Herman Kahn


Herman Kahn Herman Kahn (1922-1983) was a military strategist and systems theorist employed at RAND Corporation, USA. Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, he devised several strategies for nuclear warfare during the Cold War using applications of game theory, and had earlier played a role in the development of the hydrogen bomb. The basis of his work was systems theory, applied to military strategy and economics. His books On Thermonuclear War (1961) and Thinking about the Unthinkable (1962) attracted a great deal of attention and criticism and brought to public attention such phrases as "massive retaliation," "overkill," and "mutual assured destruction." Then and now, discussions of nuclear war involved controversy as to whether there was any meaningful sense in which whether a large-scale nuclear war could be "won" or whether "the survivors would envy the dead." In Kahn's view, a war in which the U.S. sustained ten million deaths versus one in which it sustained a hundred million should be regarded as "tragic but distinguishable outcomes." Kahn also engaged with the question of the practical politics of a Doomsday Machine -- a computer attached to a cache of thermonuclear weapons which could automatically trigger in the event of a nuclear attack and purposely coat the planet in nuclear fallout. Building such a weapon would be, in Kahn's mind, impractical, dangerous, and foolish, but he used the idea as an analogy to the state of Europe at the time, where NATO troops, despite their conventional military appearance, were, in Kahn's formulation, a mere tripwire for an all-out nuclear war. Aside from the very dramatic works on nuclear strategy, he wrote several works on systems theory and futurism, including the well received work, "Techniques in System Theory," and a number of books extrapolating the future of the U.S., Japanese and Australian economies. In 1961 Kahn, along with Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen, founded the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization located in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The organization challenged the pessimism of left-wing groups like the Club of Rome. The 1976 book The Next 200 Years, written by Kahn with William Brown and Leon Martel, presented an optimistic scenario of economic conditions in the year 2176. He coined the term escalation in his book On Escalation and was reportedly a model for Dr. Strangelove from Stanley Kubricks film of the same name released in 1964. Walter Matthaus character in Fail-Safe was also based on Herman Kahn.

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