Gwern's Reviews > Shame: Confessionas of the Father of the Neutron Bomb

Shame by Sam Cohen
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Jul 15, 2013

Read in July, 2013

It's hard to judge this one without more historical knowledge than I have.

There's a lot of things to dislike.

Cohen has a massive chip on his shoulder about the neutron bomb and how it was misunderstood which pops up every other page (but after reading the Wikipedia article, I can't say he is wrong to be aggravated about portrayals of it - why *is* a neutron bomb so horrible? Dead is dead, and limited wars fought with 1kt neutron bombs which can't affect much past 1400 meters with minimal fallout sounds way better than dropping megatons on random megalopolises).

He had a seriously messed up childhood if half what he says is true, and one gets the disturbing feeling that he was a hardline right-wing hawk solely because he was beaten up as a kid by some other kids who were socialists, and his language about the War on Drugs is disturbingly emotionally laden and based on purity.

He seems to, like the Bourbons, 'have forgotten nothing and learned nothing' - his memoir might as well have been written back in the '60s, because he shows no awareness of why anyone would consider the War on Drugs a colossal folly, discusses freely how the first Gulf War was a disaster because Saddam could go right back to inventing missiles & WMDs (?! my online edition is dated 2006! Isn't some sort of appendix or footnote or corrigendum warranted like "oops I completely fucked up my beliefs, sorry!"?), talks paranoidly about Russian intentions and capabilities with almost no reference to post-Cold War developments or revelations which you think he would've been very interested in, and so on. (I don't think much of the _Wired_ editor's appendix either; how does anyone sound 'erudite' when saying a perfectly ordinary sentence on the phone? You sound like you're kissing ass with absurd flattery like that. And the '90s boom wasn't due to the Cold War ending, it was due to Moore's law finally making computers & networks sufficiently cheap & powerful that they were worth a damn for anybody but geeks, etc.)

What is there to like? Well, he has some cute stories about the sloppy studies and research & development which went on back then, like the Minutemen silos which couldn't actually launch any when tested or about Herman Kahn's dishonest scare tactic studies or about the many compromises & sacrifices of intellectual honesty RAND staffers made. Those are fun. The part where he went to France and his explanation for the Vela incident was interesting.
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07/15/2013 marked as: read

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