Herman Kahn: Ideologist of Military Strategy

...Despite Kahn's concern for the problem of accidental war (including the ubiquitous threat of escalation from limited to extensive war), he has swept the dangers under his system net...

...VII James Newman, an editor of Scientific American, has wondered if there is a Herman Kahn...

...The virtue of the "moderate" case is that—assuming disarmament negotiations have failed—the minimum force needed to deter war is simply a second strike force...

...It is the basic lack of strategic coherence that in the long run makes his work both perilous and obfuscating...

...these are required either as a pre-attack mobilization, if we intend to strike first, or as a post-attack ruse to foil an aggressor that had crippled our own missiles and then held our population centers as "hostages" for blackmail...

...Deterrence, at least in its long-run form, also requires that the two sides be relatively equal in strength and determination, or else it will pay the stronger side to utilize its momentary advantage and launch a preventive (or surprise) attack...

...Either it would emphasize the need for disarmament and world government, or it would insist that counterforce tactical weapons are a dire necessity for an effective foreign policy in an age of nuclear conflict...

...Among the most distinguished of the "new men," blessed with and prodded by the vision of thermonuclear nightmare, is Herman Kahn...

...One suggestion that is offered is that the innovating nation turn over its weapons "break-through" to the enemy in order to maintain a nuclear symmetry...

...His two recent books, On Thermonuclear War,* and Thinking About the Unthinkable,** have bulged with premonitions, conjectures, abstract models and contrived scenarios of nuclear conflict...

...It is all the more pity, therefore, that he rejects the proposals of those minimum or finite deterrence advocates—the "non-provocative" and moderate men in the profession—who urge that shelters, first-strike bases and other "tactical" instruments should never be built...

...Can we be sure that a losing nation in a nuclear war would not go all out in a Doomsday-type maneuver and destroy its enemy, itself and the planet...

...policy would have to face a series of challenging crises in these volatile countries...

...The viability of nuclear war is discussed in two basic ways by Kahn...

...Some critics, like * Princeton, 1961...

...in their "softness," they are merely provocative and do not guarantee any retaliatory power against an enemy surprise attack...

...Recent occurrences do not give much support to the hope that the possibilities of accidental war can be eradicated...

...This new breed is composed of younger nonmilitary men with abstract research experience...

...At the very height of the Berlin crisis, when each side was hypersensitive to surprise attacks from the opponent, the SAC was put on a world-wide alert simply because of a communications failure in the radar system...

...Secondly, Kahn posits the feasibility of nuclear war upon the premise that the levels of destruction could certainly be less than catastrophic...

...stabilized when technological innovation is constantly introducing revolutionary elements into the system (e.g., improved anti-missile missiles...

...That is, its secondstrike capacity must be sufficiently invulnerable to ensure that a costly reprisal can be imposed upon the enemy...

...Immediately after air raids, martial law would have to be enforced to ensure an equitable sharing of the remaining shelter, clothing, and uncontaminated food and water supplies...

...He contends that most Americans are willing to suffer from 10 to 60 million deaths in order to fight off the Russians (above that figure, a moral issue seems to be involved...

...IV Kahn and his colleagues have been obliged to posit an ahistorical level of total rationality and predictability in the affairs of the nuclear super-powers...

...Should this dogmatism continue, either or both powers will be isolated from the tide of social and economic revolution that is sweeping through the hungry, tropical areas of the world...

...In a post-World War III era, such aid could not be forthcoming and recovery would thus be far slower...

...and that they do not dread the post-bellum character of life in a constrained and deprived garrison state...

...Gross military imbalance may always tempt action but only if the political bases for action exist...

...11 Kahn's basic procedure is to state his assumptions, offer possible alternative assumptions, assign quantitative estimates (even though many of them are just guesses) to various possibilities, trace a series of projected consequences and then launch upon a general tour d'horizon...

...Perhaps this rationalizing was seen at its very worst in the days following the President's announcement of the Cuban blockade...

...The people and their political spokesmen might be "soft" when they come to examine the callous and awesome prospects of a thermonuclear conflict, but at least they can foresee the despairing reductio-ultima of having to choose between red or dead...

...Hard" missile bases must be substituted for "soft" in order to demonstrate that the bases are not intended exclusively for surprise (first strike) attacks...

...impossible, no, as Kahn himself recognizes...

...Given the Soviet challenge, the rigid and unimaginative lines that the U.S...

...Nor would the righting of military inequality reduce political crises...

...He argues that if a first-strike capacity is penetrable by the enemy (i.e., that it could be blown up in a surprise attack) then it is not useful except for preventive or pre-emptive strikes...

...Contrary to the beliefs of those unilateralists and fatalists who refuse to look at "the facts," Kahn insists that thermonuclear annihilation can be carefully graduated, and that the threat of annihilation can therefore be viewed as a manipulable instrument of national policy...

...First, he argues that not all nuclear wars would proceed to the stage of full destruction...

...They are "cool," hard-headed, and unemotional as they contemplate the possibilities of 200 million deaths in wartime...

...This is the essential nature of the argument of strategic analysts who see international relations as a two-country problem, involving the U.S.A...

...Failing such arrangements by noon-time, it will blast the Soviets off the face of the earth...

...Unfortunately, it is the very lack of such confidence that frequently impedes conciliatory behavior at times of great crisis, as was seen in 1870 and in 1914, when the actual casus belli was withdrawn but the wars began all the same...

...manufactured its first A-bomb did not reduce conflict nor deeply inhibit the U.S.S.R.'s effort to achieve what it considered to be its indisspensable buffer zones in Eastern Europe (or even in Korea...

...The greatest reliance is placed upon improved communications between opponents so that a victim could be notified of an accidental triggering of first strike weapons before he is able to take retaliatory action...

...Can one have the confidence in the rationality assumption that Kahn and the game theoreticians have placed upon it...

...The harder bases may lead to more destructive weaponry being used against them...

...which prevailed until the U.S.S.R...

...Adventurism, competitive chance-taking, itchy trigger fingers, preventive war psychology, and blatant miscalculation would each result in dangerous misinterpretations of the enemy's behavior...

...Objective studies," he claims, indicate that the post-attack environment "would not be so hostile as to preclude, at least in the long run, decent and useful lives for the survivors and their descendants...

...In reifying military tactics and strategy, Kahn has obscured the concrete aims of peoples and governments and has reversed Clausewitz' dictum by making politics the servant of war...

...They wield considerable influence in Washington today...

...The Army and Navy would receive larger allotments for conventional fighting and retaliatory missiles, and the Air Force would specialize—if Kahn's tactics were fully adopted— in the aggressive instruments necessary to seize the initiative in a stra tegically-waged nuclear war...

...So much so that today, one feels, it is impossible to change American foreign or military policy without first challenging the postulates of Deterrence theory that have been advanced so successfully by the scientific strategist...

...This mode of analysis may spring from the fact that the theory of games originated as a two-person, zero-sum framework in which the winner takes all...

...Even if there were no Soviet threat, U.S...

...a nuclear blast triggered off while still in the sky may be the most powerful way of shaking up those missile silos, but it would maximize radiation hazards in those numerous American cities which are dangerously close to the silos...

...he is concerned with the threat of war and the self-generating possibilities of war in sensitive military operations, yet he sees war as a political tactic...

...If the two nuclear super-powers were to gamble frequently with such tactics for any length of time, it is unlikely that the world could ever regain either a rational or stable enough equilibrium to resolve its outstanding conflicts...

...Adept at mathematical formulations, they particularly lean on the theory of games to structure and compute conflict situations and their impassive outcomes...

...Another disturbing feature is that it would probably be a difficult political problem to remove a nuclear assault-rating once it had been attached, even if the attachment had been made to a prestigious but intrinsically worthless and indefensible bastion such as the Off-shore Islands...

