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Other authors named Herman:
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Author's popularity: 1
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Popularity: 2
Vote: | A closely related common error is to mistake a prescription for macro-behavior as one that will affect microbehavior, or vice versa. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A healthy and fully functioning society must allocate its resources among a variety of competing interests, all of which are more or less valid but none of which should take precedence over national security. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | A surprising number of government committees will make important decisions on fundamental matters with less attention than each individual would give to buying a suit. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | A total nuclear freeze is counterproductive - especially now, when technology is rapidly changing and the Soviets have some important strategic advantages. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | A world armed with nuclear weapons would provide a fertile field for paranoiacs, megalomaniacs, and indeed all kinds of fanatics. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Anything that reduces war-related destruction should not be considered altogether immoral. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Appropriate arms control could increase the trend toward decreased megatonnage and even toward fewer weapons, but unwise disarmament could set it back. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | As for total disarmament, there are almost 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world today; even if they were banned, not all would be destroyed. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Because of an over-reliance on nuclear capabilities or fear of the other side's nuclear capabilities, it is likely to be difficult for most nations to remain committed to the notion of limited conventional war. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Because of new technologies, new wealth, new conditions of domestic life and of international relations, unprecedented criteria and issues are coming up for national decision. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Clearly, the first task is to gain acceptance of a more reasonable view of the future, one that opens possibilities rather than forecloses them. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Criteria for decisions are often too narrow because the decision-makers are parochial, partisan, or self-interested, or simply not accustomed to considering the new criteria that are becoming relevant. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Deterrence itself is not a preeminent value; the primary values are safety and morality. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Even the most utopian of today's visionaries will have to concede that the mere existence of modern technology involves a risk to civilization that would have been unthinkable twenty-five years ago. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | For if enough people were really convinced that growth should be halted, and if they acted on that conviction, then billions of others might be deprived of any realistic hope of gaining the opportunities now enjoyed by the more fortunate. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | For some years I have spent my time on exactly these questions - both in thinking about ways to prevent war, and in thinking about how to fight, survive, and terminate a war, should it occur. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | From a scientific perspective there is some indication that a nuclear war could deplete the earth's ozone layer or, less likely, could bring on a new Ice Age - but there is no suggestion that either the created order or mankind would be destroyed in the process. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Hopefully, nations will refuse to accept a situation in which nuclear accidents actually do occur, and, if at all possible, they will do something to correct a system which makes them likely. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Human and moral factors must always be considered. They must never be missing from policies and from public discussion. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I am against the whole cliche of the moment. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I'm against fashionable thinking. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I'm against ignorance. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If we recognize nuclear deterrence as a means toward attaining a safer overall security environment, then simplistic stability (stability only against a first strike) should not be the sole objective of strategic forces. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war, and to methods for coping with the consequences should war occur despite our efforts to avoid it. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | In a world which is armed to its teeth with nuclear weapons, every quarrel or difference of opinion may lead to violence of a kind quite different from what is possible today. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Indeed, it is the limits-to-growth position which creates low morale, destroys assurance, undermines the legitimacy of governments everywhere, erodes personal and group commitment to constructive activities, and encourages obstructiveness to reasonable policies and hopes. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It is immoral from almost any point of view to refuse to defend yourself and others from very grave and terrible threats, even as there are limits to the means that can be used in such defense. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Many people believe that the current system must inevitably end in total annihilation. They reject, sometimes very emotionally, any attempts to analyze this notion. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Many people seem to believe that any change in weapons technology has to be for the worse, but that is demonstrably untrue. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Miscarriages of policy decisions can result from a lack of continuity in the effective actors or pressure groups. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Most administrators dislike debating or thinking about fundamentals, even when vague, implicit, and half-formulated views obviously are governing choices, and when some searching debate is clearly desirable. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Nevertheless, during the sixty years of the twentieth century many problems have come increasingly into the realm of acceptable public discussion. