Herman Kahn (born Feb. 15, 1922, Bayonne, N.J., U.S.—died July 7, 1983, Chappaqua, N.Y.) was an American physicist, strategist, and futurist best known for his controversial studies of nuclear warfare.
Kahn graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1945. Over the next three years he worked for several aircraft-manufacturing companies and completed his master’s degree at the California Institute of Technology. In 1948 he joined The RAND Corp., a private research centre largely funded by the U.S. Air Force, where he studied the application to military strategy of such new analytic techniques as game theory, operations research, and systems analysis.
Kahn came to public notice with the publication of On Thermonuclear War (1960), in which he presented his proposition that thermonuclear war differs only in degree and not in kind from conventional war and ought to be analyzed and planned in the same way. In 1961 Kahn left RAND and established the Hudson Institute (for research into matters of national security and public policy) at Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., where he served as chairman and director of research.
Among Kahn’s other books were Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962), The Emerging Japanese Superstate (1970), The Next 200 Years (with W. Brown and L. Martel, 1976), and The Coming Boom (1982).