Herman Kahn

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Herman Kahn, 1965

Herman Kahn (born February 15, 1922 in Bayonne , New Jersey , † July 7, 1983 in Chappaqua , New York ) was an American nuclear strategist , cyberneticist and futurologist .

Early years

Kahn grew up in a Jewish family in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City . After his parents' divorce, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) majoring in physics . During World War II , he joined the United States Army and served as a telephone operator in Burma .

In 1945 he resumed his studies. He earned a bachelor's degree from UCLA and intended to do a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). However, due to financial difficulties, he had to finish his studies with a master’s degree and then tried his hand at real estate brokerage without much enthusiasm. He soon got a position at the RAND Corporation (Research And Development, literally "Research and Development"), the leading strategic think tank at the time .

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California, Kahn worked closely with physicists such as Edward Teller and Hans Bethe and mathematicians John von Neumann and Albert Wohlstetter on the development of the hydrogen bomb .

The Cold War

Kahn's most important scientific contributions were the theories he developed on the Cold War , in which he dared to consider “the unimaginable”. Above all, nuclear war was unimaginable . Kahn wanted to apply the so-called game theory to it. Until 1954, the predominant nuclear strategy of the US government under Eisenhower had consisted of a "massive counter-strike" ( massive retaliation ). a. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had endorsed it. According to this theory, known as the New Look , the new superpower USSR threatened Americans and their strategic interests all over the world. The potential battlefields were too numerous for the US to be able to effectively counter any Soviet attacks everywhere with conventional capabilities. Because of this disadvantage, the US had no choice. They had to make it known that their response to any Soviet aggression anywhere in the world would be a nuclear attack: a preemptive strike .

In the late 1950s, Cold War tensions grew. In 1957 the Soviet Union successfully launched its Sputnik . By thus triggered Sputnik shock many Americans panicked that her country Space Race ( Space Race could lose), and it has exercised great pressure on scientists to intensify their efforts. There was talk of a widening "missile gap" ( missile gap ) between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1959, Kahn published his book On Thermonuclear War (About Nuclear War ). The title was a clear allusion to the classic and groundbreaking treatise of the 19th century, Vom Kriege by the Prussian-German strategist Carl von Clausewitz . Kahn based his theory on two highly controversial premises: first, that a nuclear war is appropriate and feasible, and second, that it can be won. Even if hundreds of millions of people died or “only” several large cities were destroyed - life would go on, claimed Kahn.

Kahn believed that the US strategy was untenable, not because of pacifist ideals - which he personally did not share - but because the theory was primitive and possibly destabilizing. The New Look could induce the Soviets to initiate their smaller military activities (e.g. in Africa or South Asia) with a large air strike against the American bomber bases. Such a move would immediately remove the American nuclear threat and force the US to wage the undesirable conventional ground war for which Americans are not prepared.

With this view he met with strong criticism. But Kahn argued unwaveringly that it is not only hypocritical not to want to lead this discussion, but also harms the official standpoint in the Cold War. If the people are not ready to face the danger that a nuclear war brings with it and reject it in principle, the US threat scenario against the Soviet Union would be deprived of its credibility: the Russians could assume that the US is not ready To respond to an emergency (conventional) attack with a (nuclear) first strike . Then all military demonstrations of power are just a bluff that is transparent in game theory and therefore ineffective. In view of the enemy’s nuclear armament, the US would not only have to present its threat scenario in a credible manner, it would even have to expand it: the so-called second strike capacity , i.e. the possibility of being able to fight back and destroy the USSR even after a devastating nuclear attack, is indispensable. This was the basic idea of mutual assured destruction (MAD), in which both sides have the option of destroying the other even after a surprising first strike and thus making any attack seem completely pointless. However, the conventional armed forces should not be neglected. If minor conflicts arise, they should still be able to be fought in the traditional way without having to resort to nuclear weapons directly.

