Herman Kahn and the Expansion of Historical Consciousness
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Thursday, 15 February 2024, is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Herman Kahn (15 February 1922–07 July 1983), who was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, on this date in 1922. Starting his career at RAND and eventually founding his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, Kahn was one of the most controversial futurists of the twentieth century and a definitive figure of the Cold War.
Someone (I don’t recall the source) once claimed that Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War was Kahn’s bid to stand alongside Clausewitz in the canon of military classics. Whether or not Kahn achieved this I can’t say. Kahn’s book has not worn as well as Clausewitz’s, although both reference technologies now no longer in use, but the detail of the exposition shows how Kahn thought, and methodology was central to scenario planning.
On Thermonuclear War was sensation when it appeared in 1960, and its impact on post-war America can be compared to the impact of Spengler’s The Decline of the West on post-war Germany, though the wars to which these two books were -post were distinct, with Spengler’s book published as the First World War was winding down, and Kahn’s published when the Second World War was fifteen years in the past, but both told their audiences hard truths we would prefer to avoid. Spengler and Kahn were the original red pill thinkers, and their willingness to take on controversial problems took them well outside the bounds of comforting lies.
Herman Kahn set himself the task of “thinking the unthinkable.” This is admirable from a philosophical point of view. Many philosophers would like to think the unthinkable but they lack either the imagination or the courage to do so. Kahn showed both in thinking about nuclear war. However much we may revile the very thought of nuclear war, it was and remains a definite possibility. Again, it is easier not to think about nuclear war, but we need to think about nuclear war because it is now part of our world.
Kahn sought to think through nuclear war rationality if not exhaustively, though the terms upon which he thought about nuclear war were quite different from what philosophers were doing at about the same time. Yesterday (in Dresden and the Technology of Mass Destruction) I mentioned Jaspers’ book The Future of Mankind, and what Jaspers called the New Fact — that human beings were now technologically enabled to destroy ourselves. Bertrand Russell also wrote books on nuclear war (e.g., Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare and Has Man A Future?), sought to intervene with both Kennedy and Khrushchev during Cuban Missile Crisis, protested in the street, and was arrested for his trouble.
Everyone agrees that nuclear war would be terrible, and we would be much better off to avoid it entirely, but among academics and the media it became almost an article of faith that nuclear war is not survivable. This claim is distinct from the claim that nuclear war would be terrible. Kahn challenged this claim head-on, and in so doing made enemies. He was skewered in two films, Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Fail Safe (also 1964). The characters in these films supposedly representing Kahn are the familiar “mad scientist” — Faust and Victor Frankenstein wrapped up into a single package for the Nuclear age, by turns deluded and crazed by his mental hypertrophy. Scientists, whether those of Goethe or Mary Shelley, or those building atomic weapons in the desert, are playing God, we are told, and the rest of us are going to pay the price. The atomic bomb became the ultimate symbol of the scientist as sorcerer’s apprentice. Nuclear war would be the price we would pay, and that would be mean the extinction of humanity and perhaps also of all life on Earth.
Kahn dealt directly with the charge that, even if we could survive nuclear war, the conditions following a nuclear war would be such that the living would envy the dead, so that there was no point in making provisions for the survival of nuclear war. Kahn begins On Thermonuclear War by calling attention to what he calls, “tragic but distinguishable postwar states.” Table three in the book provides seven distinct postwar scenarios, ranging from 2 million dead and 1 year to economic recovery, to 160 million dead and 100 years to economic recovery. In other words, any outcome of a nuclear war would be tragic, but that does not make all possible postwar states the same, nor should we be indifferent to the distinctions among them. Kahn Wrote:
“Perhaps the most important item on the table of distinguishable states is not the numbers of dead or the number of years it takes for economic recuperation; rather, it is the question at the bottom: ‘Will the survivors envy the dead?’ It is in some sense true that one may never recuperate from a thermonuclear war. The world may be permanently (i.e., for perhaps 10,000 years) more hostile to human life as a result of such a war. Therefore, if the question, ‘Can we restore the prewar conditions of life?’ is asked, the answer must be ‘No!’ But there are other relevant questions to be asked. For example: ‘How much more hostile will the environment be? Will it be so hostile that we or our descendants would prefer being dead than alive?’ Perhaps even more pertinent is this question, ‘How happy or normal a life can the survivors and their descendants hope to have?’ Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.”