...The essential point to note is that each of his premises is based not upon empirical evidence but upon abstracted inferences...

...In recommending the distribution of radiation counters to reduce the panic after a nuclear holocaust (lest the people confuse the nausea caused by the poisoned water supply with that of radiation poisoning), Kahn displays a human insensitivity that is quite astonishing...

...Together with Kahn, we may wonder if the Cold War could survive just one serious accident without some grave excess of brinksmanship following...

...Indeed, if it were possible to maintain the overt rationality and . effective communication which deterrence theory demands, it should be equally feasible to negotiate the basic issues of the Cold War and to reduce the tensions which daily menace the continuation of a peaceful co-existence...

...In order for "recovery" to take place after a fairly minor destruction, it is unquestionable that severe governmental controls would have to be exerted...

...If the Soviets should ever doubt the willingness of the President and Congress to abdicate power to the military, they would be entitled to doubt the credibility of the American response.* The automatic response approach assumes that events are clear-cut and easily readable...

...Since a "tit-tattit" (sic) exchange of cities might ensue, a rigid control must be exercised over all the button-pushers involved, lest the war "escalate" toward a limitless catastrophe...

...Hardened" bases—whether Polaris submarines, constant air-borne sorties of the S.A.C., missile sites buried in "silos"—are necessary to deter an enemy from engaging in a first strike or surprise attack, for the enemy would have to immobilize them with remarkably accurate missiles if it sought to blackmail the victim's surviving cities...

...on the other there are the optimistic schemes of political compromise and adjustment that determine the success or failure of our foreign policy...

...may respond with the destruction of Leningrad...

...Any student of public opinion analysis should know how intricate it is to measure and how quickly the changing of world events can produce a disproportionate change in the opinion set of a nation...

...Teller, too, has launched into an ahistorical utopianism in hoping that the world can arm itself against distrust, in order to "buy time" to establish an international order based upon democracy and justice...

...To preserve the peace one must prepare for a quick, tactical, first-strike war, Kahn advises, for this is the only effective posture...

...Given the rigid adherence at present to "nuclear supremacy" and to tactical nuclear bluffing, one wonders how many more journeys to the brink and back can be undertaken before the White House succumbs, too, to the canned strategies of our apolitical and abstractionist theorizers...

...The decisions for war and calculated destruction are made by people and not by military necessity...

...C. Wright Mills has aptly characterized this Euclidean system-building as "crackpot realism...

...Does the Soviet stopping of Western trucks on the autobahn to Berlin or the American pressure upon Laos suggest that "massive retaliation" is in the offing...

...military policy...

...What happens when nuclear weapons are more widely distributed (the nth-country problem...

...opinion, this does not necessarily mean that his conclusions are valid...

...On the one side there are the mechanical and essentially pessimistic formulae of the nuclear strategists, who daily await the onset of conflict...

...This assumption has already been severely questioned, and the doubts remaining can only be reinforced by the number of Intel ligence failures that have marred strategic planning during previous wars and crises...

...Further, he advocates that $5 billion should be spent each year on the shelter program and preparations to evacuate our major cities...

...The two strands of this assumption are, first, that total destruction is unlikely (since it is irrational from the point of view of the enemy) and, second, that recovery from less than total destruction can occur in a relatively short time...

...For example, if the Russians were to feel that the U.S...

...Since Kahn himself admits that no nation has ever lost—or ever would dare to lose-20 per cent of its population, this "non-offensive" deterrent should be far more effective and "safe...

...The military superiority of the U.S...

...The factor of rationality, therefore, will limit the contingent processes of nuclear war, and strategists will be justified in programming such "measured cadences of nuclear reprisal" as feinting bluffs, surprise attacks and "canned" reprisals...

...An automatic nuclear response can be automatic only if the military leaders in the field meet no political interference in making their decisions...

...There is some doubt about this contention...

...Brilliant, imaginative, and inventive where others are confused or fearful, their logical analyses have appealed to the new enthusiasts in the political and military Establishment...