Thinking about the unimaginable

Interestingly, some pacifists such as Abraham J. Muste and Bertrand Russell admired and extolled Kahn's theories. They believed this made a strong case for total disarmament, implying that nuclear war was all but inevitable. Others heavily criticized Kahn, suggesting that the idea of ​​a victorious nuclear war would make it all the more likely.

Because he was not afraid to explain the cruelest possibilities, many critics regarded Kahn as a monster (in private life he was known as a lovable person). Kahn was ready to envision a world after nuclear war - unlike most other strategists. The usual objections didn't bother him. The fallout was for him as just one of many inconveniences and discomforts in life. Even the rise in birth defects would not doom humanity to extinction because any nuclear strike would not affect the majority of survivors. Contaminated food could be expressly designated for consumption by the elderly, because they would likely die anyway before the cancer caused by radioactivity broke out.

Even a minimum of modest preparations, such as the establishment of shelters against radioactive fallout or participation in evacuation simulation games and civil defense exercises - today viewed as symptomatic of the partly paranoid political tendencies of the 1950s - would spur the population on to reconstruction. Furthermore, a good civil defense program would be an additional deterrent because it would make the destructive effect more difficult for the forces on the other side and thus dampen the incentive to use nuclear weapons.

According to Kahn, it was worth accepting such considerations in order to save the entire European continent from the massive nuclear counter-blow that was likely before the MAD doctrine.

The Hudson Institute

In 1961, Kahn, Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen founded the Hudson Institute . It was a policy research organization in Croton-on-Hudson , New York State . These intellectuals specifically challenged the pessimism of leftist groups like the Club of Rome . The Hudson Institute invited luminaries such as the sociologist Daniel Bell , the French philosopher Raymond Aron and the writer Ralph Ellison , who wrote the groundbreaking novel The Invisible Man in 1952 . The strong and indignant dissenting voices hit Kahn and made him change his attitude, or at least his tone. Replies to his critics, as in his new book, Thinking About the Unthinkable ( think the unthinkable; 1962), fell less sharply than in the past. Three years later he published a new work on military strategy, On Escalation . From 1966 to 1968, Kahn served as an advisor to the US Department of Defense. He countered the increasing pressure from the population after direct negotiations with North Vietnam with the opinion that the only solution was a further military escalation. He justified this mainly with the fact that the war had started without a strategy for an orderly withdrawal ( exit strategy ) and with unexpectedly strong resistance. Together with Anthony J. Wiener , he published a bestseller on the long-term and speculative development of the international system in 1967, which appeared in Germany under the title "You will experience it. Scientific predictions up to the year 2000". This formulates the requirement for future research that it should create forecasts and show their dependence on current political measures in order to create the prerequisites for long-term and targeted political action.

Later years

After the relaxation between the superpowers at the beginning of the 1970s, Kahn continued to work on futurology, whose assumptions of a negative development he criticized. Kahn and the Hudson Institute were relatively right-wing politicians and tried to refute popular apocalyptic essays such as The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich , The Limits to Growth of the Club of Rome , or The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin . In Kahn's view, capitalism and technology offer unlimited possibilities for progress; he assumed the colonization of the universe was imminent. At the end of the decade, Kahn continued to move to the right politically. He wrote approvingly of Ronald Reagan's policies and mocked Jonathan Schell for claiming that the long-term consequences of nuclear war would destroy humanity. Kahn's book The Next 200 Years presented an optimistic picture of the economic situation in 2176. He also wrote several books on systems theory and the future of the American, Japanese, and Australian economies.

Kahn died of a stroke in 1983 .

"Dr. Strange"

Allegedly, Kahn was one of the role models for Dr. Strange in the film of the same name by director Stanley Kubrick (1964), together with Edward Teller , Henry Kissinger and Wernher von Braun . Kubrick had read Kahn's works extensively and insisted that the film's producer read them too. Kubrick met Kahn personally know, and Kahn gave Kubrick the idea for the "Doomsday Machine" ( doomsday , literally the Day of Judgment , here in the sense of doomsday ), an invention that would destroy the entire planet as a result of a nuclear attack immediately. In the film, the US President mentions a report written by the "BLAND Corporation" about the doomsday machine. Indeed, the doomsday machine was the epitome of the destabilizing tactic that Kahn himself wanted to avoid because its sole purpose was not military but only a threat or a bluff.

