Herman Kahn
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Herman Kahn (February 15, 1922 – July 7, 1983) was a military strategist and systems theorist employed at RAND Corporation, USA.
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[edit] Background
Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, Kahn grew up 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. Like many of his colleagues at RAND, he did have a 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 neutron bomb inventor. 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.
[edit] 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. During the mid-1950s, the 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--the preemptive strike.
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 reaching their peak after 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, groundbreaking 19th-century treatise on military strategy, On War, by famed German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz.
Kahn rested his theory upon two highly controversial premises. 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 bases 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:
- "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."
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 world-wide could be thereby effectively siphoned off without undue resort to the nuclear option.
[edit] The unthinkable
Due to his willingness to articulate the most brutal possibilities, Kahn came to be regarded by some as a monster, despite the fact that he was known as an amiable individual 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. Furthermore, 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.
Interestingly, 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.
[edit] Hudson Institute
In 1961 Kahn, along with 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. The organization challenged the pessimism of left-wing groups like the Club of Rome. The institute recruited luminaries such as sociologist Daniel Bell, the French political philosopher Raymond Aron and novelist Ralph Ellison, author of the 1952 classic, Invisible Man. 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."
[edit] Later years
With the easing of nuclear tensions during the detente 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 boundless potential for progress; the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future. In his last few years, Kahn moved further to the right, writing approvingly of Ronald Reagan's political agenda in The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social, and bluntly deriding 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, who had been severely overweight all his life, died of a massive stroke in 1983, at the age of 61.
[edit] Cultural influence
Kahn was reportedly one of the models for Dr. Strangelove from Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name, released in 1964 (other prominent influences were Edward Teller, Robert McNamara, and Wernher von Braun). It was said that Kubrick immersed himself in On Thermonuclear War and insisted that the film's producer also read it. Furthermore, 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, portrayed by Peter Sellers (who also portrayed United States President Merkin Muffley and British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake) 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 a nuclear crisis forces the President (played by Henry Fonda) to order the U.S. Air Force to bomb New York in order to avert an all-out nuclear war.
[edit] Bibliography
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
- 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 Thermonuclear War (Princeton University Press), ISBN 0-313-20060-2
- On Escalation (Princeton University Press)
[edit] References
- 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, page 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: 383-384, 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 online
