berkeley before dropping out to join the RAND Corporation. At RAND Corporation in 1950, his work on the intensity of fallout radiation first became public when his calculations were included as a special appendix in Samuel Glasstone's book The Effects of Atomic Weapons.

Samuel T. Cohen in Joe Steele
In the late 1930s, Samuel T. Cohen engaged in subversive behavior and so was encamped as a wrecker by the GBI. When Captain Hyman Rickover was assigned the project to develop an atomic bomb, he received permission to use Cohen and other encamped physicists within a special encampment to work on the bomb. The project proved successful, so Cohen and the others earned their freedom.

Literary Comment
Cohen is referenced in the novel only and not in the short story.