Kahn was also the model for Walter Matthaus role in the 1964 made film attack target Moscow (English original title Fail-Safe ).

Publications

  • On Thermonuclear War. Princeton University Press, 1960
  • On escalation. Praeger, New York 1965
    • Escalation. Politics with the spiral of extermination. Propylaea, Berlin 1966; Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin / Vienna 1970
  • with Anthony J. Wiener: The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. MacMillan, New York 1967, ISBN 0-02-560440-6
  • Model for 1980 . In: Claus Grossner , Hans Hermann Münchmeyer , Arend Oetker , Carl Christian von Weizsäcker (eds.) The 198th decade. A team forecast for 1970 to 1980 . Hamburg, Christian Wegner Verlag, 1969
  • The Emerging Japanese Superstate: Challenge and Response. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1970, ISBN 0-13-274670-0
    • Soon they will be the first. Japan 2000. Future model for the world's new masters. Molden, Vienna / Munich / Zurich 1970; Goldmann, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-442-02987-2
  • Things to Come: Thinking About the Seventies and Eighties. MacMillan, New York 1972, ISBN 0-02-560470-8
  • (Ed.): The future of the corporation. Mason & Lipscomb, New York 1974, ISBN 0-88405-009-2 .
    • The future of the company. Verlag Moderne Industrie, Munich 1974
  • The next 200 years: a scenario for America and the world. William Morrow, New York 1976, ISBN 0-688-03029-7
    • The good years ahead of us. A realistic model of our future. Molden, Vienna [a. a.] 1977, ISBN 3-217-00820-0
  • World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond. William Morrow, New York 1979, ISBN 0-688-03479-9 .
  • with Thomas Pepper: The Japanese challenge: The success and failure of economic success. William Morrow, New York 1980, ISBN 0-688-08710-8
  • with Thomas Pepper: Will She be Right? The Future of Australia. University of Queensland Press, 1981, ISBN 0-7022-1569-4
  • with Michael Redepenning: The future of Germany. Decline or new rise of the Federal Republic. Molden, Vienna [a. a.] 1982, ISBN 3-217-01244-5
  • The Coming Boom: Economic, Social and Political. Horizon, 1982, ISBN 0-671-44262-7
  • Thinking about the Unthinkable in the 1980s. Simon and Schuster, New York 1984, ISBN 0-671-47544-4
    • Thinking about nuclear war. Conflict scenarios with simulated situations in the service of the peace strategy. Scherz, Bern / Munich 1983, ISBN 3-502-16361-8 ; Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-548-34399-6

literature

  • Jerome Agel: Herman Kahnsciousness: The megaton ideas of the one-man think tank. New American Library, 1973
  • Barry Bruce-Briggs: Supergenius: The mega-worlds of Herman Kahn. North American Policy Press, New York 2000
  • Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi: The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Harvard University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-674-01714-5
  • Fred Kaplan: The Wizards of Armageddon. Simon and Schuster, New York 1983, ISBN 0-671-42444-0 ; Stanford University Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8047-1884-9
  • Kate Lenkowsky: The Herman Kahn Center of the Hudson Institute. Hudson Institute, Indianapolis 1991
  • Herbert I. London: Why Are They Lying to Our Children? Preface by Herman Kahn. Stein and Day, 1984, ISBN 0-8128-2937-9
  • Karl-Heinz Steinmüller: The man who thought the unthinkable. Herman Kahn and the Birth of Futurology from the Spirit of the Cold War. In: Kursbuch . No. 164, 2006, pp. 99-103.

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Kahn, Herman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cyberneticist
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Bayonne , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 1983
Place of death Chappaqua , New York