Herman Kahn

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Herman Kahn saw the glass half full. The futurist and systems theorist (mentioned at the end of the post on 1970s Swinging Singles) thought while nuclear war would be awful, it wouldn’t wipe out the entire species. There were varying degrees of awfulness. He was likely right, but his conversation about the end of much of humanity and his coining of the term “megadeath” made him one of the inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s titular Dr. Strangelove character. Interesting that even someone so associated with nuclear believed that solar was the future. The following is an odd and disapproving 1974 piece about him from something called IPS, which apparently was a press service from loony Lyndon Larouche, one of the strangest figures of 20th-century Americans politics, who turned 92 last fall:

IPS INTERVIEW WITH HERMAN KAHN: WOULD YOU BUY A USED FUTURE FROM THIS MAN?

NEW YORK, N.Y., Nov. 24 (IPS)–In a recent interview with IPS, futurologist Herman.Kahn confirmed that no one but a criminal psychotic could field “ideas” for the Rockefeller family. The portly Kahn, who is the founder and director of the Hudson Institute, gained notoriety during the late 1950s by calculating the number of “megadeaths” that could be expected as a result of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Also present at the interview was Professor Robert Mundell of Columbia: University. Mundell organized the conference of bankers and econcmistsheld near Siena, Italy in September, exposed by IPS as a planning session for the Chileanization of Great Britain and Italy.

During the wide-ranging discussion, the following exchange took place: 

IPS:

If you reduce the level of energy “throughput” into the biosphere, as the Hudson Institute proposes, you tend to set into motion entropic processes which get out of your control. The result would be an ecological holocaust. For example, in Brazil, where levels of nutrition and health have been reduced, you see the spread of new types of plagues faster than you can find vaccines for them.

Herman Kahn:

Well, there are two basic types of population curves, the up and down curve, where you expand population, overgraze, and so forth, and then have to reduce population. Or there is the collapse curve, where you have famine and disease. I would divide the world up into four categories. 1.4 billion people are “rich”–include Portugal in this. 0.85 billion live in Communist Asia. 1.05 billion are “coping”–like Mexico. and Brazil. That is, income is trickling down to at least one third of the population. People always misunderstand “trickle down” theories because they think wealth is supposed to get to the bottom. It never does … But there is no study which shows a correlation between hunger and disease. You won’t have plagues that kill half the world’s population. (At this point Mr. Kahn, who had ordered a Japanese dinner, paused to eat a raw squid.)

Robert Mundell:

No, we are about to have another plague. We have them every 300 years. You know, 1100, 1400, then–I forget the dates exactly.

Herman Kahn:

You mean the one in the eighteenth century where they all danced around?

Robert Mundell:

That was it. Anyway, every 300 years you wipe out half the world’s population.

Herman Kahn:

Oh, a cycle theory. I’m not sure about cycle theories…

Robert Mundell:

Well, anyway, I only make up these theories for fun.

Kahn, whose style is a blend of Jackie Gleason and Heinrich Himmler, turned his attention again to his raw fish, adding to the morning coffee stains on his shirt front.

Both these men, who have access to cabinet-level members of many governments,. have been touted as leading minds of the capitalist class. In fact, “Fat Herman,” as he is known to friends, is something of a public-display item, next to whom the other psychotic “planners” of the Rockefeller faction are intended to  look sane. 

Among his most recent efforts are a study of Britain, calling into question the country’s existence by the year 1980, and the preparation of a four-year development program for the “radical” government of Algeria.•

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Excerpts from two articles about Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which is one of the greatest films ever made, yet only my fourth or fifth favorite Stanley Kubrick movie, which shows you how highly I rank his work. It’s as perfect now as it was when released 50 years ago, as timeless as Patton or Duck Soup. In fact, it’s Patton *as* Duck Soup. It’s tremendously funny yet no laughing matter.

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From “Doctor’s Orders,” Bilge Elbiri’s 2009 Moving Image Source article explaining how a very serious novel became a Kubrick comedy:

After their initial drafts, Kubrick and his producing partner James B. Harris, with whom he had made The Killing, Paths of Glory, and Lolita, workshopped the script (then called The Delicate Balance of Terror) in New York. “They’d stay up late into the night cracking up over it, overcome by their impulse towards gallows humor,” says Mick Broderick, the author of Nuclear Movies and an extensive forthcoming study of Strangelove. Harris would soon leave to forge his own directorial career (his admirably tense 1965 directorial debut, The Bedford Incident, concerns a confrontation between an American destroyer and a Soviet submarine). But when Kubrick later called his former partner to tell him that he had decided to turn Delicate Balance into an actual comedy, Harris was skeptical, to say the least. “He thought, ‘The kid’s gonna destroy his career!’” says Broderick.

The absurd hilarity of the situation had never quite stopped haunting the director, as he and George continued to work on the film. It wasn’t so much the premise of the Red Alert story as everything Kubrick was learning about the thinking behind thermonuclear strategy. The director, even then notorious for thorough research, had become friendly with a number of scientists and thinkers on the subject, some with George’s help, including the notorious RAND strategist Herman Kahn, who would talk with a straight face about “megadeaths,” a word he had coined in the 1950s to describe one million deaths. As Kubrick told Joseph Heller:

Incongruity is certainly one of the sources of laughter—the incongruity of sitting in a room talking to somebody who has a big chart on the wall that says “tragic but distinguishable postwar environments’ and that says ‘one to ten million killed.” …There is something so absurd and unreal about what you’re talking about that it’s almost impossible to take it seriously.•

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From “Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True,” a New Yorker blog post about the scary reality that informed the nervous laughter, by Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control:

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American general could order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, without consulting the President. One reviewer described the film as “dangerous … an evil thing about an evil thing.” Another compared it to Soviet propaganda. Although Strangelove was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible. An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” (See a compendium of clips from the film.) When Fail-Safe—a Hollywood thriller with a similar plot, directed by Sidney Lumet—opened, later that year, it was criticized in much the same way. “The incidents in Fail-Safe are deliberate lies!” General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.•

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