1. Herman Kahn was an American physicist and a founding member of the Hudson Institute, regarded as one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century.
17 Facts About Herman Kahn
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Herman Kahn originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation.
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Herman Kahn analyzed the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommended ways to improve survivability during the Cold War.
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Herman Kahn's theories contributed to the development of the nuclear strategy of the United States.
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Herman Kahn was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, as one of three sons to Yetta and Abraham Herman Kahn, a tailor.
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Herman Kahn was raised in the Bronx, then in Los Angeles following his parents' divorce in 1932.
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Herman Kahn graduated from Fairfax High School in 1940 and enlisted in the United States Army in May 1943, serving during the Burma campaign in World War II in a non-combat capacity as a telephone lineman.
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Herman Kahn received a Bachelor of Science at UCLA and briefly attended Caltech to pursue a doctorate before dropping out with a Master of Science due to financial constraints.
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Herman Kahn joined the RAND Corporation as a mathematician after being recruited by fellow physicist Samuel Cohen.
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Herman Kahn is often cited as a father of scenario planning.
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Herman 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".
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Herman 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:.
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Herman Kahn recruited sociologist Daniel Bell, political philosopher Raymond Aron and novelist Ralph Ellison.
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Herman Kahn 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.
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In 1970, Herman Kahn published the book The Emerging Japanese Superstate in which he claimed that Japan would play a large role in the world equal to the Soviet Union and the United States.
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Herman 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.
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Herman Kahn inspired the character of Professor Groeteschele in the 1964 film Fail Safe.