Supergenius: The Mega-Worlds of Herman Kahn
by B. Bruce-Briggs
North American Policy Press. 490 pp.
Reviewed by Dan Seligman
...somehow or other, Herman Kahn (1922-83) has become a forgotten figure.
But can that really be? Kahn was a "policy intellectual" of unquestioned
genius and dazzling quotability who was very much onstage and telling the
world what to think about its major problems for something like a quarter-
century. He had also helped develop the hydrogen bomb, and later came up
with the idea for a Doomsday Machine, immortalized, though wrenched out of
context, in Stanley Kubricks 1963 movie wherein the machines inventor is
called Dr. Strangelove. He was the author or coauthor of hundreds of
newspaper and magazine articles and of sixteen books, every one of which
received reviews that were respectful even when hostile. And, as Bruce-
Briggs states correctly, he had thousands of "chums" (I am identified as
one of them), who viewed his talents with awe and found his personality
magical, somehow combining elements of a high-speed computer, an eager-to-
please four-year-old child, a borscht-belt comic, and Santa Claus.
Early in his career, as a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, Kahns
briefingsthese were didactic lectures, densely factual and logically
powerful but still informal, with endless asides, many of them hilarious,
and much back-and-forth with the audiencewere a huge hit with the
military. Later, when he was running the Hudson Institute, the think tank
he founded in 1961, his subject matter expanded in all directions, and his
public appearances attracted a wider following. He spoke without notes,
typically for a couple of hours, and had his audiences alternately
entranced and convulsed with laughter. Supergenius does a good job of
capturing the spirit of these occasions, and also confirms what many long
suspected: that much of what Kahn "wrote" was made up of edited transcripts
of his talks.
Bruce-Briggs, who had a good inside view of Kahn during several
professional stints at Hudson, and was his co-author in a 1972 volume
called Things to Come, has organized his book more or less chronologically
but with an effort to segment particular dimensions of Kahns life. The
somewhat quirky result is 67 sections, typically five or six pages in
length, with headings like "The Soldier," "The Systems Analyst," "The
Celebrity," "The Nipponologist," "The Neoconservative." (Actually, for most
of his life Kahn was rather nonideological.) Bruce-Briggs is on balance
strongly pro-Kahn, but, as indicated in some of the headings ("The
Huckster," "The Kibitzer"), less than starry-eyed.
TO THINK about Herman Kahn is to find yourself amazed about many matters,
but three major themes stand out: his intelligence; his long-running, close-
to-single-handed effort to make Americans think straight about
thermonuclear war; and his remarkably successful forays into "futurology."
A possible fourth entry would be his weight. As a young man, Kahn was
merely stocky, but in the years of his greatest fame he kept putting on
pounds, and must have been close to 375 when he died, quite suddenly, of a
stroke. The weight seems to have induced symptoms of narcolepsy, and
Supergenius has some appalling accounts of Kahn falling asleep and snoring
uncontrollably in business meetings during his last few years (but still,
somehow, managing to take in a lot of what was being said).
Kahns career trajectory reflected the fact that he was smarterusually a
lot smarterthan just about everyone else in his life. His parents were
ambitious immigrants from Bialystok, but otherwise offered no discernible
clues to the genetic basis of his off-the-charts braininess. As a young
child, he was a speed-reader who needed (and created) multiple identities
so that he could have more library cards and take out more books. A high-
school know-it-all, he was once asked to read aloud a famous Latin oration,
took a brief glance at the passage, then recited it without the book and
offered to do it again, backwards.
Drafted in 1943, Kahn was identified as a prodigy after he took the Armed
Forces Qualification Test and was parked in a military "brain bank" in West
Virginia. There he was made to study electrical engineering before being
transferred to the signal corps and assigned to the China-Burma-India
theater. After the war, his friend Sam Cohen (later famous as the main
developer and promoter of the neutron bomb), successfully recruited him
into RAND, and his career as a defense analyst unfolded rapidly.
His early fame was based mainly on his devastating critique of U.S.
military strategy in the thermonuclear age. His core objective, elaborated
in On Thermonuclear War (1960) and again in Thinking about the Unthinkable
(1962), was to make his countrymen understand that existing doctrine was
disastrous. Its assumptions, based on the idea of a "balance of terror,"
were embodied in a nightmare scenario in which, as Kahn put it, somebody,
presumably a Russian, "pushed all the buttons and then walked away from the
table." The only thing deterring the Russians from such a massive and
unrestrained attack was, supposedly, the realization that it would be
matched in kindwhich would mean in turn that both countries would have
committed suicide.
That was the theory. Although Stanley Kubrick chose not to read him
properly, Kahns Doomsday Machinea device set to blow up the planet
automatically any time your country was attacked with nuclear weaponswas
presented by him not as a rational strategy but as a caricature of this
irrational posture. To tell the world that you equated nuclear weapons with
national suicide was, he wrote, to invite blackmailand, given the Soviet
superiority in conventional arms, it left us with very few military options
in the face of aggressive behavior short of an attack on the United States.
