Supergenius: The Mega-Worlds of Herman Kahn

[Faustine]

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.


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