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Herman Kahn (1922–1983)

Författare till On Thermonuclear War

26+ verk 621 medlemmar 5 recensioner

Om författaren

Herman Kahn (1922-1983) was a renowned political scientist, economist, historian, geostrategist, and considered by many to be the founder of futurology as a serious field of study. Associated for many years with the RAND Corporation, he was the founding director of the first independent "think visa mer tank," the Hudson Institute. Among his many books are Thinking About the Unthinkable, The Year 2000, The Next 200 Years, The Coming Boom, The Resourceful Earth, and On Thermonuclear War. Thomas C. Schelling is Distinguished University Professor at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland. In addition to being the 2005 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics, he is the author of numerous works, including Choice and Consequence, The Strategy of Conflict, and Micromotives and Macrobehavior. visa färre
Foto taget av: Herman Kahn (1922-1983) Photographed by Thomas J. O'Halloran, May 11, 1965. (U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Verk av Herman Kahn

On Thermonuclear War (1618) 153 exemplar
Tankar om det otänkbara (1962) 41 exemplar
Can we win in Vietnam? (1968) — Författare — 4 exemplar

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The Futurists (1972) — Bidragsgivare — 69 exemplar

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Kahn's seminal 1960 work on nuclear strategy. This is a dense and weighty book that examines its subject in great detail. Kahn is remembered for his assertions that a nuclear war would mean neither the end of civilization nor of humanity, that even a modest civil defense program could make a substantial difference in the time that a first-world nation needed to recover from such a war, and that a nuclear war was therefore "winnable," at least as of the 1960's, and in the sense of one combatant emerging less damaged than the other. He has sometimes been reviled as a warmonger for his unsentimental appraisal of the prospect of the deaths of millions - but what I took from his arguments early in this book is that he simply felt that when formulating policy regarding a war on such a scale, it would be irresponsible to be less than completely honest and completely objective. Thus, he argued for quantitative rather than emotional assessments, and had little use for analyses that were driven by a need to justify pre-conceived notions.

Beyond these ideas, he also develops a kind of taxonomy of the different kinds of deterrence, and elaborates the implications of each at great length. One can recognize the approaches to deterrence by the various different modern nuclear states quite easily in Kahn's treatment of the subject.

Kahn did recognize that, with more powerful thermonuclear devices, more sophisticated delivery systems, and more nuclear-capable nations being likely, the world would become a much more dangerous place in the decades after the 1960's. It would be fascinating to see what he would make of the current nuclear landscape. He does not, for example, address the concept of nuclear winter, which did not become a major subject of inquiry until the early 1980's. Given that even today one can find papers asserting that the dangers of nuclear winter are overstated and other papers predicting that even a relatively modest nuclear war would ultimately lead to the deaths of 90 percent of the human race, a Kahn-style examination of the risks would be highly instructive.
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Ailurophile | Mar 6, 2022 |
Herman Kahn discusses the way in which a nuclear war could come about. It is chilling, and seems very rational, but with little about the prediction of a post-war landscape, or habitability.
 
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DinadansFriend | Jul 10, 2019 |
This was essentially a methodology paper stretched out to 500 pages. Some of their predicted technologies, if rolled up into "a smart phone with wifi access," are surprisingly prescient. Other technologies, especially in medicine, are way off. Politically, their scenarios completely miss the fall of communism and the rise of religious fundamentalism. Their GNP predictions are interesting to look at. If I'm converting from 1965 dollars correctly, the US is at the lower end of their predictions.

Perhaps most depressingly, they predicted an average 27-hour work week (or full time with 4 months of vacation) for Americans by 2000. Here it is, 2015, and if anything work hours are increased for many.… (mer)
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encephalical | 1 annan recension | Aug 31, 2015 |
I read this back the 1980's and loved the analysis techniques and tools presented for projecting possible futures. It is very entertaining to read now regarding missed predictions and projections that never happened. You could almost read it's alternate-history content.
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stevetempo | 1 annan recension | Aug 11, 2008 |

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Verk
26
Även av
1
Medlemmar
621
Popularitet
#40,536
Betyg
3.0
Recensioner
5
ISBN
59
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5

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