Alec nevala lee5/24/2023 ![]() ![]() In her book The Worlds of Herman Kahn, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi relates:Įarly in life discovered science fiction, and he remained an avid reader throughout adulthood. As Louis Menand writes in a harshly critical piece in The New Yorker: “Herman Kahn was the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals, the men who, in the early years of the Cold War, made it their business to think about the unthinkable, and to design the game plan for nuclear war-how to prevent it, or, if it could not be prevented, how to win it, or, if it could not be won, how to survive it…The message of book seemed to be that thermonuclear war will be terrible but we’ll get over it.” And it isn’t surprising that Kahn engaged in a dialogue throughout his life with science fiction. Kahn died in 1983, but he still looms large over futures studies, and there was a period in which he was equally inescapable in the mainstream. At the symposium that I attended over the weekend, the figure whose name seemed to come up the most was Herman Kahn, the futurologist and military strategist best known for his book On Thermonuclear War. ![]()
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