...One can interpret much of what he says as encouraging the efforts to achieve disarmament (e.g., the emphasis upon the dangers of accidental war, or the provocative nature of ambiguous military positions...

...Kahn is particularly vulnerable in his public opinion analysis...

...This assumes, however, that each side can predict the opponent's movements with understanding and confidence and that it will not seek for hidden motives in the enemy's stratagems...

...and also that the dangers of radiation may lead to much more widespread debilitation than has previously occurred in wartime...

...His "sampling" of opinion seems to have been most haphazard...

...the encroachment upon the Monroe Doctrine, it was implied, was a far less serious offense...

...If the assumption of limited destructiveness were relaxed, the possibility of recovery would be all but ruled out, since the replacement of, say, 40% of the capital assets of a highlygeared economy might well take two generations—even in the conditions of peace time...

...He fails to admit, though, that after 1945 a considerable amount of aid came to the most battered areas from the outside, such as the vast American aid that went to West Germany or the transplantation of German capital goods into Eastern Europe...

...Another, more aggressively minded group, argued for action on the hazardous ground that it would be better to risk the death of millions of Americans than to allow Cuba to remain red...

...As is common with the new breed of anti-sentimental strategic "scientists," the result is a realism that starts with abstract assumptions, blots out much of the world's political experience and ends with big conclusions...

...In his effort to explore new hypotheses, Kahn often distorts his perspective so greatly that his strategic scenarios become further and further removed from reality.* And yet, it is Kahn's "realism" which is his pride and strong point, and also the target of his unrelenting enquiries...

...In many ways Kahn's work is more bizarre and sensitive to common-sense objections...

...All this conjecturing endears Kahn to the military services and appalls those more sensitive citizens who refuse to compute the pay-off of foreign policies in mega-deaths...

...that faceless evil he constantly anticipates) may decide to obliterate an American city one day...

...The technology of Deterrence contains a structural defect which can be minimized but not eliminated, for accidental war presents a series of forbidding probabilities that cannot be easily ignored...

...The enervating atmosphere of conflict may, in itself, lead to intensified technological rationality, but it is unlikely to promote the rational use of cool intelligence...

...The central assumption of Kahn's strategy is that of the feasibility of nuclear war...

...Kahn has succumbed to the favorite deux ex machina of so many social scientists—the improved quality of communications...

...Let us examine this latter contention and leave until later a discussion of the first one...

...Uncommitted to any narrow military policy, they operate from the premise that any unexamined strategy yearns for an imaginative "scenario...

...How can a symmetry of strength be * The admission that contrived "leaks" to the Press was essential during the Cuban crisis, to reinforce the credibility of our sticking to a collision course until the Soviets yielded, was just one further proof of the impact of deterrence-type thinking upon the present Administration...

...For example, he believes that hardened missile bases are not only less provocative than soft bases but are unlikely to draw devastation to nearby cities...

...The strong light that system analysts have shed on current military operations should not obscure the fact that their vision is based upon such questionable premises as the total rationality of conflict, the extension of communications, and the perfectibility of nuclear gadgets...

...2) The potential aggressor must be convinced that its intended victim would unquestionably carry out its threat to retaliate against an "intolerable" aggression...

...is mathematical in orientation and shows a distinct aversion to the more subtle, descriptive modes of strategic writing...

...Arms races engender distrust, and even Kahn concedes that our fear of fear, itself, is worse than our fear of the Soviet Union...

...but it has been precisely this quality of fantasyplus-realistic analysis that has confused his critics...

...If reasonably invulnerable, these missiles could be assured of wreaking an unacceptable amount of damage upon the aggressor's urban "hostages...

...Must there be a "heuristic" or accidental thermonuclear war before disarmament is viewed as a serious political possibility...

...111 The problem of credibility and symmetry are especially important to Kahn's system...

...Recent speeches of President Kennedy and the orientation of his policy often seem heavily influenced by the strategic analysts' ideas...