Today we would call this a problem of population ethics, and we would be mindful of Derek Parfit’s argument that comes at the very end of Reasons and Persons, which takes Jaspers’ New Fact as its starting point:
“I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:
(1) Peace.
(2) A nuclear war that kills 99 % of the world’s existing population.
(3) A nuclear war that kills 100 %
2 would be worse than 1, and 3 would be worse than 2. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between 1 and 2. I believe that the difference between 2 and 3 is very much greater.
My view is the view of two very different groups of people. Both groups would appeal to the same fact. The Earth will remain inhabitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history.”
What Kahn was saying in On Thermonuclear War was that he definitely prefers Parfit’s scenario 2 to scenario 3. Further, he lays out a great many more scenarios than these three. Since the quoted passage from Parfit comes at the end of his book, Parfit does not discuss the immediate outcome of scenarios 2 and 3; Kahn, by contrast, did this, and did so in great detail. This made many people squeamish.
The survivability of nuclear war is a debate that continued long after Kahn had passed out of public consciousness. In 1981, T. K. Jones, a Reagan administration official, had said, “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it” — the shovels being a reference to the tools needed to build improvised fallout shelters. This quote was then used as the title of With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War (1983) Robert Scheer. Herman Kahn was not mentioned once in the book, though Kahn lived to 1983.
By the 1980s everyone in the chattering classes had already forgotten about Herman Kahn and the debate over nuclear war survivability of twenty years earlier, so they had no qualms about repeating the debate, though in a Bowdlerized form, so no one would be aware of the counterarguments. All the institutions of civil society unanimously united behind the idea that nuclear war is not survivable, and anyone who failed to get on board could not be expected to receive any invitations to dinner parties. (This is still the preferred method of using soft power to disrupt and end an uncomfortable discussions.) This absurdity came to something of a crescendo in 1984, when the students of Brown University voted for the university to stock suicide pills in the event of nuclear war, because it was better to be dead than to experience life without modern conveniences.
The idea of everyone committing suicide in event of nuclear war had already been suggested almost thirty years earlier in Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach, made into a film in 1959 with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in the leading roles. Also in 1959, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz was published. Many have commented on the theme of cyclical history implicit in Miller’s book, with a nuclear war in its distant past, and the three sections of the book (originally published separately) each set about six hundred years apart, recapitulating the fall of an advanced cosmopolitan civilization, the slow rediscovery of science and technology, and the eventual appearance of a new cosmopolitan civilization, once again destroying itself in nuclear war.
Nuclear apocalypse, with an only vaguely veiled Biblical subtext, was one of the great themes of the Cold War, reflecting the extent to which we still see our future in mythological terms. This apocalyptic theme appeared in many different forms and every possible permutation. Miller’s version was arguably the most intelligent, as well as being the most explicitly Biblical. The books of Nevil Shute and Robert Scheer are also manifestations of the same underlying anxiety. Herman Kahn was yet another manifestation, but instead of representing a concealed mythology, Kahn represents rationality, specifically, the scientific and technological rationality I discussed yesterday, in Dresden and the Technology of Mass Destruction, exemplifying industrialized warfare.
In Dresden and the Technology of Mass Destruction I mentioned Edith Wyschogrod’s book Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death, and her exposition of what she called the death event:
“During World War I a new process burst upon the historical horizon, a multifaceted state of affairs which later included such features as nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare and death camps. I call this social, political, and cultural complex the death event.”
Further, the death event leaves a permanent mark on civilization:
“Present experience is not comparable to life before the advent of the death event of which the death-world is a part. The life-world, such as it is, now and in the future, includes in collective experience and shared history the death event of our times, which is the death-world of the slave labor and concentration camps and the other means of man-made mass death. Once the death-world has existed, it continues to exist, for eternity as it were; it becomes part of the sediment of an irrevocable past, without which contemporary experience is incomprehensible.”
