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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.
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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.
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 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.
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 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.
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". 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."
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 Institute 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:
With the easing of nuclear tensions during the détente 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.
Kahn was reportedly one of the models for Dr. Strangelove from the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick, 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.
Outside of physics and statistics, works written by Kahn include:
Works published by the RAND Corporation:
Кан, Герман
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