Nuclear Philosopher

HERMAN KAHN, SHARON GHAMARI-Tabrizi tells us, was “the only nuclear strategist who could have made a decent living as a stand-up comedian.” Not everyone was amused. When Kahn’s mammoth work, On Thermonuclear War, appeared in 1961, James R. Newman wrote in a notorious review in Scientific American: “Is there really a Herman Kahn? It is hard to believe. . . . No one could write like this. No one could think like this. . . . This is a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it.”

Newman was wrong on one count. There was a Herman Kahn–and, at some 300 pounds, a lot of him. (Kahn said his response to Newman’s doubts about his existence was to gain another ten pounds.) Kahn’s road to becoming one of a handful of the most influential nuclear strategists was roundabout. Born in New Jersey in 1922, he moved as a child to Los Angeles, where he studied nuclear physics at UCLA and Cal Tech. After serving in World War II, he signed on in 1947 at the newly created RAND Corporation, funded by the Air Force as the first modern think tank.

Virtually the entire argot of nuclear war (“second-strike capability,” “counterforce,” “balance of terror”) was either originated or refined by RAND’s star-studded line-up of civilian thinkers, including Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Andrew Marshall. (Marshall, a Kahn collaborator, would play a major role in Donald Rumsfeld’s 21st-century revamping of the U.S. military.) The RAND crew created modern “systems analysis,” the application of quantitative methods derived from economics to military problems, and pioneered the use of logical “game theory” and role-playing war games.

But Kahn’s initial job at RAND was as an assistant to physicists Edward Teller and Hans Bethe, who were working on the hydrogen bomb. Kahn was a genius and a polymath–in 1943, he earned the highest grade ever recorded on the Army’s intelligence test–but he came to realize he wasn’t in their league. So he turned his scientifically trained brain from nuclear physics to the mind-bending dilemmas and paradoxes of the new discipline of nuclear strategy.

Thermonuclear weapons had created a bizarre, unprecedented situation: In the event of a war, each superpower faced the threat of mutual annihilation. That made nuclear war “unthinkable.” But for nuclear deterrence to work, you in principle had to be willing to make good on your threat to retaliate. That meant you had to think about how to use nuclear weapons. And when you did that, things got complicated.

Kahn and the other RAND strategists were all driven by opposition to the Eisenhower administration’s strategy of “massive retaliation,” which raised the specter of an all-out nuclear strike against the Soviet enemy in the event of an attack on the United States, or any other significant provocation. Kahn thought this was crazy. (He told a group of Strategic Air Command officers, “In a real sense, you people don’t have war plans, you have wargasms.”) The most plausible scenario was not a Soviet “bolt from the blue,” but some sort of limited nuclear strike. And if the Soviets attacked Western Europe, a doomsday response by the United States just wasn’t credible. So he argued it made sense to have options for fighting a limited nuclear war–in particular, for “counterforce” strikes against military targets.

Nuclear war was not impossible. It would not necessarily be all-destructive. You had to think about it, and how to survive it. This was the core of Kahn’s message. It was “comforting” to believe a nuclear war would inevitably lead to mutual annihilation, because it relieved you of the burden of thinking.

On Thermonuclear War made Kahn an intellectual celebrity (“I am one of the ten most famous obscure Americans,” he quipped). He reached a wider audience in 1962 with a popularized version, Thinking About the Unthinkable. Kahn’s girth and good humor made for good copy. He was “a roly poly second-strike Santa Claus,” “a thermonuclear Zero Mostel” who was “as clearly fascinated by mega-calories as megatons.” But he’d already become celebrated in policy circles for his chatty, freewheeling, marathon three-day briefings for analysts and officers, which became the basis for On Thermonuclear War. Kahn’s ideas, as Ghamari-Tabrizi points out, were in the RAND mainstream. What set him apart was his style: “I can be funny on the subject of nuclear war,” he said.

