On Thermonuclear War

Kahn's seminal 1960 work on nuclear strategy. This is a dense and weighty book that examines its subject in great detail. Kahn is remembered for his assertions that a nuclear war would mean neither the end of civilization nor of humanity, that even a modest civil defense program could make a substantial difference in the time that a first-world nation needed to recover from such a war, and that a nuclear war was therefore "winnable," at least as of the 1960's, and in the sense of one combatant emerging less damaged than the other. He has sometimes been reviled as a warmonger for his unsentimental appraisal of the prospect of the deaths of millions - but what I took from his arguments early in this book is that he simply felt that when show more formulating policy regarding a war on such a scale, it would be irresponsible to be less than completely honest and completely objective. Thus, he argued for quantitative rather than emotional assessments, and had little use for analyses that were driven by a need to justify pre-conceived notions.

Beyond these ideas, he also develops a kind of taxonomy of the different kinds of deterrence, and elaborates the implications of each at great length. One can recognize the approaches to deterrence by the various different modern nuclear states quite easily in Kahn's treatment of the subject.

Kahn did recognize that, with more powerful thermonuclear devices, more sophisticated delivery systems, and more nuclear-capable nations being likely, the world would become a much more dangerous place in the decades after the 1960's. It would be fascinating to see what he would make of the current nuclear landscape. He does not, for example, address the concept of nuclear winter, which did not become a major subject of inquiry until the early 1980's. Given that even today one can find papers asserting that the dangers of nuclear winter are overstated and other papers predicting that even a relatively modest nuclear war would ultimately lead to the deaths of 90 percent of the human race, a Kahn-style examination of the risks would be highly instructive. show less