Kahn, Herman

Kahn, Herman kän, 1922–83, American military strategist. b. Bayonne, N.J. After graduate work in physics at the California Institute of Technology, he joined theRand Corporation. Unlike scholars such as BernardBrodie, he believed that nuclear war could be won. At Rand, he studied the application of such analytic techniques as game theory and systems analysis to military theory. In 1961 he founded the Hudson Institute, where he conducted research into questions of national security and the future. His writings includeOn Thermonuclear War(1961),Thinking about the Unthinkable(1962),On Escalation(1965),The Emerging Japanese Superstate(1970),The Future of the Corporation(1974),The Japanese Challenge(1979), andThinking about the Unthinkable in the 1980s(1984).

See biography by B. Bruce-Briggs (2000); study by S. Ghamari-Tabrizi (2005).

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