by Paul Aligica

Herman Kahn was a giant. He boldly confronted public issues with creativity and the conviction, in his case correct, that thought and analysis could help make ours a better world.

—Donald Rumsfeld

On July 7, 1983, when Herman Kahn died suddenly at age sixty-one, both friends and intellectual adversaries recognized he was among the world’s most creative minds. By the time of his death, Kahn’s work—in areas as diverse as nuclear strategy and economic policy—had powerfully influenced thinkers and policymakers around the globe. The directions he charted on very sensitive issues of crucial public concern are still being pursued today, two decades after his unexpected and premature death. Many of the views he promoted have so profoundly influenced the public discourse that now we tend to take them for granted, whereas at the time he forged and advocated them, they were unconventional and often controversial.

Kahn, the most celebrated and criticized nuclear strategist of his day—later to be known also as a futurist, political scientist, geostrategist, and founder and director of the Hudson Institute—began his career in the late 1940s with the Rand Corporation as a physicist and mathematician. His co-directorship of the Strategic Air Force Project while at Rand inspired him to write On Thermonuclear War (1960), the book that elevated him to national and international prominence. On Thermonuclear War was the first book to analyze systematically the possible effects of nuclear war and the various strategic options. The book was followed by a sequence of similar studies having a profound impact on U.S. nuclear and military strategy and on strategic thinking in general: Thinking about the Unthinkable (1962), Crises and Arms Control (1962), and On Escalation (1965).

In 1961 Kahn resigned from the Rand Corporation and established the Hudson Institute, which became a model for newly emerging public-policy and interdisciplinary research institutions. Kahn became the first director of the institute, which was set up to do freelance research into what he termed “important issues, not just urgent ones.” While he maintained his interest in strategic and military matters, Kahn began to turn his attention to economics, politics, and especially domestic policy issues. He became one of the founding fathers of the Future Studies movement, contributing significantly to its methodological and theoretical foundations: he developed the scenario method, the application of systems analysis and of mathematical and scientific tools to forecasting, and the organizational bases of interdisciplinary research.

His participation in the public debates of his day on topics related to economic development, global trends, and the impact of technology were highly visible and critically important. He challenged the pessimistic neo-Malthusianism popular in the 1970s, and with a series of path-making studies he contributed decisively to the emergence of a more realistic and pragmatic approach to global problems (The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next 33 Years [1967], The Next 200 Years [1976], World Economic Development [1979], and The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social [1982]).

Mental Mutation

During his lifetime he was considered “one of the world’s great intellects,” “a mental mutation” possessing “an incredibly high, stratospheric I.Q.,” a “mesmerizing presence,” “spectacular,” “a provocateur in the sedate world of ideas,” “a reformer,” “a technological optimist,” and “a futurist who attempted to cope with history before it happens.” His involved a spectacular series of paradoxes: thinking the unthinkable, disciplining the interdisciplinary, institutionalizing the imaginative, anchoring in facts the counterfactual, predicting the unpredictable. Kahn described himself as a “free-thinking intellectual . . . largely determined by a desire to do policy-oriented studies with practical applications, . . . pragmatic, eclectic, and synthetic in thinking.”

Given that Kahn was a prolific author and that his line of reasoning touched on so many topics, capturing the essence and coherence of his thinking has never been easy. There is, however, a fundamental and very deep unity in Kahn’s approach, and that is the basic intellectual attitude present in all his work. “I’m against ignorance,” Kahn once said. “I’m against sloppy, emotional thinking. I’m against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment.” Probably the best illustration of Kahn’s approach is the way he dealt with his vocal and aggressive critics on the subject of nuclear war. This example is even more relevant today, when the current debates on the various aspects of the ongoing War on Terrorism are in many respects plagued by the same follies Kahn had to face thirty years ago. Justifying his stance on nuclear conflict, Kahn boldly defined his attitude in a very telling way, not pro-war or anti-war but simply “in defense of thinking.”

Four decades ago Kahn published a book that attempted to focus public attention on the possibility of a thermonuclear war, the means of reducing the probability of such a war, and methods for coping with its possible consequences. The book was considered a ground-breaking work by specialists, but it also raised a wave of indignation and sharp criticism. Kahn was not troubled by substantive criticisms, touching on great or small questions of strategy, policy, and research techniques. He was, however, very disturbed by criticisms that were not concerned with the correctness or incorrectness of the views expressed, but that instead raised the question of whether any book should have been written on the subject at all. Such criticisms indicated that many people believed it to be immoral and dangerous even to think about—let alone write in detail about—the very real possibility of having to fight a thermonuclear war.

Ostrich-like Behavior

Many of the criticisms leveled at Kahn were thus symptomatic of a profound problem affecting the elites as well as the public: their propensity to avoid thoroughly thinking about—or  worse, to refuse thinking about—issues that they perceived as unpleasant on either moral or practical grounds. For Kahn, that was an extremely dangerous attitude, one that could have profound negative consequences. He acknowledged that the social inhibitions which reinforce natural tendencies to avoid thinking about unpleasant or challenging subjects—what he called the “psychological factors involved in ostrich-like behavior”—do not pertain only to the elites of the advanced industrial democracies but are in fact universal. He also accepted that perhaps some evils could be avoided or reduced if people did not think or talk about them. However, he also stressed that there are many situations in which the reluctance to consider danger brings danger nearer. In those cases, the reluctance to think about issues that are morally and practically challenging could endanger not only the social order but also, in the context of the Cold War, the survival of the entire free world.

Nonetheless, Kahn did not view the criticism of his work on war as personal: for him it simply reflected the fact that Americans and many other people throughout the world are not prepared to face reality:

To act intelligently we must learn as much as we can about the risks. We may thereby be able better to avoid war. We may even be able to avoid the crises that bring us to the brink of war. But despite our efforts we may some day come face to face with a blunt choice between surrender or war. We may even have war thrust upon us without being given any kind of a choice. We must appreciate these possibilities. We cannot wish them away. Nor should we overestimate and assume the worst is inevitable. This leads only to defeatism, inadequate preparations,  . . . or undue accommodation.

Understanding Kahn’s approach to the issue of thermonuclear war reveals a deeper perspective on his work and his overall intellectual attitude: Many things might be unfathomable, disconcerting, immoral, or highly unlikely, but not impossible. Facing them ill-informed and without a realistic assessment opens one up to serious errors in judgment and strategy.

For Kahn, the public-policy process and the public debate associated with it were always the focal points and the ultimate ends of his efforts. Hence, probably the best approach to Kahn’s work is to see it in the light of his continuous concern for the practical relevance of his research. For him, the research was always action-oriented, and its ultimate test was its direct relevance to social action.

Kahn seemed to enjoy challenging both the elites and the general public to learn, think, and talk about disquieting and challenging public policy issues. In fact, he considered it a duty. On issues as diverse as thermonuclear war, ecological disaster, and social inequality, Kahn attempted to transcend emotions, inhibitions, and prejudices and think about these problems in a detailed and rational way. It is no accident that in describing Kahn’s attitude, Donald Rumsfeld used the word “confront.” The willingness to confront and overcome prejudices and intellectual routines represents the profound essence of Kahn’s intellectual attitude and work. This is the reason why the phrases “in defense of thinking” and “thinking the unthinkable” are so emblematic for Herman Kahn, and it is the reason why his legacy goes beyond even the tremendous influence his ideas have had on the way we view the world.

Paul Aligica is a Fellow at Mercatus Center at George Mason University and an Adjunct Fellow at Hudson Institute.

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