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Herman Kahn Biography |
Herman Kahn born in Bayonne, New Jersey, 1922, died in 1983.
Herman Kahn was a military strategist employed at Rand Corporation, USA. He devised several strategies for nuclear warfare during the Cold War.
His books On Thermonuclear War (1961) and Thinking about the Unthinkable (1962) attracted a great deal of attention and criticism and brought to public attention such phrases as "massive retaliation," "overkill," and "mutual assured destruction." Then and now, discussions of nuclear war involved controversy as to whether there was any meaningful sense in which whether a large-scale nuclear war could be "won" or whether "the survivors would envy the dead." In Kahn's view, a war in which the U.S. sustained ten million deaths versus one in which it sustained a hundred million should be regarded as "tragic but distinguishable outcomes."
He coined the term escalation in his book On Escalation and was reportedly the model for Dr. Strangelove from Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name released in 1964. |
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| Herman Kahn Resources |
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