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | New developments in weapon systems during the 1950s and early 1960s created a situation that was most dangerous, and even conducive to accidental war. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Nuclear weapons are intrinsically neither moral nor immoral, though they are more prone to immoral use than most weapons. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Once weapons are allowed to become widely diffused, it becomes much more difficult to work out methods of arms control. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Only those who are ideologically opposed to military programs think of the defense budget as the first and best place to get resources for social welfare needs. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Projecting a persuasive image of a desirable and practical future is extremely important to high morale, to dynamism, to consensus, and in general to help the wheels of society turn smoothly. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The objective of nuclear-weapons policy should not be solely to decrease the number of weapons in the world, but to make the world safer - which is not necessarily the same thing. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The possibility of inadvertent war would no doubt increase not only because there would be many more weapons and missiles available, but because there will be many more organizations in existence, each with different standards of training, organization, and degrees of responsibility. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The widespread diffusion of nuclear weapons would make many nations able, and in some cases also create the pressure, to aggravate an on-going crisis, or even touch off a war between two other powers for purposes of their own. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There was no race - but to the extent that there was an arms competition, it was almost entirely on the Soviet side, first to catch up and then to surpass the Americans. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Thus naive utilitarianism can do considerable social damage; and moral rules are required under a variety of circumstances. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | To the extent that these advanced weapons or their components are treated as articles of commerce, perhaps for peaceful uses as in the Plowshare program, their cost would be well within the resources available to many large private organizations. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | To us, the virtue of the image of the future presented here is not that it may prove useful (though we are highly pleased that this may be so), but rather that our forecast of the future may prove accurate, or at least about the most plausible image one can develop now. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race. |
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Biography
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Herman Kahn (1922-1983) was a military strategist and systems theorist employed at RAND Corporation, USA. Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, he devised several strategies for nuclear warfare during the Cold War using applications of game theory, and had earlier played a role in the development of the hydrogen bomb.
The basis of his work was systems theory, applied to military strategy and economics. 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 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."
Kahn also engaged with the question of the practical politics of a Doomsday Machine -- a computer attached to a cache of thermonuclear weapons which could automatically trigger in the event of a nuclear attack and purposely coat the planet in nuclear fallout. Building such a weapon would be, in Kahn's mind, impractical, dangerous, and foolish, but he used the idea as an analogy to the state of Europe at the time, where NATO troops, despite their conventional military appearance, were, in Kahn's formulation, a mere tripwire for an all-out nuclear war.
Aside from the very dramatic works on nuclear strategy, he wrote several works on systems theory and futurism, including the well received work, "Techniques in System Theory," and a number of books extrapolating the future of the U.S., Japanese and Australian economies.
In 1961 Kahn, along with Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen, founded the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization located in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The organization challenged the pessimism of left-wing groups like the Club of Rome. The 1976 book The Next 200 Years, written by Kahn with William Brown and Leon Martel, presented an optimistic scenario of economic conditions in the year 2176.
He was reportedly a model for Dr. Strangelove from Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name released in 1964. Walter Matthau's character in Fail-Safe was also based on Herman Kahn.
References *Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, (Stanford Nuclear Age Series), ISBN 0804718849
*Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn : The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War, (Harvard University Press), ISBN 0674017145
*Herman Kahn, Jerome Agel Herman Kahnsciousness;: The megaton ideas of the one-man think tank, (New American Library)
*B Bruce-Briggs, Supergenius: The mega-worlds of Herman Kahn, (North American Policy Press)
*Kate Lenkowsky, The Herman Kahn Center of the Hudson Institute, (Hudson Institute)
*Herman Kahn, The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social, (Simon & Schuster), ISBN 0671492659
*---- The Japanese challenge: The success and failure of economic success, (Morrow), ISBN 0688087108
*---- Things to Come: Thinking About the Seventies and Eighties, (MacMillan), ISBN 0025604708
*---- World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond, (William Morrow), ISBN 0688034799
*---- Will she be right?: The future of Australia, (University of Queensland Press), ISBN 0702215694
*---- The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, (MacMillan), ISBN 0025604406
*---- Emerging Japanese Superstate : Challenge and Response, (Prentice Hall), ISBN 0132746700
*---- The nature and feasibility of war, deterrence, and arms control (Central nuclear war monograph series), (Hudson Institute)
*---- A slightly optimistic world context for 1975-2000 (Hudson Institute. HI)
*---- Social limits to growth: "creeping stagnation" vs. "natural and inevitable" (HPS paper)
*---- A new kind of class struggle in the United States? (Corporate Environment Program. Research memorandum)
*Herbert I. London, forward by Herman Kahn, Why Are They Lying to Our Children. (Against the doomsayer futurists.), ISBN 0967351421
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Herman Kahn".
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