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The Worlds of Herman Kahn The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War by Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi Harvard Univ. Press, 432 pp.; $26.95

While conscientious civilians kept an eye out for suspicious aircraft, Herman Kahn went swimming. A corporation sympathetic to Kahn's concern for civil defense had offered a fallout shelter, free of charge, to the Kahn family. Unfortunately, the shelter's entrance tube could not accommodate Kahn's prodigious frame, and so he had a swimming pool installed instead. He swam in it nearly every day.

Meanwhile, citizens of Yale, South Dakota, were gazing at the sky. Upon spotting a plane overhead, they'd sprint to the post office, each eager to be the first to describe the shape of the aircraft. These civic-minded Dakotans were members of the Ground Observer Corps, inaugurated in 1950 by the Continental Air Command. Joining them across the United States were lumbermen, fishermen, merchant marines, taxicab drivers, and inmates at Folsom, Attica, and Statesville.

These two images capture Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi's ambivalence toward the subject of her book The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Famous in his heyday, in the late 1950s and the 1960s, reduced to a caricature by those for whom Dr. Strangelove remains the last word on nuclear strategy, Kahn (1922-1983) has long aroused simplistic responses. Ghamari-Tabrizi is more ambivalent, more nuanced, seeing him in turn as a court jester and a visionary.

The case for the former is strong. Ghamari-Tabrizi dwells on Kahn's propensity for nuclear holocaust humor, quoting such gems as: "It is possible, isn't it, that parents will learn to love two-headed children twice as much?" Kahn's appearance alone was preposterous. Comically corpulent, balding, bespectacled, wheezing, and stumbling over words, he resembled—Frances FitzGerald wrote—"his adopted Los Angeles, that giant amoeboid city which seems to have no natural boundaries, no structural limits."

Yet the threat that engendered the Ground Observer Corps was real, and Kahn's book On Thermonuclear War, published in 1960 under the auspices of the Center for International Studies at Princeton, was "the first widely circulated study that dramatized how a nuclear war might begin, be fought, and survived." What would such a conflict actually look like? How many would die under various scenarios? What would be the most pressing challenges for the survivors? How should resources prepared in anticipation of such an event be prioritized? Kahn's responses could be at once cogent and troubling: he proposed that irradiated food be graded A-E, with Grade A, available only to pregnant women and children, containing the least strontium. Grade D would be available to those over forty; Grade E fodder for animals. Kahn advocated the distribution of personal radiation meters, because, as he said, "if one man vomits, everybody vomits," and even those not stricken with radiation sickness would believe themselves ill. Kahn had no time for those who believed that such considerations were pointless in the face of the ultimate horror. Against the paralysis of thought, he maintained his conviction that human beings will persist amid tremendous adversity, and perhaps even thrive.

By asking and trying to answer such questions, often in excruciating detail—by seriously thinking about the lived reality of nuclear war and not just its geopolitical dimension—Kahn earned the respect of philosopher and passionate disarmament advocate Bertrand Russell. At RAND and later at the Hudson Institute, Kahn was part of what Ghamari-Tabrizi calls "the cold-war avant-garde," men who advocated the burgeoning science of systems analysis rather than relying principally on conventional approaches to military strategy. Since, as Kahn mordantly observed, there was "a dearth of people with relevant practical experience in the conduct of thermonuclear wars," practical experience had to take a back seat to theory. In 1968, Kahn described his approach, and its major liability, with a characteristic blend of chutzpah and self-deprecating wit: "We take God's view. The president's view. Big. Aerial. Global. Galactic. Ethereal. Spatial. Overall. Megalomania is the standard occupational hazard."

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August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49