Herman Kahn (February 15, 1922 – July 7, 1983) was one of the preeminent
futurists of the latter third of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s he predicted the rise of Japan as a major world power. He was a founder of the
Hudson Institute think tank and originally came to prominence as a
military strategist and
systems theorist while employed at
RAND Corporation, USA. He was known for analyzing the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommending ways to improve survivability.
His theories contributed to the development of the nuclear strategy of the United States.
Background
Born in
Bayonne, New Jersey, Kahn grew up in a Jewish family in the
Bronx, then in
Los Angeles following his parents' divorce. He attended the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), majoring in
physics. During World War II he was stationed by the Army as a telephone linesman in Burma. Thus, like many of his colleagues at
RAND in the 1950s, he had little personal experience of warfare. After World War II, he finished his
B.S. at UCLA and embarked on a
Ph.D. at
Caltech; however, he had to drop out for financial reasons but did receive an
M.Sc. Following a brief attempt to work in real estate, he was recruited to
RAND by his friend
Samuel Cohen, the inventor of the
neutron bomb. He became involved with the development of the
hydrogen bomb, commuting to the
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Northern California and working closely with
Edward Teller,
John von Neumann,
Hans Bethe, and mathematician
Albert Wohlstetter.
Cold War theories
Kahn's major contributions were the several strategies he developed during the
Cold War to contemplate "the unthinkable", namely,
nuclear warfare, by using applications of
game theory. (Most notably, Kahn is often cited as the father of
scenario planning.) During the mid-1950s, the
Dwight D. Eisenhower administration's prevailing nuclear strategy had been one of "massive retaliation", enunciated by Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles. According to this theory, dubbed the "
New Look", since the Soviet Army was considerably larger than that of the United States, it therefore presented a potential security threat in too many locations for the Americans to counter effectively all at once. Consequently, the United States had no choice but to proclaim that its response to any Soviet aggression, anywhere, would be a nuclear attack.
Kahn considered this theory untenable because it was crude and potentially destabilizing. Arguably, the "New Look" invited nuclear attack by providing the Soviets with an incentive to precede any conventional, localized military action worldwide (e.g., in Korea, Africa, etc.) with a nuclear attack on U.S. bomber bases, thereby eliminating the Americans' nuclear threat immediately and forcing the U.S. into the land war it sought to avoid.
In 1960, as Cold War tensions were near their peak following the Sputnik crisis and amidst talk of a widening "missile gap" between the U.S. and the Soviets, Kahn published On Thermonuclear War, the title of which clearly alluded to the classic 19th-century treatise on military strategy, On War, by German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz.
Kahn rested his theory upon two premises, one obvious, one highly controversial. First, nuclear war was obviously feasible, since the United States and the Soviet Union currently had massive nuclear arsenals aimed at each other. Second, like any other war, it was winnable.
Whether hundreds of millions died or "merely" a few major cities were destroyed, Kahn argued, life would in fact go on, as it had for instance after the "Black Death" of the 14th century in Europe, or in Japan after a limited nuclear attack in 1945, contrary to the conventional, prevailing doomsday scenarios. Various outcomes might be far more horrible than anything hitherto witnessed or imagined, but nonetheless, some of them in turn could be far worse than others. No matter how calamitous the devastation, the survivors ultimately would not "envy the dead." To believe otherwise would mean that deterrence was unnecessary in the first place. If Americans were unwilling to accept the consequences, no matter how horrifying, of a nuclear exchange, then they certainly had no business proclaiming their willingness to attack. Without an unfettered, unambivalent willingness to push the button, the entire array of preparations and military deployments was merely an elaborate bluff.
The basis of his work were systems theory and game theory as applied to military strategy and economics. Kahn argued that for deterrence to succeed, the Soviets had to be convinced that the United States had a second strike capability, in order to leave no doubt in the minds of the Politburo that even a perfectly-coordinated, massive attack would guarantee a measure of retaliation that would leave them devastated as well:
This reasoning was the genesis of the famous doctrine of MAD, or "Mutual Assured Destruction", which would dominate Cold War thinking into the Reagan Era. Strong conventional forces were also a key element in Kahn's strategic thinking, for he argued that the tension generated by relatively minor flashpoints worldwide could be thereby effectively siphoned off without undue resort to the nuclear option.
The unthinkable
Due to his willingness to articulate the most brutal possibilities, Kahn came to be disliked by some, although he was known as amiable in private. Unlike most strategists, Kahn was entirely willing to posit the form a post-nuclear world might assume. None of the conventional issues bothered him.
