Herman Kahn


Herman Kahn 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. In his commentary for Fail Safe, director Sidney Lumet remarked that the Professor Groeteschele character is also based on Herman Kahn.
Kahn's theories contributed to the development of the nuclear strategy of the United States.

Early life and education

Kahn was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, as one of three sons to Yetta and Abraham Kahn, a tailor. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland. He was raised in the Bronx, then in Los Angeles following his parents' divorce in 1932. He grew up in poverty in Los Angeles and his mother depended upon social assistance to support her children.
Raised Jewish, he later identified as an atheist. Kahn graduated from Fairfax High School in 1940 and enlisted in the United States Army in May 1943, serving during the Burma campaign in World War II in a non-combat capacity as a telephone lineman. He did not see action in World War Two.
He received a Bachelor of Science at UCLA and briefly attended Caltech to pursue a doctorate before dropping out with a Master of Science due to financial constraints. He joined the RAND Corporation as a mathematician after being recruited by fellow physicist Samuel Cohen. He worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the development of the hydrogen bomb. His work was cut short when he was denounced by an anonymous informer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a communist. The anonymous denouncer in their unsigned letter to the FBI accused Kahn of being a member of a communist front organization, of having communist leanings and being a Soviet spy. As a result of the FBI investigation, Kahn lost his security clearance to work on the hydrogen bomb, which forced him to turn full time to the RAND corporation to support himself. Though the FBI concluded that the allegations were the work of a malicious co-worker who disliked Kahn, his security clearance was not restored. Kahn was a liberal who was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Americans for Democratic Action. During the Red Scare of the late 1940s-early 1950s, American liberals were often denounced by conservatives for being "soft on Communism", which led to a number of liberals taking an extremely aggressive anti-communist posture to rebut such charges. Kahn was one such example as he went out of his way to take extreme anti-communist positions as to counter such allegations.

