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“... looking back, will see this as the age of Mao Tse Tung and Giap rather than Bernard Brodie and Herman Kahn. It was Mao and Giap who transformed the face of Asia, while Brodie, Kahn and the other American nuclear strategists could find no way of bringing nuclear power to bear in order to change the world. Would it ...”

“... For some years, 2000 has been rivalling 1984 as a golden number in the calendar of futurologists. It has now taken over. And while Europeans have been casting economic horoscopes for their continent at the dawn of the next millennium, nothing is good enough for their American cousins but a forecast for the great globe itself – hence Global 2000: Report to the President, the establishment of the Global Tomorrow Commission, and Global Future: Time to Act, with its list of a hundred recommendations ...”

“... to survive better than the Soviet Union. This argument was made more than twenty years ago by Herman Kahn in his book On Thermo-Nuclear War. Since then, it has surfaced from time to time, linked to wild assertions about the extent to which the Soviet Union has organised civil defence. Its latest and wildest airing came, as one might expect, from the ...”

“... free-market libertarianism of Herbert Spencer and F.A. Hayek, and the technological optimism of Herman Kahn or Julian Simon, post-scarcity anarchism asserts that, given existing and prospective technologies, there are no insuperable natural limitations to the growth of human population, and no forms of scarcity that cannot be overcome by scientific ...”

“... are sprinkled in among moderates, who find themselves side by side with the extreme optimism of Herman Kahn. Garrett Hardin and Barry Commoner point to the problems of co-operation and solidarity, Alvin Toffler calls desperately for responsibility, while others, pointing the finger of blame, use vitriol to stir up hostility. As well as being a ...”

“... Diplomacy is obviously one of them. During the year of the Cuban missile crisis the strategist Herman Kahn published a book on nuclear war called Thinking about the Unthinkable. The only way to avoid such a conflict, he insisted, was to determine, ahead of time, how one might fight it. It was an understandably unpalatable line to take, and ...”

“... launch a large second-strike retaliation.In this context it’s worth considering the lectures of Herman Kahn, collected in 1960 as On Thermonuclear War. Kahn believed that a cataclysmic nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union was imminent. He differed from others, though, in arguing that nuclear war need not ...”

“... realised in Nature so un-Coleridgean, as if the ‘damaged archangel’ had suddenly turned into Herman Kahn? Is there some way of conceding the incoherence of at least some of Coleridge’s thought while continuing to insist on his greatness? Because Coleridge isn’t in this book, in the way that he isin Richard Holmes’s recent, sensitive profile in ...”

“... preventing catastrophe or even that it was conspiring to bring it about. (In 1962, the war-gamer Herman Kahn suggested that we should begin to ‘think the unthinkable’ and work out how to fight and win a nuclear war, and in 1964 Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove made Kahn’s vision box-office.) The counterculture ...”