Page "Herman Kahn" Paragraph 10

Due to his willingness to articulate the most brutal possibilities, Kahn came to be disliked by some, although he was known as amiable in private.

Unlike most strategists, Kahn was entirely willing to posit the form a post-nuclear world might assume.

None of the conventional issues bothered him.

Fallout, for example, would simply be another one of life's many unpleasantnesses and inconveniences ; even the much-ballyhooed rise in birth defects would not doom mankind to extinction, because in any event a majority of the survivors would still not be affected by them.

Contaminated food could be designated for consumption by the elderly, who would presumably die anyhow before the delayed onset of cancers caused by radioactivity.

A degree of even modest preparation — namely, the fallout shelters, evacuation scenarios, and civil defense drills now seen as emblematic of the paranoid 1950s — would give the population both the incentive and the encouragement to rebuild.

He even recommended the government offer homeowners insurance against nuclear bomb damage.

Kahn felt that having a strong civil-defense program in place would serve as an additional deterrent, because it would hamper the other side's potential to inflict destruction, thus lessening the attraction of the nuclear option.

A willingness to tolerate such possibilities might be worth it, Kahn argued, in exchange for sparing the entire continent of Europe in the more massive nuclear exchange more likely to occur under the pre-MAD doctrine.