Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi

If history repeats twice, as tragedy and then as farce, this life and times begins with that bizarre moment back in 2002 when Donald Rumsfeld was holding forth in public on "unknown unknowns" while trying to explain the administration's security perspective, and the average person could only wonder how one could think like that. If the second tenure of Mr. Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense now appears to be an unfunny farce, the author then rapidly moves on to examining the tragicomic intellectual journey of the subject of her book, a brilliant and by all accounts humane individual who was for a time one of the most loathed intellectual figures in America.

As much a study of the milieu of the RAND Corporation as it is of Herman Kahn, the author concludes that the intellectual tragedy of Kahn and his compatriots was that of overconfidence in their new science of simulation, as they struggled mightily to understand how nuclear war might be fought, but could still only offer vague suppositions in the place of nothing, and wondered why a wide range of people recoiled in horror. This is exemplified here by Dwight Eisenhower, the ultimate example of the experienced military mind the RAND contingent tended to patronize, who could only conclude that he had asked the wrong question when presented with Kahn's epic proposals for civil defense; wisdom does trump technique.

If there is one chapter in this book that is particularly brilliant, it is Ghamari-Tabrizi's reconstruction of the state of humor and satire in America when "On Thermonuclear War" was published; the world of the sick joke, the heyday of "Mad" magazine, and the beginning of the whole assault on good taste and decency that was the Sixties. Not to mention the age of "Dr. Strangelove;" the irony of which being that a film meant to be a serious drama ultimately became an over-the-top satire, in part from Stanley Kubrick's interaction with Herman Kahn. The man did like a good joke.… (més)