Herman Kahn
Encyclopedia
Herman Kahn 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
.
, 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
.
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 superficially resembles the much older doctrine of MAD
, or "Mutual Assured Destruction", but Kahn was actually a vocal critic of that doctrine, which was due to John von Neumann
. 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.
, for example, would simply be another one of life's many unpleasantnesses 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 homeowners 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.
, 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
". Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute advised against starting a counterinsurgency war in Vietnam, but once it was going, they were of course willing to give advice on how to wage it. He said in an interview that he and the Hudson Institute preferred not to give advice to e.g. the Secretary of Defense, because disagreement at such a high level was regarded as treason, whereas disagreement with, say, the deputy undersecretary was regarded as only technical. Their criticism of the US plan seems almost prophetic now. The US brought in British advisers having experience from their successful counterinsurgency war in Malaya and constructed a plan with their help. But Kahn and the Institute judged that Vietnam was different from Malaya because the British had an effective rural constabulary in Malaya. They did a study of the major counterinsurgency wars in recent history and found a 100% correlation between successful wars and effective police forces. Kahn said "the purpose of an army is to protect your police force. We had an army in Vietnam without a purpose."
and an introduction by Daniel Bell
. Table XVIII contains a list called "One Hundred Technical Innovations Very Likely in the Last Third of the Twentieth Century." This list makes interesting reading today.
The first ten predictions were:
The remaining ninety predictions included:
years of the 1970s, Kahn continued his work on futurism, with 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 year of life (1983), 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.
, released in 1964 (other prominent influences were John von Neumann
, 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 The Politics of Ecstasy, Timothy Leary suggests that Herman Kahn had taken LSD.
Futurists
Futurists or futurologists are scientists and social scientists whose speciality is to attempt to systematically predict the future, whether that of human society in particular or of life on earth in general....
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
Hudson Institute
The Hudson Institute is an American think tank founded in 1961, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation...
think tank
Think tank
A think tank is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax...
and originally came to prominence as a military strategist
Military strategy
Military strategy is a set of ideas implemented by military organizations to pursue desired strategic goals. Derived from the Greek strategos, strategy when it appeared in use during the 18th century, was seen in its narrow sense as the "art of the general", 'the art of arrangement' of troops...
and systems theorist while employed at RAND Corporation
RAND
RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations including the healthcare industry, universities...
, 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
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
Background
Born in Bayonne, New JerseyBayonne, New Jersey
Bayonne is a city in Hudson County, New Jersey, United States. Located in the Gateway Region, Bayonne is a peninsula that is situated between Newark Bay to the west, the Kill van Kull to the south, and New York Bay to the east...
, Kahn grew up in a Jewish family in the Bronx, then in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
following his parents' divorce. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
(UCLA), majoring in physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
. During World War II he was stationed by the Army as a telephone linesman in Burma. Thus, like many of his colleagues at RAND
RAND
RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations including the healthcare industry, universities...
in the 1950s, he had little personal experience of warfare. After World War II, he finished his B.S.
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
at UCLA and embarked on a Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
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
RAND
RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations including the healthcare industry, universities...
by his friend Samuel Cohen
Samuel Cohen
Samuel Theodore Cohen was an American physicist who invented the W70 warhead, more popularly known as the neutron bomb.-Biography:...
, the inventor of the neutron bomb
Neutron bomb
A neutron bomb or enhanced radiation weapon or weapon of reinforced radiation is a type of thermonuclear weapon designed specifically to release a large portion of its energy as energetic neutron radiation rather than explosive energy...
. 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
Edward Teller
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," even though he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics...
, John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
, Hans Bethe
Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and...
, and mathematician Albert Wohlstetter
Albert Wohlstetter
Albert Wohlstetter was an influential and controversial nuclear strategist during the Cold War. He was major intellectual force behind efforts to deter nuclear war and avoid the further spread of nuclear weapons to more nations...
.
Cold War theories
Kahn's major contributions were the several strategies he developed during the Cold WarCold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
to contemplate "the unthinkable", namely, nuclear warfare
Nuclear warfare
Nuclear warfare, or atomic warfare, is a military conflict or political strategy in which nuclear weaponry is detonated on an opponent. Compared to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can be vastly more destructive in range and extent of damage...
, by using applications of game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...
. (Most notably, Kahn is often cited as the father of scenario planning
Scenario planning
Scenario planning, also called scenario thinking or scenario analysis, is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. It is in large part an adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by military intelligence.The original method was that a...
.) During the mid-1950s, the Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army...
administration's prevailing nuclear strategy had been one of "massive retaliation", enunciated by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
John Foster Dulles
John Foster Dulles served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. He was a significant figure in the early Cold War era, advocating an aggressive stance against communism throughout the world...
. According to this theory, dubbed the "New Look
New Look (policy)
The New Look was the name given to the national security policy of the United States during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower...
