Herman Kahn (February 15, 1922 – July 7, 1983) was an American physicist and a founding member of the Hudson Institute, regarded as one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation. He analyzed the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommended ways to improve survivability during the Cold War. Kahn posited the idea of a "winnable" nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War for which he was one of the historical inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire Dr. Strangelove.[1] In his commentary for Fail Safe, director Sidney Lumet remarked that the Professor Groeteschele character is also based on Herman Kahn.[2]
Kahn's theories contributed to the development of the nuclear strategy of the United States.
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. Kahn is often cited (with Pierre Wack) as a father of scenario planning.[9]
Kahn argued for deterrence and believed that if the Soviet Union believed that the United States had a second strike capability then it would offer greater deterrence, which he wrote in his paper titled "The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence".[10]
The bases of his work were systems theory and game theory as applied to economics and military strategy. Kahn argued that for deterrence to succeed, the Soviet Union had to be convinced that the United States had second-strike capability in order to leave the Politburo in no doubt that even a perfectly coordinated massive attack would guarantee a measure of retaliation that would leave them devastated as well:
At the minimum, an adequate deterrent for the United States must provide an objective basis for a Soviet calculation that would persuade them that, no matter how skillful or ingenious they were, an attack on the United States would lead to a very high risk if not certainty of large-scale destruction to Soviet civil society and military forces.[11]
In 1962, Kahn published a 16-step escalation ladder. By 1965 he had developed this into a 44-step ladder.[12]
Ostensible Crisis
Political, Economic and Diplomatic Gestures
Solemn and Formal Declarations
Hardening of Positions – Confrontation of Wills
Show of Force
Significant Mobilization
"Legal" Harassment – Retortions
Harassing Acts of Violence
Dramatic Military Confrontations
Provocative Breaking off of Diplomatic Relations
Super-Ready Status
Large Conventional War (or Actions)
Large Compound Escalation
Declaration of Limited Conventional War
Barely Nuclear War
Nuclear "Ultimatums"
Limited Evacuations (20%)
Spectacular Show or Demonstration of Force
"Justifiable" Counterforce Attack
"Peaceful" World-Wide Embargo or Blockade
Local Nuclear War – Exemplary
Declaration of Limited Nuclear War
Local Nuclear War – Military
Unusual, Provocative and Significant Countermeasures
In 1967, Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener published The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, which included contributions from staff members of the Hudson Institute and an introduction by Daniel Bell. Table XVIII in the document[14] contains a list called "One Hundred Technical Innovations Very Likely in the Last Third of the Twentieth Century". The first ten predictions were:
Multiple applications of lasers
Extreme high-strength structural materials
New or improved superperformance fabrics
New or improved materials for equipment and appliances
In Kahn's view, capitalism and technology held nearly boundless potential for progress, while the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future.[15] 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 a number of books extrapolating the future of the American, Japanese and Australian economies and several works on systems theory, including the well-received 1957 monograph Techniques of System Analysis.[16]
In 1970, Kahn published the book The Emerging Japanese Superstate in which he claimed that Japan would play a large role in the world equal to the Soviet Union and the United States.[17] In the book, he claimed that Japan would pursue obtaining nuclear weapons and that it would pass the United States in per-capita income by 1990, and likely equal it in gross national product by 2000.[17] During the mid-1970s, when South Korea's GDP per capita was one of the lowest in the world, Kahn predicted that the country would become one of the top 10 most powerful countries in the world by the year 2000.[18]
In his last year, 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. On July 7 that year, he died of a stroke, aged 61.[19]
Along with John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun, Kahn was an inspiration for the character "Dr. Strangelove" in the eponymous filmbyStanley Kubrick released in 1964.[1][failed verification] After Kubrick read Kahn's book On Thermonuclear War, he began a correspondence with him which led to face-to-face discussions between Kubrick and Kahn.[20] In the film, Dr. Strangelove refers to a report on the Doomsday Machine by the "BLAND Corporation". Kahn gave Kubrick the idea for the "Doomsday Machine", a device which would immediately cause the destruction of the entire planet in the event of a nuclear attack. Both the name and the concept of the weapon are drawn from the text of On Thermonuclear War.[21] Louis Menand observes, "In Kahn’s book, the Doomsday Machine is an example of the sort of deterrent that appeals to the military mind but that is dangerously destabilizing. Since nations are not suicidal, its only use is to threaten."[21]
^McWhirter, William A. (December 6, 1968). "The Think-Tank Man". Life. Vol. 65, no. 23. pp. 110–126. Herman Kahn is an atheist who still likes rabbis, and a liberal who likes cops.
Kate Lenkowsky, The Herman Kahn Center of the Hudson Institute, Hudson Institute
Susan Lindee, Science as Comic Metaphysics, Science 309: 383–384, 2005.
Herbert I. London, foreword by Herman Kahn, Why Are They Lying to Our Children (Against the doomsayer futurists), ISBN0-9673514-2-1
Louis Menand, Fat Man: Herman Kahn and the Nuclear Age, in The New Yorker, June 27, 2005.
Claus Pias, "Hermann Kahn – Szenarien für den Kalten Krieg", Zurich: Diaphanes 2009, ISBN978-3-935300-90-2
Innes Thacker, Ideological Control and the Depoliticisation of Language, in Bold, Christine (ed.), Cencrastus No. 2, Spring 1980, pp. 30–33, ISSN0264-0856
