On Thermonuclear War

And as one of the cardinals of that church, Herman Kahn, my old colleague, uh, used to think really, refusing to, uh, think in this particular way, always the comparison, always what is the pragmatic best thing to do under the circumstances, always to plan, always to calculate, that that really overshadowed, I know in his mind and in a lot of people that I worked with, any question of the, the content of the actions, the impact on the world of a particular action.

The question was, how did you arrive at this particular reasonable choice? Kahn's first book, you know, was called, um, On Thermonuclear War, which defined our subject, and his second book was called Thinking About the Unthinkable.

And he used to love to think aloud about the unthinkable.

And a lot of what he said, uh, I didn't like the tone of, the way he said it, but a lot of what he said made sense to me at the time, and at the same time made me uneasy.