Samuel T. Cohen

"Knowledge or no knowledge, the intelligence community is obliged to furnish estimates to military planners, even if they’re worthless and very possibly misleading. If you are one of those strange duck…"

"The next day, I called one of them and asked if I could come to his office to discuss the briefing. Fine with him, so off I went. I sat down and asked him a question: “Norm, how did you decide so exac…"

"Naturally, the next question was: “How accurate is the nuclear data you used in your calculation?” As only Edward Teller is capable of doing, he replied, with a smirk-smile going from ear to ear: “Wel…"

"He was all in favor of fighting an all-out thermonuclear war that might devastate a fair fraction of civilization, to settle an argument with the USSR, but was dead set against using discriminate nucl…"

"As you can well imagine, any nuclear bombing study that neglected to target Moscow would be laughed out of the room. Consequently, two of RAND’s brightest mathematicians were assigned the task of dete…"

"The briefing was over, there were lots of questions that Teller handled with aplomb, knowing far more about the subject than most in the audience. Finally there came a question that had nothing to do …"

"People are people, and all people have emotions and biases, rarely understood: intellectual and emotional behavior don’t necessarily have an inverse correlation. Oppenheimer, as superhuman and wise as…"