...Do his poll responses mean that people are willing to go to war with the possibilities of millions of deaths or that they think the willingness to risk destruction' will prevent war...

...In the course of his anti-sentimental analysis, Kahn examines the variety of military moves available—first strike, retaliatory second strike, Counterforce-plus-Countervalue, etc...

...4.95 James Newman in the Scientific American, bore an emotional revulsion against his outlook, while others, like Amitai Etzioni in the Columbia University Forum, failed to grapple with Kahn's system in its own terms...

...Since traditional military analysts are limited by pre-nuclear preconceptions and training, a new secular type has recently emerged to fill the gap: the system analyst...

...Judging from the postWorld War II rebuilding of the Soviet Union, Kahn estimates that the recovery period after a "counterforce" attack would be about ten years...

...Since it would be easy to fool the victim by assuring it that the missile flying towards it has been set off accidentally, or that it is a dud, confidence in the enemy's truthfulness would have to be total...

...There was no prior consultation in the decision-making and its political disunity might have been severe if the peakof the crisis had lasted for more than a few days...

...They demonstrate that the weakest element in his analysis is unquestionably the political one...

...Kahn emphasizes that the pattern of Russian and German recovery after World War II can be taken as predictive of post-World War III through VIII reactions...

...structiveness of nuclear war and the willingness of Americans to engage in wars of great destruction, Kahn frequently repeats, can both enlarge the range of alternatives and the flexibility of posture in U.S...

...There is one scenario that Kahn mentions but does not explore: the United States notifies the Soviet Union that it is now ready to surrender, but only if the surrender is operative before noon on that very day...

...In seeking for flawless syllogisms it disdains the subtle nuances of political action and human aspiration...

...Kahn's analysis is limited to two nations, unfriendly to each other...

...and the U.S.S.R...

...The industrial cities and the areas surrounding missile bases are most likely to be hard hit, but the "hinterland," less heavily attacked, would be able to rebuild the economic and military power of the nation...

...This is particularly noticeable in the nth country problem for Kahn does not worry unduly over allies, their reactions to policies, the need for compromise among them, their national interests, and the weaknesses of their collective decision-making.* His worst failure is the implicit conception that the problems of rational security can be neatly dichotomized...

...The "S.U...

...The signal defect of this excessively logical idealism is that it concentrates exclusively upon the abstractions of conflict and ignores the human capacities of compromise and political adjustment...

...A limited holocaust, in the first rounds of a game of chicken, would be of inestimable benefit as an heuristic device...

...Each side is expected to behave as if the fanatical hostility of the Cold War had dissolved and as if operational concessions can quickly be negotiated to obviate an exchange of cities...

...In postulating rationality, Kahn neglects the conditions which permit rationality to occur in international relations...

...Bernard Brodie faces this problem of irrationality squarely, in his Strategy in the Missile Age, while Kahn simply insists upon his subjective credo that button-pushers, even in the most tense and ambiguous of crises, would not enact their own "self-fulfilling prophesy:" i.e., by pushing all the available buttons in a spasm of panic...

...Heightened and continuous military pressures are likely to drive the Cold War into a state of instability that might severely undermine the logical patterns of Deterrence strategy...

...Kahn's perspectives appear to be even more limited when we contrast them to the torturous and confusing reality of the struggle to co-exist...

...This belief sustains him as he waves aside the prediction that martial law, aggressive economic planning, the suppression of political unrest and other garrison state measures might prevail even in the nation that "won" a nuclear war...

...Would behaviors and reactions be as predictable and rational as required by Deterrence theory...

...V In his efforts to scrutinize military policy Kahn recognizes that accidental war is an urgent and worrying possibility...

...Another technical deficiency in Kahn's reasoning is that he underestimates the human dangers and irrational procedures of nuclear war...