", 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
Sputnik crisis
The Sputnik crisis is the name for the American reaction to the success of the Sputnik program. It was a key event during the Cold War that began on October 4, 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite....
and amidst talk of a widening "missile gap
Missile gap
The missile gap was the term used in the United States for the perceived disparity between the number and power of the weapons in the U.S.S.R. and U.S. ballistic missile arsenals during the Cold War. The gap only existed in exaggerated estimates made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and United...
" between the U.S. and the Soviets, Kahn published On Thermonuclear War
On Thermonuclear War
On Thermonuclear War is a book by Herman Kahn, a military strategist at the RAND Corporation, although it was written only a year before he left RAND to form the Hudson Institute. It is a controversial treatise on the nature and theory of war in the thermonuclear age...
, the title of which clearly alluded to the classic 19th-century treatise on military strategy, On War
On War
Vom Kriege is a book on war and military strategy by Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz , written mostly after the Napoleonic wars, between 1816 and 1830, and published posthumously by his wife in 1832. It has been translated into English several times as On War...
, by German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz
Carl von Clausewitz
Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz was a Prussian soldier and German military theorist who stressed the moral and political aspects of war...
.
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
Systems theory
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...
and game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...
as applied to military strategy
Strategy
Strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. In military usage strategy is distinct from tactics, which are concerned with the conduct of an engagement, while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked...
and economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
. 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
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
that even a perfectly-coordinated, massive attack would guarantee a measure of retaliation that would leave them devastated as well:
This reasoning superficially resembles the much older doctrine of MAD
Mutual assured destruction
Mutual Assured Destruction, or mutually assured destruction , is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of high-yield weapons of mass destruction by two opposing sides would effectively result in the complete, utter and irrevocable annihilation of...
, or "Mutual Assured Destruction", but Kahn was actually a vocal critic of that doctrine, which was due to John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
. 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. FalloutNuclear fallout
Fallout is the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast, so called because it "falls out" of the sky after the explosion and shock wave have passed. It commonly refers to the radioactive dust and ash created when a nuclear weapon explodes...
, for example, would simply be another one of life's many unpleasantnesses 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
Civil defense
Civil defense, civil defence or civil protection is an effort to protect the citizens of a state from military attack. It uses the principles of emergency operations: prevention, mitigation, preparation, response, or emergency evacuation, and recovery...
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 homeowners 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
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
, 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 InstituteHudson Institute
The Hudson Institute is an American think tank founded in 1961, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation...
, a policy research organization then located in Croton-on-Hudson, New York
Croton-on-Hudson, New York
Croton-on-Hudson is a village in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 8,070 at the 2010 census. It is located in the town of Cortlandt, in New York City's northern suburbs...
which was also where Kahn was living at the time. Luminaries such as sociologist Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor emeritus at Harvard University, best known for his seminal contributions to the study of post-industrialism...
, the French political philosopher Raymond Aron
Raymond Aron
Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, journalist and political scientist.He is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people -- in contrast, Aron argued that in...
and novelist Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953...
, author of the 1952 classic Invisible Man
Invisible Man
Invisible Man is a novel written by Ralph Ellison, and the only one that he published during his lifetime . It won him the National Book Award in 1953...
, 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
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, Kahn served as a consultant to the Department of Defense
United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...
and opposed the growing pressure to negotiate directly with North Vietnam
North Vietnam
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam , was a communist state that ruled the northern half of Vietnam from 1954 until 1976 following the Geneva Conference and laid claim to all of Vietnam from 1945 to 1954 during the First Indochina War, during which they controlled pockets of territory throughout...
, arguing that the only military solution was sharp escalation. Failing that, he said, the U.S. government had to have an exit strategy
Exit strategy
An exit strategy is a means of leaving one's current situation, either after a predetermined objective has been achieved, or as a strategy to mitigate failure. An organisation or individual without an exit strategy may be in a quagmire...
, and Kahn claimed credit for introducing the term "Vietnamization
Vietnamization
Vietnamization was a policy of the Richard M. Nixon administration during the Vietnam War, as a result of the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive, to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnam's forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S....
". Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute advised against starting a counterinsurgency war in Vietnam, but once it was going, they were of course willing to give advice on how to wage it. He said in an interview that he and the Hudson Institute preferred not to give advice to e.g. the Secretary of Defense, because disagreement at such a high level was regarded as treason, whereas disagreement with, say, the deputy undersecretary was regarded as only technical. Their criticism of the US plan seems almost prophetic now. The US brought in British advisers having experience from their successful counterinsurgency war in Malaya and constructed a plan with their help. But Kahn and the Institute judged that Vietnam was different from Malaya because the British had an effective rural constabulary in Malaya. They did a study of the major counterinsurgency wars in recent history and found a 100% correlation between successful wars and effective police forces. Kahn said "the purpose of an army is to protect your police force. We had an army in Vietnam without a purpose."
The Year 2000
In 1961 Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener published The Year 2000, A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years with contributions from other staff members of the Hudson InstituteHudson Institute
The Hudson Institute is an American think tank founded in 1961, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation...
and an introduction by Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor emeritus at Harvard University, best known for his seminal contributions to the study of post-industrialism...
