''On Thermonuclear War'' is a

book A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physi ...

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 theo ...

, a military strategist at the RAND Corporation, although it was written only a year before he left RAND to form the Hudson Institute. It is a controversial treatise on the nature and theory of war in the

thermonuclear weapon A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a low ...

age. In it, Kahn addresses the strategic doctrines of nuclear war and its effect on the international balance of power. Kahn's stated purpose in writing the book was "avoiding disaster and buying time, without specifying the use of this time." The title of the book was inspired by the classic volume ''

On War ''Vom Kriege'' () is a book on war and military strategy by Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), written mostly after the Napoleonic wars, between 1816 and 1830, and published posthumously by his wife Marie von Brühl in 1832. ...

'', by

Carl von Clausewitz Carl Philipp Gottfried (or Gottlieb) von Clausewitz (; 1 June 1780 – 16 November 1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral", in modern terms meaning psychological, and political aspects of waging war. His mo ...

. Widely read on both sides of the Iron Curtain—the book sold 30,000 copies in hardcover—it is noteworthy for its views on the lack of credibility of a purely thermonuclear deterrent and how a country could "win" a nuclear war. Kahn used the term '' Doomsday Machine'' in the book as a rhetorical device to show the limits of

John von Neumann John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...

's strategy of

mutual assured destruction Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would cause the ...

or MAD.

Reception

Of the book,

Hubert H. Humphrey Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (May 27, 1911 – January 13, 1978) was an American pharmacist and politician who served as the 38th vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969. He twice served in the United States Senate, representing Mi ...

said: "New thoughts, particularly those which contradict current assumptions, are always painful for the human mind to contemplate. ''On Thermonuclear War'' is filled with such thoughts."

In popular culture

Kahn is sometimes credited with having coined the term ''megadeath'' in this book as shorthand for one million deaths. However, though the book does describe deaths in terms of millions, it does not contain the term ''megadeath'' and Kahn was quoted as having said in a 1982 interview, "I know of no analyst who uses the term megadeath. The peace people use it and they think we use it." The book ''The Worlds of Herman Kahn'' contains a footnote describing the use of the term in the headline of a 1963 article by

Marcus Raskin Marcus Goodman Raskin (April 30, 1934 – December 24, 2017) was an American progressive social critic, political activist, author, and philosopher. He was the co-founder, with Richard Barnet, of the progressive think tank the Institute for Poli ...

/ Lines from the character General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film ''

Dr. Strangelove ''Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'', known simply and more commonly as ''Dr. Strangelove'', is a 1964 black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and t ...

'' directly mimic passages from this book, such as Turgidson's phrase "two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments" which reflects a chart from this book labeled "Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States". Indeed, the folder that General Turgidson holds while reading a report on projected nuclear war casualties is titled "Global Targets in Megadeaths".

Tom Clancy Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. (April 12, 1947 – October 1, 2013) was an American novelist. He is best known for his technically detailed espionage and military-science storylines set during and after the Cold War. Seventeen of his novels have ...

's 1991 political thriller '' The Sum of All Fears'' quotes a passage from this book in the introduction.

Publication

First published in 1960 by the

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...

(), it was republished as a paperback by

Transaction Publishers Transaction Publishers was a New Jersey-based publishing house that specialized in social science books and journals. It was located on the Livingston Campus of Rutgers University. Transaction was sold to Taylor & Francis in 2016 and merged wit ...

in 2007 ().

References

Sources

* {{cite book , last=Kahn , first=H. , title=On Thermonuclear War , publisher=Transaction Publishers , series=War and Peace Research , year=2011 , isbn=978-1-4128-1559-8 , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EN2gtPTjFd8C , access-date=2022-04-23 }

External links

Essays about and by Herman Kahn
* ttp://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/06/27/050627crbo_books "Fat Man: Herman Kahn and the nuclear age"-(''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'') 1960 non-fiction books Military strategy books Nuclear weapons Nuclear warfare Works about the theory of history Princeton University Press books