In her, at times, artfully written study, Ghamari-Tabrizi evokes the intellectual climate at RAND and paints a vivid picture of Kahn in action. (“The chubby young man in eyeglasses, clutching a pointer, tottering at a lectern flanked by easels and charts, perspiring freely,” wandering in front of the projector, his enormous belly a screen for the tables and graphs.) Here is Kahn at one briefing, examining the paradox of having to appear willing to punish the Soviets for bad acts, but making sure they know your retaliation will be limited:

It’s well known that Kahn was a model for Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy. What’s not so well-known is that Kahn met with Kubrick and briefed him on his theories. The two got on well. Ghamari-Tabrizi makes a good case that Kubrick didn’t so much satirize Kahn as copy his shtick and spirit. “Dr. Strangelove’s grotesque derives from Kahn,” she finds. “They both believed that sick humor loosened public inhibitions.” Kubrick lifted lines out of On Thermonuclear War verbatim. (After a special screening, Kahn, who liked the film, teased, “Doesn’t that entitle me to a royalty?” Kubrick, not getting the joke, responded sternly, “It doesn’t work that way.”) The whole notion of the Doomsday Machine in the film came straight from Kahn’s book. Kahn’s point was that a machine that would automatically destroy the world if the United States were attacked was the “ideal” deterrent, if you really believed in massive retaliation.

Kahn’s assertion that nuclear war was survivable–and the brio with which he elaborated baroque scenarios–did the most to earn him his Strangelove reputation. In a chapter called “Will the Survivors Envy the Dead?” he gave a clear answer: No. With adequate preparations, a nuclear war “would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.” The tone is sometimes macabre–“Table 3: Tragic But Distinguishable Postwar States,” with casualties from two million on up–or arch: “One can almost hear the president saying . . . ‘How can I go to war–almost all American cities will be destroyed?’ And the answer ought to be, in essence, ‘That’s not entirely fatal, we’ve built some spares.'” Kahn pushes for a massive civil defense program. Factories could be built underground. New Yorkers could ride out an attack in caverns. Not unreasonably, Ghamari-Tabrizi joins the critics in finding his plans far-fetched.

But she also finds Kahn’s most strident critics guilty of slander. In the self-righteous ire aroused by the book, she sees much in common with the “decency crusades” that claimed young minds were harmed by comic books. On Thermonuclear War “churned up much the same energies.” Unfortunately, she doesn’t stop there. She gives us a whole mini-history of the crusade against “sick” comic books. It’s not her only attempt to lard on layers of social history and highfalutin literary criticism. Some of her offbeat approach works–Kahn does have something in common with Mort Sahl and “sick” comics like Lenny Bruce–but much of it has a tacked-on quality.

Ghamari-Tabrizi’s overall judgment of Kahn is still harsh. She admires his intellectual bravery, “but it was folly to downplay the scientific uncertainties that engulfed his prediction of post-war survival. And more than folly to sweep aside the morality of fighting a war with weapons that would vaporize millions of innocent people in a single campaign.”

This is unfair. Kahn, as she herself points out, was so willing to admit, in his words, the “chilling uncertainties,” that you sometimes wondered if his analysis meant anything at all. No policymaker, he said, could ever comfortably go to war based on his speculations. Kahn was a model of intellectual integrity because he always laid bare the gaps in his own analysis and the trade-offs of risks and benefits in his proposals. He didn’t “sweep aside” the moral questions; if there was a moral side, he felt he was on it. His overriding goal was to make nuclear war less likely, and to limit the human toll if one occurred.

An important point that goes unremarked is that Kahn, far from being gung-ho on nuclear war, was an early and persistent advocate of a “no-first-use” pledge by the United States. So when Ghamari-Tabrizi links Kahn to the Bush administration’s interest in a new category of tactical nuclear “bunker busters,” she is way off. Kahn had very limited faith in limited nuclear war; he wanted to do everything possible to avoid it. In fact, in On Thermonuclear War, he specifically argues against low-yield “battlefield” nuclear weapons because, even if they were militarily useful, he feared they would “blot out” the nuclear/non-nuclear dividing line. He wanted to make the nuclear taboo as sacrosanct as possible.

Ghamari-Tabrizi is more on the mark when she sees traces of Kahn’s “strategic futurology” in Donald Rumsfeld’s fear of “unknown unknowns.” But she frets that the terrorist threat, like the Soviet threat during the Cold War, “drives the impulse toward extravagant speculation.” Kahn did “speculate extravagantly,” but he always made clear that scenarios were not predictions, but aids to the imagination.

And Ghamari-Tabrizi never mentions 9/11, which provoked a national discussion about the failure to think about the unthinkable. One wonders what insights Kahn would have come up with if he hadn’t died suddenly in 1983 at the age of 61. “Is there a danger of bringing too much imagination to these problems? Do we risk losing ourselves in a maze of bizarre improbabilities?” Kahn asked in a 1963 paper.

The danger, he wrote, is a “lack of imagination, rather than an excess of it.”

Edmund Levin is a writer/producer for ABC News.