Fallout, for example, would simply be another one of life's many unpleasantries and inconveniences; even the much-ballyhooed rise in birth defects would not doom mankind to extinction, because in any event a majority of the survivors would still not be affected by them. Contaminated food could be designated for consumption by the elderly, who would presumably die anyhow before the delayed onset of cancers caused by
radioactivity. A degree of even modest preparation — namely, the
fallout shelters, evacuation scenarios, and
civil defense drills now seen as emblematic of the paranoid 1950s — would give the population both the incentive and the encouragement to rebuild. He even recommended the government offer homeowner's insurance against nuclear bomb damage. Kahn felt that having a strong civil-defense program in place would serve as an additional deterrent, because it would hamper the other side's potential to inflict destruction, thus lessening the attraction of the nuclear option. A willingness to tolerate such possibilities might be worth it, Kahn argued, in exchange for sparing the entire continent of Europe in the more massive nuclear exchange more likely to occur under the pre-MAD doctrine.
A number of pacifists, including A.J. Muste and Bertrand Russell, admired and praised Kahn's work, because they felt it presented a strong case for full disarmament by suggesting that nuclear war was all but unavoidable. Others criticized Kahn vehemently, claiming that his postulating the notion of a winnable nuclear war made one more likely.
Hudson Institute
In 1961 Kahn,
Max Singer and
Oscar Ruebhausen, founded the
Hudson Institute, a policy research organization then located in
Croton-on-Hudson, New York which was also where Kahn was living at the time. Luminaries such as sociologist
Daniel Bell, the French political philosopher
Raymond Aron and novelist
Ralph Ellison, author of the 1952 classic
Invisible Man, were recruited by the institute. Stung by the vociferousness of his critics, Kahn softened his tone somewhat, responding to their points in
Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962) and a further work on military strategy,
On Escalation (1965). Between 1966 and 1968, during the peak of the
Vietnam War, Kahn served as a consultant to the
Department of Defense and opposed the growing pressure to negotiate directly with
North Vietnam, arguing that the only military solution was sharp escalation. Failing that, he said, the U.S. government had to have an
exit strategy, and Kahn claimed credit for introducing the term "
Vietnamization".
Later years
With the easing of nuclear tensions during the
détente years of the 1970s, Kahn turned his attention to
futurism, with its speculations about a potential
Armageddon. The Hudson Institute sought to refute popular apocalyptic essays such as
Paul Ehrlich's "
The Population Bomb" (1968),
Garrett Hardin's similarly reasoned "
The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the same year, and the
Club of Rome's "
Limits to Growth" (1972). In Kahn's view,
capitalism and technology held nearly boundless potential for progress; the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future. In his last few years, Kahn wrote approvingly of
Ronald Reagan's political agenda in
The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social, and bluntly derided
Jonathan Schell's claims about the long-term effects of nuclear war. Kahn's 1976 book
The Next 200 Years, written with William Brown and Leon Martel, presented an optimistic scenario of economic conditions in the year 2176. He also wrote several works on systems theory, including the well-received work
Techniques in System Theory, as well as a number of books extrapolating the future of the U.S., Japanese and Australian economies.
Kahn died of a stroke in 1983, at the age of 61.
Cultural influence
Kahn was reportedly one of the models for
Dr. Strangelove from
Stanley Kubrick's eponymous film, released in 1964 (other prominent influences were
Edward Teller,
Robert McNamara, and
Wernher von Braun). It was said that Kubrick immersed himself in Kahn's book
On Thermonuclear War. Kubrick actually met Kahn personally, and Kahn gave him the idea for the Doomsday Machine, which would immediately destroy the entire planet in the event of a nuclear attack. In the film, Dr. Strangelove refers to a report on the Doomsday Machine by the "BLAND Corporation". The Doomsday Machine is precisely the sort of destabilizing tactic that Kahn himself sought to avert, since its only purpose was a threat or bluff rather than actual military application.
Also based upon Kahn was Walter Matthau's maverick character Professor Groteschele in Fail-Safe, in which the U.S. President (played by Henry Fonda) tries to prevent a nuclear holocaust when a mechanical malfunction sends nuclear weapons heading toward Moscow.
In the , Timothy Leary suggest Herman Kahn had taken LSD.
The band Megadeth got its name from the deliberate misspelling of the word megadeath, a term coined in 1953 by Herman Kahn to describe one million deaths, which was popularized by his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War.
