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

When Herman Kahn published On Thermonuclear War in 1960, he shocked readers by thinking the unthinkable, that is, by visualizing the effects of various levels of preparedness and civil defense on the rates of survival in the event of a devastating thermonuclear attack on the United States. As he did so, however, Kahn cloaked his futurological scenarios in a strange mix of mathematical calculation, gallows humor, and a tendency to ignore some of the hideous consequences of thermonuclear war for society. Kahn's approach infuriated critics, and his emphasis on the utility and value of civil defense angered the Air Force sponsors of RAND, where he was employed. On Thermonuclear War or "OTW," as it came to be called, was published outside of RAND sponsorship by Princeton University Press.

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi explores the ideas and style of Kahn by situating him within the various cultural worlds in which he lived. He was an obese, fast-talking, casual-dressing Southern Californian. He was a Jew and a brilliant and compelling presenter of briefings with some of the characteristics of a stand-up comic. His mannerisms and presentation methods amused and bemused his audiences, sometimes offending them, sometimes giving them insights they found disturbing. Kahn was one of a cluster of thinkers at RAND (and later at the Hudson Institute, which he founded) whose skills and academic backgrounds drew on computers, systems analysis, economics, and the application of those and related disciplines to the problems of thinking about the conduct of thermonuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s. Kahn also lived in a broader political/cultural world that underwent a transition from the 1950s, which Ghamari-Tabrizi characterizes as a decade of fear and denial, to the 1960s, which she presents as the age of the sick joke. Increasingly in the 1960s, she demonstrates, new varieties of humor in the popular culture provided antidotes to nuclear anxieties. The diplomatic, military, and weapons-technology events of the Cold War are presented almost as an afterthought, providing a sort of backdrop or stage setting for the worlds in which Kahn moved.

The author explores these worlds in a style that is perhaps appropriate to the topic but that some readers may find surprising and unconventional. The work proceeds in a sort of nonlinear spiral outward from Kahn and his personality to the other worlds in which he lived, then returns again to his major book OTW and the storm of controversy that surrounded its reception.

The cultural commentary method Ghamari-Tabrizi employs takes the reader in unexpected directions. For example, instead of analytically differentiating between the methods of viewing future scenarios at RAND, including war-gaming and computer simulation using Monte Carlo random numbers, she presents these technical systems in terms of their underlying aesthetic. She shows how Kahn and his associates built their own vision of a postapocalyptic world with artful intuition, in which the appearance of numerical calculations gave a semblance of certainty to what some regarded as little more than science-fiction speculation.

Kahn's conclusions in OTW—that American planners should do everything possible to mitigate the effects of thermonuclear war through planning and preparation—drove his critics to distraction. Many believed that by such planning, the nation would begin to accept the feasibility of such war and, as a result, make it more likely to happen. Kahn's most hostile critics found his calculations of death rates obscene, and some publishers of reviews refused to allow Kahn a chance to rebut their ad hominem outbursts with even a short summary of his logic. For some, Kahn was the archetype of Dr. Strangelove. Ghamari-Tabrizi seems disposed to share some of the critics' hostility to Kahn's planning and his calculations of mortality rates, but overcoming that predisposition, she plunges deeper to discover in Kahn a kind of comic philosophy. That essentially comic outlook, she explains, can lead to...