KAHN'S APOLOGIA

...All too often these are more exhausting than exhaustive, and in one or two instances it seemed to me that Kahn chose to illustrate his plea for strange new aids to imaginative thought by using examples that are utterly unconvincing, even ludicrous...

...However, history is littered with catastrophe unthinkable and unimaginable to its victims, who placed their trust in a logic of history which deserted them in their hour of need...

...His latest book has clearly been assembled with one principal objective in mind: to try to provide an apologia for the existence of those who, with Kahn, are systematically thinking about the unthinkable possibility of thermonuclear war...

...Much less emphatically, Kahn seems to come out favoring the kind of Counter-force Plus Avoidance strategy that falls so close to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's Ann Arbor proclamation of June 16...

...The bulkier interior of the book is devoted to what France's Raymond Aron, in his introduction, gently terms "Kahn's favorite method of exhaustive enumeration of hypotheses...

...Kahn seems to me to emerge from the pages of this book as a man sincerely trying to think about the unthinkable...

...Only in a few scattered passages does he indulge in that casualness about catastrophe that so maddened many who read his earlier book...

...I believe that Hudson Institutes and Rand Corporations and the ilk serve useful purposes...

...Thus, Hedley Bull, in his Control of the Arms Race, pub-ished last year, warns against putting thermonuclear war out of mind on any grounds that it cannot occur because it is just too horrible...

...Bull's words are worth quoting to underscore Kahn's thesis: "This view—is not often made explicit, but . . . lurks unstated in much of our thinking, and provides even the least metaphysically minded of us with a furtive source of comfort...

...He has also become noticeably less matter-of-fact about ticking off megadeath options associated with his long lists of alternative policies and war plans...

...The best chapters of Kahn's book are the first and last...

...Where Kahn does take a strong new stand (and this may surprise some of his past critics) is in the matter of world government: he is adamant that if weapon diffusion proceeds, we have at most a few decades in which to adjust to the idea of world government, or else...

...In his new book, Kahn again speaks out strongly in favor of much more Federal attention to civil defense, but Representative Albert Thomas' long knife took care of that one while this book was in press...

...Yet for all these technical shortcomings, the bulky interior is meant to spell out the important argument that the future is complex and unfamiliar, and we had better do all we can to think it out and to see that there are diverse groups and institutions devoting all their energies to this urgent task...

...Those same critics will find far fewer juicy quotes than before to document their view that Kahn is not man but monster...

...In the first, Kahn is fencing with critics of his earlier book in a lively and effective way...

...For the most part, Kahn is now much more noncommittal about tactics and strategies, because his main goal here is merely to illustrate their innate complexity...

...but as safeguards against subservient and inbred thought, I see need for a wide base of support crossing many agency boundaries and extending into the private foundations...

...And to insure open criticism of favorite policies and strategies, I would like to see many study groups and policy research projects established within the great American universities where there still rests a degree of independence of thought that the think-factories profess but have yet to document by example...

...Kahn passes off this danger with a few perfunctory remarks, yet my own experience makes me pessimistic on this crucial score...

...On balance, I would say that he achieves that objective...

...Some will damn a brand of thinking that admonishes us to "readjust to reality without being confused by past experience...

...In his main thesis that we'd better not hide our heads in the sands of past history, Kahn is only urging what so many other writers are telling us today...

...Some of Kahn's past critics, upon sensing that the above purpose dominates this book, will caustically urge that the whole thing is only a project-proposal-at-large for Kahn's newly established Hudson Institute, which is dedicated to thinking about the unthinkable in the no-holds-barred manner which Kahn illustrates in the rambling interior of this book...

...Since Kahn here surely does have his own Hudson Institute's interests in mind, even the reader who agrees that there are weighty problems crying for attention must be allowed a cynical question: Why doesn't Kahn make a more convincing argument that agency-supported "think-factor-ies" will not be subservient to their supporting agencies...

...Example: "It is difficult to visualize—at least in the Sixties—a likely sequence of events that would set back either the population or the wealth of the world by more than a generation or so...

...Though he has in the past appeared over-glib or callous in his analytical remarks on our thermonuclear future, I believe that even some of his stronger critics will, on reading his newest book, grudgingly admit that perhaps he is not really a monster after all—just misunderstood all too easily...

...but a sober, careful reading of what Kahn is trying to say leaves me with the fear that there is more truth than sarcasm in that admonishment...

...but, to repeat, Kahn grinds no one strategic axe in this book...

...in the last chapter, Kahn, with none of his customary glibness, reveals deep concern that our sands are running out faster than we think...

...Reviewed by James E. McDonald It is easy to see (and to understand) that the thunderous volleys which were fired from all sides at Herman Kahn upon publication of his ponderous 1960 volume, On Thermonuclear War, are still ringing painfully in Kahn's ears...