Notes
Bibliography
Outside of physics and statistics, works written by Kahn include:
(With Jerome Agel) Herman Kahnsciousness;: The megaton ideas of the one-man think tank, (New American Library)
The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social, (Simon & Schuster), ISBN 0-671-49265-9
The Next 200 Years, (Morrow), ISBN 0-688-08029-4
The Japanese challenge: The success and failure of economic success, (Morrow), ISBN 0-688-08710-8
Thinking about the unthinkable in the 1980s (New York : Simon and Schuster) 1984. ISBN 0671475444
Things to Come: Thinking About the Seventies and Eighties, (MacMillan), ISBN 0-02-560470-8
World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond, (William Morrow), ISBN 0-688-03479-9
Will she be right?: The future of Australia, (University of Queensland Press), ISBN 0-7022-1569-4
The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, (MacMillan), ISBN 0-02-560440-6
Emerging Japanese Superstate : Challenge and Response, (Prentice Hall), ISBN 0-13-274670-0
The nature and feasibility of war, deterrence, and arms control (Central nuclear war monograph series), (Hudson Institute)
A slightly optimistic world context for 1975-2000 (Hudson Institute. HI)
Social limits to growth: "creeping stagnation" vs. "natural and inevitable" (HPS paper)
A new kind of class struggle in the United States? (Corporate Environment Program. Research memorandum)
On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (Praeger) 1965
Thinking about the unthinkable (New York, Horizon Press) 1962.
On Thermonuclear War (Princeton University Press) 1960, ISBN 0-313-20060-2
Works published by the RAND Corporation:
The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence, RAND Corporation paper P-1888-RC, 1960
Some Specific Suggestions for Achieving Early Non-Military Defense Capabilities and Initiating Long-Range Programs, RAND Corporation research memorandum RM-2206-RC, 1958
(team led by Herman Kahn) Report on a Study of Non-Military Defense, RAND Corporation report R-322-RC, 1958
Herman Kahn and Irwin Mann, War Gaming, RAND Corporation paper P-1167, 1957
Herman Kahn and Irwin Mann, Ten Common Pitfalls, RAND research memorandum RM-1937-PR, 1957
Herman Kahn, Stochastic (Monte Carlo) attenuation analysis, Santa, Monica, Calif., Rand Corp., 1949
Further reading
Barry Bruce-Briggs, Supergenius: The mega-worlds of Herman Kahn, North American Policy Press
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-01714-5 [reviewed by Christopher Coker in the Times Literary Supplement], nº 5332, 10 June 2005, p. 19.
Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, Stanford Nuclear Age Series, ISBN 0-8047-1884-9
Kate Lenkowsky, The Herman Kahn Center of the Hudson Institute, Hudson Institute
Susan Lindee, "Science as Comic Metaphysics", Science 309: 383–4, 2005.
Herbert I. London, forward by Herman Kahn, Why Are They Lying to Our Children (Against the doomsayer futurists), ISBN 0-9673514-2-1
Louis Menand, " Fat Man: Herman Kahn and the Nuclear Age", The New Yorker, June 27, 2005.
Claus Pias, "Hermann Kahn – Szenarien für den Kalten Krieg", Zurich: Diaphanes 2009, ISBN 978-3-935300-90-2
External links
Annotated Bibliography for Herman Kahn from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
Essays about and by Herman Kahn
Kahn's "escalation ladder"
Article, "Herman Kahn's Doomsday Machine"
RAND Corporation unclassified papers by Herman Kahn, 1948-59
Hudson Institute unclassified articles and papers by Herman Kahn, 1962-84
Philanthropy, "The History of Kahnsciousness"
Category:1922 births
Category:1983 deaths
Category:American Jews
Category:California Institute of Technology alumni
Category:Futurologists
Category:People from Bayonne, New Jersey
Category:Political realists
Category:Systems scientists
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![The steamer Albany departs for New York City; at the height of steam travel in 1884, more than 1.5 million passengers took the trip.[41]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110511203120im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/e9/e7/ab02a133d7992c608aa8c9a2f2dd_thumb.jpg "The steamer Albany departs for New York City; at the height of steam travel in 1884, more than 1.5 million passengers took the trip.[41]")
![California Golden Beaver family on upper Los Gatos Creek. Although twentieth century naturalists were skeptical that beaver were historically extant in coastal streams or the Bay itself,[38] earlier records show that the California Golden beaver (Castor canadensis ssp](http://web.archive.org./web/20110511203120im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/87/41/8f1d1fc55ef4259d606c8d9d1965_thumb.jpg "California Golden Beaver family on upper Los Gatos Creek. Although twentieth century naturalists were skeptical that beaver were historically extant in coastal streams or the Bay itself,[38] earlier records show that the California Golden beaver (Castor canadensis ssp")
