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Reviews
"… [an] LSD-trip of a book …"
“Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi’s The Worlds of Herman Kahn is an attempt to look at Kahn as a cultural phenomenon. …Ghamari-Tabrizi thinks that if nuclear strategy is a science, it is, at best, an 'intuitive science,' more imaginative than empirical, and she relies a lot on the vocabulary of literary criticism to interpret it: the grotesque, the fantastic, the uncanny, the hardboiled, the 'aesthetic of spontaneity,' 'serious play.' She does not withhold judgment about the merits of Kahn’s work, but she is interested mainly in the feel of the moment, the moods and tastes of a time when the Cold War, and the anxious talk that swirled around it, had many Americans scared almost to death. It is an adventurous approach and rewarding when it works.”
“Ghamari-Tabrizi …. tracks his uncanny ideas and public meanings and in the process excavates the Cold War in ways that resonate eerily with the present war on terror. … Kahn in her text is a performance artist, a devotee of science as comic metaphysics, and a master of artful intuition and artificial experience. … Ghamari-Tabrizi has produced an affecting and intelligent portrait of a Cold War figure who can still puzzle and amaze.”
“Well-written and straddling the worlds of wonk-talk and pop culture,
the narrative meanders comfortably – it is Kahn … against a
colorful, shifting … backdrop, a time when nuclear war was a thing
people really worried about. For talking about it frankly and with a sense
of humor, Kahn was both praised and reviled. Ghamari-Tabrizi’s own
tone, irreverent and incisive, is a perfect match for her fascinating subject.”
“The Worlds of Herman Kahn does not evaluate the validity of Kahn’s stratagems. Instead, Ghamari-Tabrizi tells us ‘we can more sensitively explore the cold war by referring to a shape of feeling. If we foreground the cognitive and emotional palette of these years rather than its pathology, we can enter vitally into its world.’ Ghamari-Tabrizi succeeds admirably in this reconstruction; the book is peppered with amusing, startling, and unsettling artifacts of Kahn’s world. … She’s persuasive when she places within of the frame [of the uncanny and the fantastic] Kahn’s enthusiasm for simulation, abstraction, and the limitless possibilities of the mind.”
“[In her] … highly engaging book, … Ghamari-Tabrizi sets out with gusto to attack what she calls Kahn’s ‘comic metaphysics.’”
“This is a thoroughly researched and well-written and argued book – much more readable than either of Kahn’s ponderous tomes.”
“In her… artfully written study, Ghamari-Tabrizi evokes the intellectual climate at RAND and paints a vivid picture of Kahn in action. …[She is] … on the mark when she sees traces of Kahn’s ‘strategic futurology’ in Donald Rumsfeld’s fear of ‘unknown unknowns.’”
“Kahn’s great strength was as a horror-story teller, using nuclear grotesquerie instead of ghosts and goblins. Ghamari-Tabrizi rightly connects him to … horrifically surreal… The author briefly and deftly connects the metaphysics of Kahn to those of … Donald Rumsfeld. … Sadly, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi’s book, which offers significant insight into Kahn, is more than just a chronicle of the past. It is an account, too, of the present, in which many of Kahn’s self-anointed successors are still riding high. And it might also be a guide to an increasingly dangerous future, in which Kahn’s memory is trampled under the thudding hooves of Four Apocalyptic Horsemen.”
“As Dr Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi makes clear in her new biography of Kahn, The Worlds of Herman Kahn, his insouciance unleashed a firestorm of controversy. Kahn's book dealt with the question everyone wanted answered but few felt brave enough to ask: just how bad would a thermonuclear war be? …What prompted [public] outrage was not so much Kahn's aim but his methods. In his book, he pointed out that, dreadful as an exchange of H-bombs might be, there were degrees of dreadfulness - arguing that just as having one loose lion roaming the city streets is worrying but survivable, a hundred lions could really ruin your day.”
"Herman Kahn is perhaps best known (to those who know of him at all) as the model for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. In fact, this physicist turned defense analyst achieved notoriety in the 1950s and '60s by articulating a vision of what a postnuclear-war world might look like, arguing that since it might be possible to survive a nuclear war, it was essential to plan to do just that. Ghamari-Tabrizi is superb at providing, in compelling narrative, the cultural context for Kahn, his work and some of his more outlandish statements...He was vilified for his beliefs and, as the author so capably demonstrates, he seemed to love every second of it ...Ghamari-Tabrizi provides a fascinating look at a complex man--at once 'visionary' and 'quixotic'--who was thinking, as the author says, about the unthinkable."
"In 1961, Amitai Etzioni said that Herman Kahn 'does for nuclear arms what free-love advocates did for sex: he speaks candidly of acts about which others whisper behind closed doors.' Kahn, one of the nuclear analysts whom the RAND Corporation paid to think about the unthinkable, did not just stand out from his cold-blooded brethren; he ballooned out from them. This 'artless, sweaty man,' wheezing and gulping down water, was almost cartoonishly fat, a rotund prophet giggling at the apocalypse. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi's suitably macabre The Worlds of Herman Kahn shows us both the clownish appearance and the deadly serious mind."
"Ghamari-Tabrizi exposes the direct line of descent between Kahn's confections and Donald Rumsfeld. ... On Kahn's nuclear world, her book is a tour de force, so to speak."
"Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi delves into the remarkable and terrifying world of Herman Kahn, offering a unique portrait of the analyst who gleefully articulated a vision of a survivable post-nuclear war world. Highlighting Kahn’s infamous jokes about mass annihilation as well as quirks of the Cold War era—the high consumption of tranquilizers—Ghamari-Tabrizi describes the occult culture at the RAND Corporation, where Kahn and his fellow nuclear researchers sought to fill in the blanks of strategic uncertainty. At RAND, Kahn used systems analysis and mathematical and scientific tools to forecast, among other things, extravagant threat scenarios. Khan’s 1961 book, On Thermonuclear War, was the first effort to explore the possible effects and strategic options of nuclear war. The author hints that Kahn’s complex vision of civil defense—200 million underground shelters—might have unintentionally helped convince President Dwight Eisenhower that American society could not survive and rebuild from a nuclear war."
"Herman Kahn (1922-83) was a cold war original whose notoriously sensational ideas, embodied in his On Thermonuclear War (1960), were later satirized in Dr. Strangelove . Though the inspiration for the movie's namesake character, the real Kahn could not have been less menacing. A rotund, joke--cracking extrovert, the loquacious Kahn reveled in prodding presumptions that nuclear war was too horrible to contemplate. The contrast between Kahn's joviality and his apologia for global genocide is one of the worlds of Kahn that Ghamari-Tabrizi surveys. Others are Kahn's think-tank society of civilian defense intellectuals and their simulations of warfare, and her consideration of Kahn's ruminations about waging and surviving nuclear war 'as a style, a mood, and an aesthetic.' If it seems strange to treat theories of nuclear warfare as an art form, the fantastical scenarios that Kahn batted around justify Ghamari-Tabrizi's approach. Her exploration of Kahn falls in line with the contemporary fad for demented comedy, and a Ghamari-Tabrizi unbounded by a political-science stricture will attract readership beyond the wonks."
"Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi's study is valuable not only for its insights into a figure now rapidly fading into a footnote to the Cold War, but for her chapters of social history. In a chapter on "The Comedy of the Unspeakable," she delves into sick jokes, Lenny Bruce, horror comics, and Mad magazine. Finally, in "Mass Murder or the Spirit of Humanism," she surveys the philosophical responses to Kahn's vision of what to do about achieving peace and security in a world threatened by annihilation. Ghamari-Tabrizi has written a fine study of an unusual genius and of a crucial period of American history."
“Ghamari-Tabrizi makes the connections between Kahn’s image in pop culture and the remarkable shift that brought civilian analysts and game theorists to positions of influence at the expense of more traditional military analysts.”
"A highly engaging account of Herman Kahn through 1962 as seen by a wide range of people.”
“This eloquently penned biography of ‘our first Virtuoso of the unknown unknowns’ displays both the wit of Kahn as well as his dark genius.” Reviews in Academic Journals “Rather than framing her study as a traditional biography, Ghamari-Tabrizi weaves in and out of Kahn's life story to develop a broader argument about shifting sources of authority in the nuclear age. ... Ghamari-Tabrizi is at her most creative when trying to place Kahn's bizarre style into a broader cultural context ... in an effort to discern how readers at the time might have encountered Kahn's strange book. These sections are where The Worlds of Herman Kahn no doubt represents one of the most original and thought-provoking books about science, culture, and politics during the Cold War."
“Ghamari-Tabrizi's book ... is an outstanding cultural and social history, a reconstruction of the 'atmospheric mood and style' of the Cold War. ... The uncertainties, the sense of imminent war and the feeling of inevitability of global catastrophe together with the ways the society and daily life adjusted to them are beautifully captured and depicted. ... Ghamari-Tabrizi not only reconstructs the matrix of a strategic intellectual culture but also relates it to the broader cultural and intellectual context. ... A sincere, thoughtful, sophisticated and largely successful attempt to escape the intellectual and academic clichés of the moment regarding war, military, strategic thinking and the human condition in conflict situations, Ghamari-Tabrizi's book is a remarkable endeavor both in its arguable shortcomings and its incontestable achievements. "
“Ghamari-Tabrizi's approach is unusual and refreshing. While her work is not easily pigeonholed as biography or history, she succeeds in capturing a unique twentieth century cultural and political milieu in which the cataclysmic end of human civilization within the space of a few hours ... was a possibility. ... The Worlds of Herman Kahn is a thought-provoking and enjoyable work about an enigmatic though influential figure in Cold War history. "
“With this engaging study of Kahn’s thinking, independent scholar Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi has produced an engaging book which is almost as idiosyncratic and colourful as Kahn himself. …Ghamari-Tabrizi certainly approaches American strategic thought from an angle rarely seen in the existing literature. Whatever one’s view of her methodology she most certainly makes the reader think. For this she should be congratulated. Moreover, given Kahn’s own gift for creative exaggeration and hyperbole, such an approach is probably best suited to analyzing his work of all the nuclear strategists.” — Robert Ayson, Contemporary Security Policy, 27(3), 2006
"Accepted on its own terms, The Worlds of Herman Kahn can provide the sorts of tools necessary to yield entirely fresh insights into the planning and strategic thinking that shaped the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s."
“Clearly, the author views systems analysis and the pretensions of the ‘simulationists,’ whose gaming techniques tended to become ubiquitous in government agencies and which she discusses at some length, with great skepticism. …[Her] discussion of systems analysis is insightful and worth reading.” — Thomas A. Julian, Journal of Military History, 71(1), 2007
"This impressively researched and highly readable book offers a revealing picture of key players in the drama of American technological-societal interaction during the age of anxiety we call the Cold War. ... Ghamari-Tabrizi's volume is well worth reading, providing a very insightful, even entertaining view of the worlds of Herman Kahn."
-- James F. Dunnigan, The NYMAS Review, a publication of the New York Military Affairs Symposium, 33, Winter 2004-2005
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