. Table XVIII contains a list called "One Hundred Technical Innovations Very Likely in the Last Third of the Twentieth Century." This list makes interesting reading today.
The first ten predictions were:
- 1. Multiple applications of lasers.
- 2. Extreme high-strength structural materials.
- 3. New or improved superperformance fabrics.
- 4. New or improved materials for equipment and appliances.
- 5. New airborne vehicles (ground-effect vehicles, giant or supersonic jets, VTOL, STOL.)
- 6. Extensive commercial applications of shaped-charge explosives.
- 7. More reliable and longer-range weather forecasting.
- 8. Extensive and/or intensive expansion of tropical agriculture and forestry.
- 9. New sources of power for fixed installations.
- 10. New sources of power for ground transportation.
The remaining ninety predictions included:
- 26. Widespread use of nuclear reactors for power.
- 38. New techniques for cheap and reliable birth control.
- 41. Improved capability to change sex of children and/or adults.
- 57. Automated universal (real time) credit, audit and banking systems.
- 67. Commercial extraction of oil from shale.
- 74. Pervasive business use of computers.
- 81. Personal pagers (perhaps even pocket phones.)
- 84. Home computers to "run" households and communicate with the outside world.
Later years
With the easing of nuclear tensions during the détenteDétente
Détente is the easing of strained relations, especially in a political situation. The term is often used in reference to the general easing of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s, a thawing at a period roughly in the middle of the Cold War...
years of the 1970s, Kahn continued his work on futurism, with speculations about a potential Armageddon
Armageddon
Armageddon is, according to the Bible, the site of a battle during the end times, variously interpreted as either a literal or symbolic location...
. The Hudson Institute sought to refute popular apocalyptic essays such as Paul Ehrlich's
Paul R. Ehrlich
Paul Ralph Ehrlich is an American biologist and educator who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology. By training he is an entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera , but...
"The Population Bomb
The Population Bomb
The Population Bomb was a best-selling book written by Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich , in 1968. It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth...
" (1968), Garrett Hardin
Garrett Hardin
Garrett James Hardin was an American ecologist who warned of the dangers of overpopulation and whose concept of the tragedy of the commons brought attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment"...
's similarly reasoned "The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the same year, and the Club of Rome
Club of Rome
The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. Founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy, the CoR describes itself as "a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity." It consists of current and...
's "Limits to Growth
Limits to Growth
The Limits to Growth is a 1972 book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, commissioned by the Club of Rome. Its authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The book used the World3 model to...
" (1972). In Kahn's view, capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
and technology held nearly boundless potential for progress; the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future. In his last year of life (1983), Kahn wrote approvingly of Ronald Reagan's
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
political agenda in The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social, and bluntly derided Jonathan Schell's
Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Edward Schell is an author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose work primarily deals with nuclear weapons.-Career:His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch...
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
Stroke
A stroke, previously known medically as a cerebrovascular accident , is the rapidly developing loss of brain function due to disturbance in the blood supply to the brain. This can be due to ischemia caused by blockage , or a hemorrhage...
in 1983, at the age of 61.
Cultural influence
Kahn was reportedly one of the models for Dr. Strangelove from the eponymous film by Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
, released in 1964 (other prominent influences were John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
, Edward Teller
Edward Teller
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," even though he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics...
, Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara
Robert Strange McNamara was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, during which time he played a large role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War...
, and Wernher von Braun
Wernher von Braun
Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun was a German rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect, and one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany during World War II and in the United States after that.A former member of the Nazi party,...
). 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
Walter Matthau
Walter Matthau was an American actor best known for his role as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple and his frequent collaborations with Odd Couple star Jack Lemmon, as well as his role as Coach Buttermaker in the 1976 comedy The Bad News Bears...
's maverick character Professor Groteschele in Fail-Safe
Fail-Safe (1964 film)
Fail-Safe is a 1964 film directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. It tells the story of a fictional Cold War nuclear crisis...
, in which the U.S. President (played by Henry Fonda
Henry Fonda
Henry Jaynes Fonda was an American film and stage actor.Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins...
) tries to prevent a nuclear holocaust when a mechanical malfunction sends nuclear weapons heading toward Moscow.
In the The Politics of Ecstasy, Timothy Leary suggests that Herman Kahn had taken LSD.
Further reading
- Barry Bruce-BriggsBarry Bruce-BriggsBarry Bruce-Briggs is a writer on American public policy, who has been affiliated to the Hudson Institute.-Author or coauthor of the following books:*ISBN 0-02-560470-8, Things to Come: Thinking About the Seventies and Eighties...
, 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"
- Andrew Yale Glikman: "Herman Kahn's Doomsday Machine" In: CYB + ORG = (COLD) WAR MACHINE, FrAme, 26/Sep/1999, Online
- 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"