In 1961, Amitai Etzioni said that Herman Kahn "does for nuclear arms what free-love advocates did for sex: he speaks candidly of acts about which others whisper behind closed doors." Kahn, one of the nuclear analysts whom the RAND Corporation paid to think about the unthinkable, did not just stand out from his cold-blooded brethren; he ballooned out from them. This "artless, sweaty man," wheezing and gulping down water, was almost cartoonishly fat, a rotund prophet giggling at the apocalypse. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi's suitably macabre The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Harvard Univ., $26.95, forthcoming in April) shows us both the clownish appearance and the deadly serious mind. "I can be funny on the subject of thermonuclear war," he once told a reporter.
Much of Kahn's fame and notoriety came from his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, which Ghamari-Tabrizi notes was "the first widely circulated study that dramatized how a nuclear war might begin, be fought, and be survived." Kahn wrote that prewar preparations could decisively shape a post-nuclear-war world. Like Thomas C. Schelling, Bernard Brodie and the rest of RAND's wizards of Armageddon, Kahn argued that the best way to deter a nuclear war was "to look willing" to fight one -- and that the easiest way to look willing to fight one was "to be willing" to fight one.
The reviews were uniformly passionate and decidedly mixed: The future Kennedy and Johnson aide Adam Yarmolinsky admitted that he and other Pentagon officials were living off Kahn's "intellectual capital," while Bertrand Russell raged that the book should shock British politicians into outright neutralism. "Is there really a Herman Kahn?" James Newman famously wrote in Scientific American. "It is hard to believe. Doubts cross one's mind from the first page of this deplorable book: no one could write like this; no one could think like this." Kahn joked that he had gained 10 more pounds to prove that he was real.
Kahn expected to see a world awash with some 50,000 missiles by the mid-1970s, and he found it hard to believe that "an occasional button will not get pressed. . . . We may just be going to live in a world in which every now and then a city or town is destroyed." Three decades later, in a world in which the Bush administration and Russia deem it acceptable to wait until some time beyond 2008 to finish securing the nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union from the grasping hands of al Qaeda, Kahn may seem monstrous, but he does not sound mad.
-- Warren Bass
