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Herman
Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a
living as a standup comedian. Indeed, galumphing around stages across
the country, joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario
after another, he came frighteningly close. In telling the story of
Herman Kahn, whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War
catapulted him into celebrity, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi captures an era
that is still very much with us--a time whose innocence, gruesome
nuclear humor, and outrageous but deadly serious visions of annihilation
have their echoes in the "known unknowns and unknown unknowns" that
guide policymakers in our own embattled world.
Portraying a life
that combined aspects of Lenny Bruce, Hitchcock, and Kubrick,
Ghamari-Tabrizi presents not one Herman Kahn, but many--one who spoke
the suffocatingly dry argot of the nuclear experts, another whose
buffoonery conveyed the ingenious absurdity of it all, and countless
others who capered before the public, ambiguous, baffling, always open
to interpretation. This, then, is a story of one thoroughly strange and
captivating man as well as a cultural history of our moment. In Herman
Kahn's world is a critical lesson about how Cold War analysts learned to
fill in the ciphers of strategic uncertainty, and thus how we as a
nation learned to live with the peculiarly inventive quality of
strategy, in which uncertainty generates extravagant threat scenarios.
Revealing
the metaphysical behind the dryly deliberate, apparently practical
discussion of nuclear strategy, this book depicts the creation of a
world where clever men fashion Something out of Nothing--and establishes
Herman Kahn as our first virtuoso of the unknown unknowns.