The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War - Hardcover

Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674017145 ISBN 13: 9780674017146

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2005

Synopsis

Herman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. Indeed, galumphing around stages across the country, joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario after another, he came frighteningly close. In telling the story of Herman Kahn, whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War catapulted him into celebrity, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi captures an era that is still very much with us--a time whose innocence, gruesome nuclear humor, and outrageous but deadly serious visions of annihilation have their echoes in the "known unknowns and unknown unknowns" that guide policymakers in our own embattled world.

Portraying a life that combined aspects of Lenny Bruce, Hitchcock, and Kubrick, Ghamari-Tabrizi presents not one Herman Kahn, but many--one who spoke the suffocatingly dry argot of the nuclear experts, another whose buffoonery conveyed the ingenious absurdity of it all, and countless others who capered before the public, ambiguous, baffling, always open to interpretation. This, then, is a story of one thoroughly strange and captivating man as well as a cultural history of our moment. In Herman Kahn's world is a critical lesson about how Cold War analysts learned to fill in the ciphers of strategic uncertainty, and thus how we as a nation learned to live with the peculiarly inventive quality of strategy, in which uncertainty generates extravagant threat scenarios.

Revealing the metaphysical behind the dryly deliberate, apparently practical discussion of nuclear strategy, this book depicts the creation of a world where clever men fashion Something out of Nothing--and establishes Herman Kahn as our first virtuoso of the unknown unknowns.

About this title

About the Author

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi is an independent scholar living in Florida.

Reviews

Starred Review. Herman Kahn is perhaps best known (to those who know of him at all) as the model for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. In fact, this physicist turned defense analyst achieved notoriety in the 1950s and '60s by articulating a vision of what a postnuclear-war world might look like, arguing that since it might be possible to survive a nuclear war, it was essential to plan to do just that. Ghamari-Tabrizi is superb at providing, in compelling narrative, the cultural context for Kahn, his work and some of his more outlandish statements. As Ghamari-Tabrizi describes him, Kahn, first at RAND and then at the Hudson Institute (the think tank he founded in 1961), dared to talk about all aspects of nuclear warfare and ways of keeping the nuclear peace, at a time when his approach to such topics was taboo. He was vilified for his beliefs and, as the author so capably demonstrates, he seemed to love every second of it. Ghamari-Tabrizi integrates popular culture, such as the parodies of Tom Lehrer, with the dramatic shift in military culture as civilian defense analysts and game theorists began to increase their influence at the Pentagon at the expense of the more traditional military personnel. Throughout, we are reminded how little the U.S. actually knew about what the Soviets were doing and thinking—and how "uncertainty becomes the wellspring of extravagant threat scenarios." Ghamari-Tabrizi provides a fascinating look at a complex man—at once "visionary" and "quixotic"—who was thinking, as the author says, about the unthinkable. 43 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)
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Herman Kahn (1922-83) was a cold war original whose notoriously sensational ideas, embodied in his On Thermonuclear War (1960), were later satirized in Dr. Strangelove. Though the inspiration for the movie's namesake character, the real Kahn could not have been less menacing. A rotund, joke--cracking extrovert, the loquacious Kahn reveled in prodding presumptions that nuclear war was too horrible to contemplate. The contrast between Kahn's joviality and his apologia for global genocide is one of the worlds of Kahn that Ghamari-Tabrizi surveys. Others are Kahn's think-tank society of civilian defense intellectuals and their simulations of warfare, and her consideration of Kahn's ruminations about waging and surviving nuclear war "as a style, a mood, and an aesthetic." If it seems strange to treat theories of nuclear warfare as an art form, the fantastical scenarios that Kahn batted around justify Ghamari-Tabrizi's approach. Her exploration of Kahn falls in line with the contemporary fad for demented comedy, and a Ghamari-Tabrizi unbounded by a political-science stricture will attract readership beyond the wonks. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674017145
• ISBN 13: 9780674017146
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432