...An isolation of this kind might leave the fearful, nuclear owners in an unenviable position: their foreign policies would be reduced to a "nuclear nullity"—as Liddell Hart has put it—because of their armed and oversensitive mistrust, and they would be forced to act as conservative advocates of a status quo because of their fear of radical change...

...The likelihood of a limited nuclear war and of a partial survival must therefore be doubted as strongly as the capacity of a country to act with flawless intelligence and predictability, or its capacity to withstand and recover from a nuclear assault...

...Possibly over time this kind of super-rationality might emerge, but the biting question is whether unsymmetrical situations give us enough time for long-run solutions: to extend Keynes, in the long-run we are all rational and dead...

...Invulnerable deterrents can be assembled to "back-stop" the daring use of conventional arms, and second-strike missiles can be deployed throughout the world to deter the Soviets from following the same dangerous game...

...This Kahn disputes...

...Significantly, Kahn relies— as he ultimately admits in hoping that an accidental war will never begin— upon "faith" in the sanity of men: surely they will realize when the first tactical gambit occurs, that the retaliation to it should be similarly limited and not total...

...While Kahn would junk much of current military strategy and weaponry as old-fashioned, unanalyzed, and unproven in action, his tactical hypotheses should aid all the military services by providing them with new and extended activities...

...The chief difficulty with Kahn's book is that it is a study of war and its prevention that ignores politics and oversimplifies the complex realities of political conflict...

...Would the military strength of one nation be sufficient to deter several potential aggressors...

...Even assuming, though, that Kahn's unspecified collection of respondents had provided a sensitive profile of U.S...

...Would the Soviets understand and respect our touchiness about prestige prizes...

...It can quickly be seen, for example, that the difficulties of the U.S...

...Dr...

...But even if Kahn's assertion (that most Americans would accept 60 million American deaths as a legitimate sacrifice, to be "better dead than red") is well-founded now, would this resolve be maintained after destruction and death had begun...

...The sustained and unemotional quality of his work can be taken as representative of his strategic colleagues—Schelling, Morgenstern, Knorr, Kissinger, Wohlstetter, etc...

...With his general belief that most dangers can be overcome if intelligence is applied—"bright makes right"—Kahn launches into a discussion of fail-safe procedures...

...This critique attempts to test both the internal consistency of Kahn's analysis and the relevance of his findings to the tensions of the Cold War...

...Kahn dismisses this problem by saying that the blasted areas of the country should be written off, or that the high American standards of consumer comfort and of local government could be temporarily relaxed...

...However infinite the deterrent value of nuclear arms, there is always a sound reason for a country equipped with a superior arsenal to desist from striking, or for an inferior power to make limited encroachments outside its zone of influence...

...The scintillating and adventuresome logic of either school was replaced at the very climax, fortunately, by the diplomatic maneuvering of the political leadership...

...He admits that the destruction of any fairly prolonged nuclear war (a week or a month perhaps) would cause much more damage than that of World War II...

...The United States has initiated several false alarms and "Red Alerts" when its Early Warning radar screens failed to distinguish a flight of geese or the moon from a flight of on-coming missiles...

...If a nation is to be deterred by the threat of retaliatory military power from carrying out an aggressive act, two conditions must be met: (1) The nation utilizing the deterrence strategy must have the second strike (or retaliatory) strength to inflict an "unacceptable" amount of damage upon the first strike aggressor...

...otherwise they will be too provocative to the enemy.* Following this logic, he argues for the evacuation of missile bases in England...

...Replete with tabular presentations, it is frequently unashamedly slick...

...In listing some of the sources of system accidents Kahn makes a genuine contribution by analyzing the instability of sensitive, quickacting systems...

...action (i.e., in order to maintain the stasis of "nuclear nullity" implicit in the Balance of Terror...

...Would not symmetry be constantly endangered, particularly if political alliances were shifting, as well they might be...

...non-military causes...

...has been pursuing has led to recurring hot, tepid, and cold wars...

...In freeing military "hardware" and its disposition from foreign policy, Kahn has isolated moral questions from political considerations and military decisions...