Cold War theories

Kahn's major contributions were the several strategies he developed during the Cold War to contemplate "the unthinkable"namely, nuclear warfareby using applications of game theory. Kahn is often cited as a father of scenario planning. 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". Kahn was greatly in favor of civil defense, urging that the government build a network of underground shelters across the nation to ensure that as many Americans as possible could survive a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Kahn argued that the Soviet Union would be less likely to attack with nuclear weapons should such a network of bunkers exist, and should a Third World War break out, it could limit the American death toll from 30 million dead to 10 million dead. Kahn felt that it had to be shown that the United States was able and willing to fight a nuclear war as the best way of preventing war.
Unhappy at the way that the Eisenhower administration had rejected his plan for a civil defense programme for a nuclear war, Kahn took a leave of absence from the Rand Corporation in 1959 to go on a nation-wide lecture tour on the subject of civil defense. Unlike most of the intellectuals who served at the Rand Corporation who were known for their dull, dry style of speaking, Kahn was in the words of the American historian Alex Abella "a showman" whose charisma, charm, sense of humor and colorful speaking style made his lectures well attended. Kahn's style was to confront head-on the costs of a nuclear war as he declared in one of his lectures: "If 180 million dead is too high a price of punishing the Soviets for their aggression, what price would we be willing to pay?" However, Kahn's lectures sometimes had the opposite effect from that he intended as he spoke frankly about how a nuclear war would kill hundreds of millions of people, which had the effect of persuading people that nuclear weapons should be banned, which was not Kahn's intention. However, Kahn's use of humor, his charisma and his brutally honest talk about the costs of a nuclear war often won audiences over to his point of view. The fact that Kahn did not seek to downplay the costs of nuclear warfare or use euphemisms as so many others did at the time gave him a reputation for being authentic and honest.
About his use of morbid jokes in his lectures, Kahn stated: "I was trying to shake things up. I wasn't trying to shock, but I did state things provocatively and sometimes humorously". Some of his black humor was considered offensive as he argued that in the aftermath of a nuclear war would probably cause humans to mutate into something hideous, leading him to joke: "It is possible, isn't it, that parents will learn to love two-headed children twice as much?" Reflecting the fashionable theories of sexual psychoanalysis that sought to explain all human behavior as being sexually driven, Kahn joked in a lecture to a group of Air Force officers: "Gentlemen, you don't have a war plan, you have a war-gasm!" Kahn's tendency to joke about how a nuclear war would kill hundreds of millions of people along with the survivors mutating into something grotesque led to charges that he was callous about the value of human life. About the charge that he was cold and callous, Kahn responded that in his view emotions were a weakness for leaders contemplating the prospect of a nuclear war, and what the United States needed were leaders like himself who were cold and calculating about the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Kahn argued that a cold and calculating leader was more likely to make the correct decisions about the use of nuclear weapons than an emotional leader who would flinch at the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse, and accordingly make compromises that would damage the security interests of the United States. On the other extreme, there was always the possibility that the President would be excessively bellicose, aggressive and impulsive and likewise gratuitously start a nuclear war.
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:
Kahn was a poor writer and with the assistance of several ghostwriters turned his lectures into his known book, On Thermonuclear War, which was published in 1960. On Thermonuclear War angered several of his colleagues at the Rand Corporation, whom felt he plagiarized their ideas in his book. When Kahn presented a draft of On Thermonuclear War to Albert Wohlstetter for comments, the latter told Kahn: "There's only one thing to do with this, Herman. Burn it!" In On Thermonuclear War, Kahn put forward what came to be his "most notorious idea", the Doomsday Machine, a computer that would set off an enormous stock of hydrogen bombs that would end all life on Earth if there was a nuclear attack on the United States or if there was an attempt to deactivate it. He argued that no-one would attempt to attack the United States if it possessed the Doomsday Machine. However, he admitted that there was always the possibility that a few "coding errors" in the computer might accidentally set off the Doomsday Machine. Kahn had put forward the Doomsday Machine as a thought experiment intended to criticize the "massive retaliation" security doctrine of the Eisenhower administration that had been championed by the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In his thought experiment, Kahn explored a scenario where the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear strike against the United States with almost all of the Soviet missiles and bombers being shot down before hitting American cities with only five American cities being destroyed, which would nonetheless trigger the Doomsday Machine. The American film director Stanley Kubrick had read On Thermonuclear War and was in contact with Kahn in the early 1960s. The Doomsday Machine in Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove was based very closely on the Doomsday Machine in On Thermonuclear War with the only difference being that it was the Soviet Union rather than the United States that possessed the Doomsday Machine. Reflecting his interests in civil defense, the longest sections in On Thermonuclear War were devoted to how a civil defense program could ensure that the United States could survive a nuclear war. He called for spending some $200 billion in building a network of underground concrete bunkers along with converting mines into shelters and encouraging Americans to build their own shelters under their homes. He downplayed the problems of radioactive fallout, saying that people could survive by living in the shelters and that only a relatively small number would experience genetic mutations. Kahn argued that after World War Three, all food should be divided into grades labelled A, B, C, D and E based on their level of radioactivity. The highest quality A grade food with the least radioactivity would be provided only to children and pregnant women; the B grade food would be expensive food with some radioactivity would be available to anyone under the age of 50 who could afford it; the C grade food with a greater level of radioactivity would serve to keep the poor under the age of 50 alive; the D grade food with a higher level of radioactivity would be provided only to people over the age of 50 as Kahn wrote that "most of these people would die of other causes before they go cancer"; and the E grade food with the most radioactivity would be provided only to animals.
Critical reception to On Thermonuclear War was highly mixed, but the book was a bestseller, selling 14,000 copies in the first two months after publication. The most savage response to On Thermonuclear War was a review in The Scientific American by the American mathematician James R. Newman who called the book "a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with, how to justify it". The British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell offered a backhanded compliment in his ostensibly positive review of On Thermonuclear War, declaring that Kahn in his section of his book dealing with a post nuclear war world had vividly and conclusively proved why a nuclear war should never be fought. Likewise, the American Socialist Norman Thomas wrote in his review of On Thermonuclear War that: "Mr. Kahn deserves attention from of us who believe that universal disarmament is our sole valid hope for a decent existence of the human race".
In 1962, Kahn published a 16-step escalation ladder. By 1965 he had developed this into a 44-step ladder.
  1. Ostensible Crisis
  2. Political, Economic and Diplomatic Gestures
  3. Solemn and Formal Declarations
  4. Hardening of Positions – Confrontation of Wills
  5. Show of Force
  6. Significant Mobilization
  7. "Legal" Harassment – Retortions
  8. Harassing Acts of Violence
  9. Dramatic Military Confrontations
  10. Provocative Breaking off of Diplomatic Relations
  11. Super-Ready Status
  12. Large Conventional War
  13. Large Compound Escalation
  14. Declaration of Limited Conventional War
  15. Barely Nuclear War
  16. Nuclear "Ultimatums"
  17. Limited Evacuations
  18. Spectacular Show or Demonstration of Force
  19. "Justifiable" Counterforce Attack
  20. "Peaceful" World-Wide Embargo or Blockade
  21. Local Nuclear War – Exemplary
  22. Declaration of Limited Nuclear War
  23. Local Nuclear War – Military
  24. Unusual, Provocative and Significant Countermeasures
  25. Evacuation
  26. Demonstration Attack on Zone of Interior
  27. Exemplary Attack on Military
  28. Exemplary Attacks Against Property
  29. Exemplary Attacks on Population
  30. Complete Evacuation
  31. Reciprocal Reprisals
  32. Formal Declaration of "General" War
  33. Slow-Motion Counter-"Property" War
  34. Slow-Motion Counterforce War
  35. Constrained Force-Reduction Salvo
  36. Constrained Disarming Attack
  37. Counterforce-with-Avoidance Attack
  38. Unmodified Counterforce Attack
  39. Slow-Motion Countercity war
  40. Countervalue Salvo
  41. Augmented Disarming Attack
  42. Civilian Devastation Attack
  43. Controlled General War
  44. Spasm/Insensate War