Wyschogrod doesn’t mention Kahn, but I have no doubt, given his affiliation with the defense industry, and with his reputation for black humor about nuclear war, that she would have seen Kahn as a manifestation of that death event. In Dresden and the Technology of Mass Destruction I suggested, against Wyschogrod, that the death event, and the death-world that takes shape in the wake of the death event, can serve as a novel way to coordinate scientific and technological rationality, realizing and rationalizing man-made mass death Certainly Kahn was dedicated to the rational exposition of nuclear war, which would have, and still could, result in man-made mass death on an unprecedented scale. Kahn did not equivocate on this point, but another aspect of that same rationality is the counter-argument of survivability. Kahn not only represents scientific-technological reason, he also represents the moral and emotional ambiguity that is the ever-present partner of rational inquiry. Kahn wanted to break us free of the mythological framework for conceptualizing the future and have us think it through on our own human, all-too-human, terms.
Ultimately, Kahn was an optimist, as was revealed in his later writings. In the 70s, with the Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome, and the advent of the environmental movement as a political force, Kahn wrote a number of futurist forecasts that discussed both the dangers and the opportunities of the future, again, in a thoroughly rationalistic and pragmatic spirit, strikingly different from those who argued for mass suicide, like the students of Brown University.
If anything, Kahn was too much of an optimist. In a 1977 report on space development for NASA co-authored with William M. Brown, Long-Term Prospects For Developments in Space (A Scenario Approach), the authors formulated an optimistic scenario, a moderate scenario, and a pessimistic scenario. It is the pessimistic scenario is closest to that which has actually been accomplished in space since 1977. As part of their pessimistic scenario the authors mention a nuclear accident in 1987 near Los Angeles as souring the public on technology. Instead, we had a nuclear accident in 1986 at Chernobyl. Some of their pessimistic anti-technology scenario has indeed already happened. Elaborating on the anti-technological theme the authors wrote:
“The potential rewards of space development and space travel had been debated by the New Class and found wanting — indeed had been judged to be too costly and relatively risky, especially where it involved manned programs. Moreover, there appeared more and more philosophical, religious polemics that asserted that man’s attempt to scatter his seeds even further into space was an incipient new form of pollution, if not desecration, of the purity and beauty of the universe.”
That is pretty much where we are today. The while worst of Kahn’s scenarios have not materialized, and we have not had a nuclear war, the best of Kahn’s scenarios also have not materialized. We have foregone both existential risk and existential hope for the middle path of safety and mediocrity.
Kahn’s most important legacy has been his rational engagement with the future. Scenario planning has become so routine that we no longer appreciate how novel it is. Most of human history had only a mythological conception of the future. Kahn applied human reason to the future and we have been doing this ever since. Many his predictions didn’t pan out. Japan never became the superstate he predicted, but that is beside the point. The point is critically thinking through future possibilities.
The expansion of historical consciousness to the future is part of a larger historical process of the expansion of human historical consciousness. Today we are all familiar with the idea that we are situated in an enormous expanse of time extending both into the deep past and the deep future. There was already a formal awareness of this in antiquity such as we find in Lucretius, near the end of book III of On the Nature of Things, where the eternal past is show to mirror the eternal future:
“Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.”
There’s an older translation by William Ellery Leonard that is more poetic:
Look back:
Nothing to us was all fore-passed eld
Of time the eternal, ere we had a birth.
And Nature holds this like a mirror up
Of time-to-be when we are dead and gone.
It was the work of many centuries to flesh out this idea that time extends long before and long after us. It was not until the nineteenth century, in the work of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, that deep time was made palpable to us through geology and biology. It was not until the twentieth century that the earth sciences, with the maturation of geology into geomorphology and plate tectonics, fully converged on the consequences of our planet having a natural history. And it was only in the twentieth century that technology advanced to the point that we could formulate a scientific cosmology based on observations reaching the limits of the observable universe, older than us by far, and far to outlast us.
It is still a challenge for us to grasp this, to make it feel real, but planning for the far future is now familiar. It is a central tenet of the environmental movement that human beings can actively intervene in the historical process, choosing among distinguishable future states those that are more desirable. Herman Kahn contributed to our attempts to grasp the future in a rational way, to make it a part of human life through the practical means of planning for the future, and so to expand historical consciousness to become historical agency.
