Alvin & Heidi Toffler - Global Gladiators Challenge the Power of Nations (2000)

 

Introduction

 

"The process under way now is as historically significant as the 30 Years War that ended in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, which laid the diplomatic groundwork for the now fading world order built around supposedly sovereign nation states."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TRADOC Mad Scientist Initiative - Visioning the Future of Warfare: 2030-2050 (U.S. Army, 2016)

Info

In November 2016, Mad Scientist launched its first Science Fiction Writing Competition with the topic “Warfare in 2030 to 2050.” We sought out unconventional thinkers and solicited their unique perspectives — we were not disappointed! With over 150 submissions from authors in 10 different countries around the globe, the diversity of input provided us with a wide variety of thoughts and ideas about warfare and the Future Operational Environment. Through the art of Story Telling, the Army was able to visualize the known, probable, and possible challenges and opportunities that the future holds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aurelio Peccei - The Human Quality (1977)

 

Description

 

An autobiographical statement of the author's belief in the global approach to development and world problems. How can the human species survive the crisis of its own extraordinary techno-scientific success? In this truly unique book Aurelio Peccei shows us that the solution cannot be found in external factors. It must lie in re-establishing a sound cultural balance within man himself so that he becomes capable of living in harmony with the new human condition and changed world environment. Only by a cultural revolution which changes the human quality can we control and orient the material revolutions. Aurelio Peccei's distinguished career in industry, conservation, international affairs and as a counsellor on major world problems needs little introduction. He was a founder-member of the Club of Rome in 1968 and has been a member of its Executive Committee ever since. Inevitably he draws upon his wisdom and experience to highlight the arguments in his book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aldous Huxley - A Positive Program of Research for Peace (1947)

Introduction

 

The military are "intruding" into science, because they hope that an increase in knowledge will lead to the development of more effective weapons. Scientists are advised by Dr. Ridenour to "resist intrusion"
to the extent that it threatens to degrade pure science into mere engineering by ProfessorWiener, they are advised to resist it absolutely and unequivocally, on moral grounds. This negative procedure of "resistance to intrusion" requires, it seems to me, to be upplemented by some form of positive action, designed to offsett he military program of research for war, and to render it unnecessary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alexander King - Education and Change (1956)

 

Info on Alexander King

 

Alexander King, who has died aged 98, was a pioneering scientist who warned of the dangers to the environment from extensive industrial development. He was one of the people who commissioned the 1972 Limits to Growth report, which triggered the first wave of international concern about the environment. This remains one of the world's largest selling books on the environment. He then became one of the founders of the international thinktank, the Club of Rome, which the Duke of Edinburgh has called the "conscience of the world".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi - The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (2005)

 

Info

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Dragos Aligica &  Kenneth R. Weinstein - The Essential Herman Kahn: In Defense of Thinking (2009)

Introduction

By the time of his untimely death in 1983, Herman Kahn was recognized by both friends and intellectual adversaries as “one of the world’s most creative and best minds.” He was one of the preeminent and best known futures studies scholars, a founding father of the field, with extensive and vital contributions to the debates on the nature of global economic development and its impact on human societies and their environment, as well as a key figure in the field of strategic studies, an area where he was also considered a founder and a leader. His work was followed all over the world and the directions he traced in the public debate on very sensitive issues of crucial public concern have continued to be unaltered today, more than twenty years after his unexpected death. Yet, in spite of the incessant influence of his arguments and ideas, today his intellectual legacy is still to be accounted for and the breath and depth of his contributions are still to be reviewed and analyzed in a systematic way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Herman Kahn & Irwin Mann - Game Theory: Military planning in a uncertain world (1957)

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