Volume 4, Number 12 · July 15, 1965
Up the Doomsday Ladder
By Ronald Steel
On Escalation—Metaphors and Scenarios
by Herman Kahn
Praeger, 300 pp., $6.95
Nuclear War: The Impending Strategic Deadlock
by Neville Brown
Praeger, 227 pp., $6.50
If Herman Kahn didn't exist, he would have to be invented. Indeed, he already has been. He is Dr. Strangelove, plotting 'megadeaths' on computers deep in the bowels of the Pentagon. He is Dr. No, lying awake nights thinking of ways to plunge the world into an atomic Götterdämmerung. He is Dr. Mabuse, armed with 'kilotons' and cobalt bombs. He is Our Lord of the Doomsday Machine, the evil genius that the atomic age has brought upon himself. No wonder we all find him so horrifying. He forces us to think impure thoughts and gaze into the technological abyss created by our own political ineptitude.
Review, 2603 words
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