...His work * Hanson Baldwin argues in the New York Times that it was the "soft" and essentially first-strike quality of the Soviet missiles in Cuba that made them unacceptable to the United States...

...Conceivably, they might be in the long-run, but it is getting us over the next ten years that is the crucial issue...

...Similarly, it should be seen that nuclear threats often provide merely the shadow of crisis and not the root cause itself...

...The deterrence strategists suggest a list of offenses which would in stantly be punishable by nuclear assault, and they envisage using conterforce missiles as the cutting edge of a new, offensive foreign policy (i.e., one of Controlled Threats and Reprisals...

...One group of strategists relied upon the sanity of the Soviets to refuse to respond to the U.S...

...Irrational, yes...

...How to govern military technology—which potential weapons should have priority in development, what should be the "mix" of weapons in the military arsenal—and how to relate military strategy to foreign policy have become awesome problems in the nuclear age...

...The likelihood of credibility in the threat would depend upon the untrammelled authority of the military decision-makers...

...The latter possibility—"standing up to the Russians"—seems to be closer to the current modes of American thinking...

...If we examine more closely what is likely to happen, Kahn argues, we can see that not all human life will be snuffed out by such a war if only because any sane aggressor would aim at the victim's retaliatory weapons (the "counterforce strategy") and not its cities...

...foreign policy—particularly in relation to those emerging nations that are undergoing a rapid social and economic change—presently stem from * Once again the Cuban crisis proved that the NATO alliance was not a mutualsecurity pact but a U. S.-controlled organization...

...VI While analyzing Kahn's work within his own frame of reference, we have ignored the relevance of external criteria...

...This does not assume that Soviet policy has been flexible and imaginative...

...10 ** Horizon Press, 1962...

...Moreover, is there in reality such an obvious set of national interests, unchanging over a period of time, that a list of unacceptable transgressions can be compiled...

...the U.S.A...

...The "realism" of the strategists is fundamentally a nuclear pessimism, compounded by a misplaced hypothesizing of human destruction...

...Even where imbalances do threaten to produce a decisive superiority of one side, inequities in striking power are not necessarily self-propelling stimuli towards political and military action...

...If there is a Herman Kahn, then he must be a packaged Ellery Queen of the strategic school because his quixotic and quicksilver writings take so many varied and apparently inconsistent positions...

...This allows him to draw a wide (and often contradictory) series of conclusions—ranging from provocative first-strike schemes at one extreme, to careful arms reduction plans at the other...

...This may be an act of the highest ultimate rationality, but it is most unlikely in the present political situation...

...might not carry out the threat to bomb Moscow in case Soviet troops invaded West Berlin, then the whole strategy of deterrence would lose its effective credibility...

...The non-total de...

...If politicians in Washington make the decision, then automaticity does not occur, not even if "hard talk" should become the propaganda specialty of the White House...

...The Bay of Pigs fiasco notwithstanding, this doctrine of supremacy of nuclear arms still prevails in Washington...

...He is a stern critic of the military establishment but wants to augment military activity...

...The more diversified the military establishment and the more sensitive the weapons in the thermonuclear arsenals, the greater will be the dangers of accidental war, Kahn argues that hardened bases can reduce the dangers since immediate retaliation against the enemy would not be necessary (i.e., as a form of counterforce insurance...

...That the Soviets might object to the current American strategy of a preponderant, first-strike capability is a refinement that fails to worry Kahn...

...Nevertheless, he is a pathfinder for the military...

...This competition to threaten and counter-threaten can quickly deteriorate, especially in an unyielding conflict such as that in Berlin, to a nonsensical game of "chicken...

...Kahn emerges at this point with a series of estimates based upon his personal opinion polling and subjective inferences...

...Kahn's major assumption is that nuclear war can be less than catastrophic...

...A map of these likely targets that wad prepared for Congress last year showed that practically every big city would stand within lethal range of an attack that concentrated upon our SAC and missile bases...