Yet many of Kahn’s critics, including those in the social science division of the RAND Corporation, thought that Kahn’s particular fashion of thinking about nuclear war would, if taken seriously by policy-makers, only make the possibility of such a war more likely. Even Kahn admitted, “The one circumstance under which almost all Soviet experts agree the Russians might strike is the one in which they feel they are anticipating a strike by us.” Yet wasn’t that just what Kahn was advocating with his business about Types II and III Deterrence—creating a defense “posture” that would allow the U.S. President to threaten the Russians with a first-strike in the event of a crisis?
There was also a pseudoscientific element in Kahn’s analysis. The civil-defense study examined the relationship between radiation dosage and human fatalities and crop damage, shelter preparations and the number of survivors, blast and the survival of the national economy. Kahn and his associates went through dozens of possible scenarios, effects and consequences, working through the problem in the most meticulous quantitative detail. But examined closely, the optimistic conclusions that Kahn reached hardly met the standards of realistic, systematic analysis.
First, Kahn employed “seven optimistic assumptions” about the postwar conditions, on which his conclusions critically depended: “Favorable political environment,” “Immediate survival and patch-up,” “Maintenance of economic momentum,” “Specific bottlenecks alleviated,” “‘Bourgeois’ virtues survive,” “Workable postwar standards adopted,” “Neglected effects unimportant.”
If any of these assumptions didn’t hold in the real world, all of Kahn’s bets were off. Yet none of the assumptions were subject to analysis; they were all held on faith. It was part and parcel of Kahn’s long-held, almost dogmatic belief in the free-market system, inculcated since his early teen-age years when he taught himself economics by perusing the works of the classic eighteenth-century free-market philosopher Adam Smith. Kahn admitted that his estimates of economic recovery did not take into account bottlenecks that would likely occur. “However,” he wrote, “experience has shown that entrepreneurs and engineers are very capable at ‘making do’ when necessary.”
Even the recuperative phases of the postwar world would be run according to the principles of the free market. Foods contaminated with strontium 90, for example, would be classified into five grades—from less to more contaminated, A, B, C, D and E. “The A food would be restricted to children and to pregnant women. The B food would be a high-priced food available to everybody. The C food would be a low-priced food also available to everybody. Finally, the D food would be restricted to people over age forty or fifty,” whose bones would not pick up so much strontium anyway. (E food would be given to animals.)
The price difference between B and C food “comes from assuming some sort of free market mechanism.” For, “If there were no free market, some sort of rationing of B food would be required, but this could introduce all kinds of serious administrative, political, and ethical difficulties and would not encourage expanded production of B food unless some subsidy were granted—implying further complications.”
Had Kahn really taken into account all the complications of nuclear war? He reported that his team’s civil-defense study concluded that “a nation like the United States or the Soviet Union could handle each of the problems of radioactivity, physical destruction, or likely levels of casualties, if they occurred by themselves.” But they “did not look at the interaction among the effects [they] did study.” If “all these things happened together and all the other effects were added at the same time,” Kahn conceded, “one cannot help but have some doubts” as to the conclusion’s validity. “How much confidence did our researchers have in these recuperation calculations? In the sense of having taken account of all factors, not too much… our study was not complete enough to be a full treatment of this complicated problem.”
Kahn’s 56-page chapter on civil defense in OTW, called “Will the Survivors Envy the Dead?,” began with an air of scientific rigor and mathematical precision. It ended with rambling, uplifting rhetoric: “We may not be able to recuperate even with preparations, but we cannot today put our finger on why this should be so and I, for one, believe that with sufficient study we will be able to make a very convincing case for recuperation, if we survive the war, and, more important, that with sufficient preparation we actually will be able to survive and recuperate if deterrence fails.”
The rest of Kahn’s book crucially depended on the feasibility and success of a nationwide civil-defense program. Yet, in the final analysis, proof of this feasibility rested not on the rigorous thinking that Kahn elsewhere celebrated, but on faith in the basic goodness of the free market even under the most catastrophic circumstances, faith in the ability of quantitative analysis to solve problems even when faced with unpredictable, largely unquantifiable variables.
In 1964, film-maker Stanley Kubrick released a brilliant black comedy about a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. called Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Strangelove, the character and the film, struck insiders as a parody of Herman Kahn, some of the dialogue virtually lifted from the pages of On Thermonuclear War. But the film was also a satire of the whole language and intellectual culture of the strategic-intellectual set. Kahn’s main purpose in writing OTW was “to create a vocabulary” so that strategic issues can be “comfortably and easily” discussed, a vocabulary that reduces the emotions surrounding nuclear war to the dispassionate cool of scientific thought. To the extent that many people today talk about nuclear war in such a nonchalant, would-be scientific manner, their language is rooted in the work of Herman Kahn. And to the extent that people have an image of defense analysts as mad-scientist Dr. Strangeloves who almost glorify the challenge of nuclear war, that image, too, comes from Herman Kahn.
Kahn was more extreme in his tone and views than many of his RAND colleagues. But he was only pushing the strategic postulates, the analytical techniques, the underlying world view of the RAND conventional wisdom to their logical limits. He was the ultimate creature and creation of the rational life at RAND, the desperate, at times fervid effort to find, as Kahn phrased it, “more reasonable forms of using violence.”
15
THE REAL RIVALRY
THE VIEWS THAT Herman Kahn, Bill Kaufmann, Andy Marshall and a few others at RAND held on counterforce strategies struck a live chord at the very end of the 1950s. For the Air Force was locked in ferocious battle with the Navy, and counterforce seemed just the weapon to help them win the war.
Air Force-Navy rivalry had a long history. Its first major instance had broken out in 1949 during the “Admirals’ Revolt,” when in reaction to severe cuts in the Navy’s budget, the entire top echelon of naval officers broke all tradition of subordination and publicly testified against the official emphasis being placed on the atom bomb, on the Strategic Air Command, on the Air Force’s B-36 bombers, at the expense of more traditional modes and weapons of combat, as represented by the Army and the Navy, especially the Navy’s aircraft carriers and their task groups. The chief testimony came from Rear Admiral Ralph Ofstie. Ofstie had served on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey shortly after World War II and had been among those who concluded from the study that the Army Air Force’s strategic bombing had accomplished little for all the resources and lives that the effort had cost.