Herman Kahn
Herman Kahn (February 15, 1922 – July 7, 1983) was a founder of the Hudson Institute and one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation. He became known for analyzing the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommending ways to improve survivability, making him one of the historical inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire "Dr. Strangelove". In his commentary for "Fail Safe", director Sidney Lumet remarked that the  Professor Groeteschele character is also based on Herman Kahn. Kahn's theories contributed heavily to the development of the nuclear strategy of the United States. Background. Kahn was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Yetta (née Koslowsky) and Abraham Kahn, a tailor. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He was raised in the Bronx, then in Los Angeles following his parents' divorce. Raised Jewish, he later became an atheist. Cold War theories. Kahn's major contributions were the several strategies he developed during the Cold War to contemplate "the unthinkable"namely, nuclear warfareby using applications of game  theory. Kahn is often cited (with Pierre Wack) as a father of scenario planning. Kahn argued for deterrence and believed that if the Soviet Union believed that the United States had a second strike capability then it would offer greater deterrence, which he wrote in his paper titled "The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence". The bases of his work were systems theory and game theory as applied to economics and military strategy. Kahn argued that for deterrence to succeed, the Soviet Union had to be convinced that the United States had second-strike capability in order to leave  the Politburo in no doubt that even a perfectly coordinated massive attack would guarantee a measure of retaliation that would leave them devastated as well: In 1962, Kahn published a 16-step escalation ladder. By 1965 he had developed this into a 44-step ladder. Hudson Institute. In 1961, Kahn, Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen founded the Hudson Institute, a think tank initially located in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where Kahn was living at the time. He recruited sociologist Daniel Bell, political philosopher Raymond Aron and novelist Ralph Ellison (author of the 1952 classic "Invisible Man"). Section::::"The Year 2000 . In 1967, Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener published The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years", which included contributions from staff members of the Hudson Institute and an introduction by Daniel Bell. Table XVIII in the document contains a list called "One Hundred Technical Innovations Very Likely in the Last Third of the Twentieth Century". The first ten predictions were: Later years. In Kahn's view, capitalism and technology held nearly boundless potential for progress, while the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future. Kahn's 1976 book "The Next  200 Years", written with William Brown and Leon Martel, presented an optimistic scenario of economic conditions in the year 2176. He also wrote a number of books extrapolating the future of the American, Japanese and Australian economies and several works on systems theory, including the well-received 1957 monograph "Techniques of System Analysis". During the mid-1970s, when South Korea's GDP per capita was one of the lowest in the world, Kahn predicted that the country would become one of the top 10 most powerful countries in the world by the year 2000. In his last year, 1983, Kahn wrote  approvingly of Ronald Reagan's political agenda in "The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social" and bluntly derided Jonathan Schell's claims about the long-term effects of nuclear war. On July 7 that year, he died of a stroke, aged 61. Personal life. Herman Kahn was the son of Abraham Kahn and Yetta Kahn. His wife was Rosalie "Jane" Kahn. He and Jane had two children, David and Debbie. Cultural influence. Along with John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun, Kahn was, reportedly, an inspiration for the character "Dr. Strangelove" in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick  released in 1964. It was also said that Kubrick immersed himself in Kahn's book "On Thermonuclear War". In the film, Dr. Strangelove refers to a report on the Doomsday Machine by the "BLAND Corporation". Kahn gave Kubrick the idea for the "Doomsday Machine", a device which would immediately cause the destruction of the entire planet in the event of a nuclear attack. Both the name and the concept of the weapon are drawn from the text of "On Thermonuclear War". Louis Menand observes, "In Kahn’s book, the Doomsday Machine is an example of the sort of deterrent that  appeals to the military mind but that is dangerously destabilizing. Since nations are not suicidal, its only use is to threaten." Publications. Outside physics and statistics, works written by Kahn include: Works published by the RAND Corporation involving Kahn: