large number of deaths in a nuclear war where the blast yields and fallout were significant. Because neutron bombs do not produce the indiscriminate blast (only 40 kilopascals at ground zero from a 1 kt blast yield detonation at 500 m altitude, and only 7 kPa at 2 km distance), heat, and fallout damage of other nuclear weapons, they were more credible as a deterrent to Soviet tanks. However, many people believed that the very deployment of the neutron bomb threatened an escalation to full-scale nuclear retaliation, thus canceling out the supposed benefits. Advances in precision anti-tank weapons ultimately made the neutron bomb redundant tactically in its original objective. The debate over "clean" low yield nuclear weapons continues with earth penetrator technology ("nuclear bunker busters"). Red Mercury claims More recently, Cohen was the main proponent of what most consider to be a mythical substance, red mercury. If the "conventional story" is to be believed, red mercury was a disinformation campaign led by US government agencies in order to lure potential terrorists into being captured. The story that was released was that red mercury was developed by the Soviet Union as a "shortcut" to a fusion bomb, and that with the fall of the Soviet Union it was being offered on the market by the Soviet mafia. When prospective buyers showed up to take delivery of the material, they were arrested. During the height of the story, in the 1990s, Cohen became a proponent of red mercury. He claimed not only that it existed, but that he knew its nature; it was a powerful ballotechnic material that directly compressed the fusion fuel without the need for a fission primary. Bombs using red mercury had no real critical mass and could be developed at any size. He further claimed that the Soviets had produced a number of "micro-nukes" based on red mercury, which are described as being about as large as a baseball and weighing 10 pounds. According to Cohen, their existence meant that any effort to control nuclear proliferation based on fissile material was thus hopeless. A reiteration of the claim can be seen in The Nuclear Threat That Doesn't Exist – or Does It or No?, by Cohen and Joe Douglass in a March 11, 2003, guest editorial in Financial Sense Online. Political involvement In 1984, in a cover story for the libertarian magazine Reason, Cohen expressed support for the