The point of all this thinking about the unthinkable was to find serious
alternatives to annihilation and surrender. Kahn argued that the
alternatives were there. Any thermonuclear war would almost certainly begin
as a limited and not as an "all-out" attack, for the simple reason that the
attacker would want the other side to have incentives for restraint. With
that in mind, Kahn generated an avalanche of data to demonstrate that civil
defense and other damage-limiting measures could leave our country still
viable even after most imaginable thermonuclear wars. And he also argued
that serious planning for such warsincluding a "pre-attack mobilization
base," some ballistic-missile defense, and what he called a "not incredible
first-strike capability"would itself serve as a deterrent to provocative
behavior, and leave us less susceptible to blackmail. Although Kahn was not
alone in making this casehis RAND colleague Albert Wohlstetter was a major
allythere is no doubt that his briefings and studies had a major impact on
the Pentagons thinking in the 50s and 60s.
AT ITS founding, the Hudson Institute was defense-oriented, and in the late
60s it was still receiving contracts for Vietnam-related research. Kahn
was deeply involved in the Pentagons partially successful "Vietnamization"
program, i.e., the effort to pacify the countryside and build up the South
Vietnamese armed forces while preparing for American withdrawal. But by
this time he and Hudson had also been drawn into a broad range of social-
policy issues, which gradually coalesced into a discipline that came to be
known as "futurology" (a term he disliked, even as he came to be identified
as its prime exemplar).
There is a mystery at the heart of this discipline. (There are also
disagreements about whether it deserves the label "discipline.") The
threshold question is whether it represents merely informed speculation
about the future or a serious effort at forecasting. Kahn was clear about
the need for the latter in the area of military technology, but in thinking
about long-term social change, his approach seems much more hedged.
One major Kahn exercise in futurology was The Year 2000, written with
Anthony J. Wiener and published in 1967. (The analysis was Kahns, the
writing was Wieners.) The authors warned readers up front that
the "scenarios" being put forward should be taken only as "imaginative
simulations of what might happen," and the subtitle identifies the study
as "a framework for speculation." But I have trouble with this.
As I read The Year 2000, the authors repeatedly leave their cautions in the
dust to argue that some scenarios are, in fact, resoundingly plausible. An
intriguing example is their argument for a continuing explosion in computer
power and their rejection of the then-popular notion that such power was
already approaching its physical limits. It is quite possible, they wrote,
that computer capabilities would continue expanding by "a factor of ten
every several years"a judgment consistent with Moores Law, which posits a
doubling every 18 months or so. They also stated that "there will probably
be computer consoles in every home," a projection that overstates todays
reality even while managing to look remarkably prescient for 1967.
I do not know how to construct a box score, but the "forecasts" in The Year
2000 look pretty good to me. One big error, quite unsurprising in itself,
was to assume the durability of the Soviet Union, and the authors also
possibly overrated the long-term dynamism of the Japanese economy (although
it had close to twenty pretty good years after they wrote). But they were
seldom misleading about other important matters. Their projection put year-
2000 world population around 6 billion, which appears to be just about
right, and one of their preferred scenarios for U.S. gross national product
per capita (they offer a couple of choices) works out to about $37,500 in
todays dollarsalso right. The book foresaw relative peace and prosperity
for the "older nations"i.e., Europe, the U.S. and Canada, and the Pacific
Rim countries. It also bought wholeheartedly into the idea of a "post-
industrial society," then being broached by Daniel Bell and others and now
plainly surrounding us.
Kahns record in futurology was also pretty good in later years. In 1980,
in the face of headlines projecting oil prices of $60 a barrel or more,
Kahn and William M. Brown, Hudsons energy economist, forecast that prices
would instead collapse, which they did (from $40 a barrel to less than
$20). With marvelous timing, Kahn produced a 1982 book about the U.S.
economy called The Coming Boom.
Is he really a forgotten figure today? I hope not. But it is true that the
themes he was most associated with are themselves offstage. For better or
worse, thermonuclear war has pretty much receded from public consciousness.
And futurologylong-term, broad-gauge social forecastingseems unimaginably
difficult in a world featuring successive stunners in biotechnology. Still,
I would hate to think that the man who put "thinking about the unthinkable"
into the public dialogue has fallen prey to a different syndrome:
forgetting the unforgettable. At a minimum, he deserves the $15 download.
* To order the book, you send a check or money order to North American
Policy Press, Box 26, Idaville, PA 17337. For $15, you get the right to
download it on your computer; for $20, you get three 31/2-inch diskettes
incorporating the text; and for $40, you get a bound copy of the 490-page
printout, of which about 100 pages are source notes.
