Herman Kahn is back in the news.
He was the great geo-strategist, the ultimate doomsday game-theory player and the model for Peter Sellers' character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie of that name subtitled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Some of the mad doctor's dialogue in the film is lifted from Kahn's writing.
Kahn believed that nuclear war was not only highly likely, but winnable. He wrote and spoke of tolerable levels of victims in the tens of millions. He crunched his numbers, according to the game theory that he helped to refine, and found the United States coming out on top. The term "escalation" is attributed to Kahn; and in a Cold War era plagued by fear stemming from the nuclear powers' deterrence strategy of mutually assured destruction (MAD), it was comforting to refer to his message: that, scientifically analyzed, America's future was secure, if somewhat blistered by the death fires of internecine war.