The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (review)

The author of this book, Dr. Tabrizi, earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness Program, described by the university as "an interdisciplinary program centered in the humanities with links to the social sciences, natural sciences and the arts." Reflecting this broad focus, she references philosophers, artists, Freudian analysis, and various elements of popular culture such as comic books, radio dramas by Arch Obler (for those old enough to remember him), and comedians like Mort Sahl and Lennie Bruce throughout the book to help make her points. The book is at once a critique of systems analysis and its use in determining national security policy, and an expression of deep concern about the impact of the kind of thinking exemplified at an extreme by Herman Kahn, in his On Thermonuclear War, but also by other civilian "strategists" at the RAND Corporation on military planning during the Cold War years—and, as she has noted elsewhere explicitly, on our own ("An Interview with Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi," April 2005, on her website: www.sharonghamari.com/ press.html). She implicitly rejects on both moral and logical grounds "worst casing," such as she sees the Air Force did in analyzing the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities and its intentions, and she quotes more recent statements by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to emphasize the fact that "unknown unknowns" figure heavily in such analyses. Hence, her concern that they helped shape the role nuclear weapons have played—and may currently play—in U.S. national security strategy. Kahn's career and the emergence of RAND, the pioneer civilian "think tank," provide the vehicle for conveying her views. Called into being by General Henry Arnold immediately following World War II, it was at RAND that Kahn developed his ideas that one must think seriously about thermonuclear war and plan for surviving its aftermath, which were finally codified in On Thermonuclear War. This book and his ubiquitous briefings in many venues, made some view him as a heroic thinker, willing to address a subject no one else dared to, and others to find him repellent, a man fascinated by fantasy worlds with no concern for morality, who was all the more reprehensible for interjecting humor into a subject of utter horror. The author herself seems to view Kahn with a mixture of admiration and exasperation (a mix apparently felt by many who tried to pin him down on particular points during his briefings!), calling him in several places "a grotesque." The U.S. Air Force objected to Kahn's emphasis on civil defense as a tool for postwar recovery, since this would divert resources from its offensive programs. Clearly, the author views systems analysis and the pretensions of the "simulationists," whose gaming techniques tended to become ubiquitous in government agencies and which she discusses at some length, with great skepticism. Ultimately, the new civilian strategists, chafing under constraints imposed by RAND in order to keep its patron, the U.S. Air Force, content, left RAND seeking positions where they could have more influence. The advent of Robert MacNamara as Secretary of Defense afforded opportunities in government for many, including Charles Hitch, Alan Enthoven, and Andrew Marshall. Presumably with some irony, the author quotes Enthoven's arrogant complaint explaining why he and other RAND strategists left: "We were doing very important studies on very important matters, on which we had conclusions that really should be listened to and acted on and were being received politely and filed away. I became . . . fed up." Although by no means Kahn's biographer, Tabrizi does provide interesting information on his background, including his life-long friendship with Sam Cohen, "father of...