The Worlds of Herman Kahn PDF Download

Author: Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674017146
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
In telling Kahn’s story, Ghamari-Tabrizi captures 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.

Author: B. Bruce-Briggs
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781411631960
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
The definitive biography of Herman Kahn (1922-1983), the renowned thermonuclear war strategist, futurologist, and polymath, written by a long-time colleague with full access to his papers and former associates. Describes his scientific, military, and political milieu. Thorough annotation. 12 pages of graphics; 472 text pages.

Author: Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674017145
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
In telling Kahn’s story, Ghamari-Tabrizi captures 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.

Author: Herman Kahn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351502204
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In this widely discussed and influential book, Herman Kahn probes the dynamics of escalation and demonstrates how the intensification of conflict can be depicted by means of a definite escalation ladder, ascent of which brings opponents closer to all-out war. At each rung of the ladder, before the climb proceeds, decisions must be made based on numerous choices. Some are clear and obvious, others obscure, but the options are always there. Thermonuclear annihilation, says Kahn, is unlikely to come through accident; but nations may elect to climb the ladder to extinction. The basic material for the book was developed in briefings delivered by Kahn to military and civilian experts and revised in the light of his findings of a trip to Vietnam in the 1960s. In On Escalation he states the facts squarely. He asks the reader to face unemotionally the terrors of a world fully capable of suicide and to consider carefully the alternatives to such a path. In the never-never land of nuclear warfare, where nuclear incredulity is pervasive and paralyzing to the imagination even for the professional analyst, salient details of possible scenarios for the outbreak of war, and even more for war fighting, are largely unexplored or even unnoticed. For scenarios in which war is terminated, the issues and possibilities of which are almost completely unstudied, the situation is even worse. Kahn's discussion throws light on the terrain and gives the individual a sense of the range of possibilities and complexities involved and are useful.

Author: Herman Kahn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000002780
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
This book examines the prospects for world economic development. It focuses primarily on the period from 1978 to 2000 and pays particular attention to the earlier part of that interval. The book examines some of the more immediate problems and issues associated with the process of economic growth.

Author: Alex Abella
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156033442
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind the American government for 60 years.

Author: Paul Erickson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604677X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

Author: Antulio J. Echevarria II
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107091977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Surveys how American strategic theorists have understood the nature and character of war in the twentieth century.

Author: Robert L. Holmes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400860148
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The threat to the survival of humankind posed by nuclear weapons has been a frightening and essential focus of public debate for the last four decades and must continue to be so if we are to avoid destroying ourselves and the natural world around us. One unfortunate result of preoccupation with the nuclear threat, however, has been a new kind of "respectability" accorded to conventional war. In this radical and cogent argument for pacifism, Robert Holmes asserts that all war--not just nuclear war--has become morally impermissible in the modern world. Addressing a wide audience of informed and concerned readers, he raises dramatic questions about the concepts of "political realism" and nuclear deterrence, makes a number of persuasive suggestions for nonviolent alternatives to war, and presents a rich panorama of thinking about war from St. Augustine to Reinhold Niebuhr and Herman Kahn. Holmes's positions are compellingly presented and will provoke discussion both among convinced pacifists and among those whom he calls "militarists." "Militarists," we realize after reading this book, include the majority of us who live a friendly and peaceful personal life while supporting a system which, if Holmes is correct, guarantees war and risks eventual human extinction. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: Herman Kahn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780739128299
Category : Forecasting
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Essential Herman Kahn offers the public for the first time an anthology consisting of the best of Herman Kahn's work. It brings together, out of the several thousands of pages published in his life, the 'essential Kahn'_the most relevant, consequential, and interesting the...