Kahn, H
conf 1975 oct houston; CIA notes/approve
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00308A000100020009-7.pdf
kahn an asshole; lovins; lester brown; dennis says alt to growth is not no growth, nor end of progress, notes growing inequality
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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/06/27/050627crbo_books
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn
Hudson Institute
In 1961 Kahn, Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen, founded the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization then located in Croton-on-Hudson, New York which was also where Kahn was living at the time. Luminaries such as sociologist Daniel Bell, the French political philosopher Raymond Aron and novelist Ralph Ellison, author of the 1952 classic *Invisible Man*, were recruited by the institute.
Stung by the vociferousness of his critics, Kahn softened his tone somewhat, responding to their points in Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962) and a further work on military strategy, *On Escalation* (1965). Between 1966 and 1968, during the peak of the Vietnam War,
Kahn served as a consultant to the Department of Defense and opposed the growing pressure to negotiate directly with North Vietnam, arguing that the only military solution was sharp escalation. Failing that, he said, the U.S. government had to have an exit strategy, and Kahn claimed credit for introducing the term "Vietnamization".[citation needed]
[ Later years
With the easing of nuclear tensions during the détente years of the 1970s, Kahn turned his attention to futurism, with its speculations about a potential Armageddon. The Hudson Institute sought to refute popular apocalyptic essays such as Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" (1968), Garrett Hardin's similarly reasoned "The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the same year, and the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" (1972). In Kahn's view, capitalism and technology held nearly boundless potential for progress; the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future.[citation needed]
In his last few years, Kahn moved further to the right, writing approvingly of Ronald Reagan's political agenda in The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social, and bluntly deriding Jonathan Schell's claims about the long-term effects of nuclear war. Kahn's 1976 book The Next 200 Years, written with William Brown and Leon Martel, presented an optimistic scenario of economic conditions in the year 2176. He also wrote several works on systems theory, including the well-received work Techniques in System Theory, as well as a number of books extrapolating the future of the U.S., Japanese and Australian economies.
Kahn died of a stroke in 1983, at the age of 61.
[ Cultural influence
Kahn was reportedly one of the models for Dr. Strangelove from Stanley Kubrick's eponymous film, released in 1964 (other prominent influences were Edward Teller, Robert McNamara, and Wernher von Braun). It was said that Kubrick immersed himself in Kahn's book On Thermonuclear War.Kubrick actually met Kahn personally, and Kahn gave him the idea for the Doomsday Machine, which would immediately destroy the entire planet in the event of a nuclear attack. In the film, Dr. Strangelove refers to a report on the Doomsday Machine by the "BLAND Corporation". The Doomsday Machine is precisely the sort of destabilizing tactic that Kahn himself sought to avert, since its only purpose was a threat or bluff rather than actual military application.
Also based upon Kahn was Walter Matthau's maverick character Professor Groteschele in *Fail-Safe*, in which the U.S. President (played by Henry Fonda) tries to prevent a nuclear holocaust when a mechanical malfunction sends nuclear weapons heading toward Moscow.
The band Megadeth got its name from the deliberate misspelling of the word megadeath, a term coined in 1953 by Herman Kahn to describe one million deaths, which was popularized by his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War.[^^2]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn#cite_note-1)
A satirical unit of measure, the Hermi, the name being an homage to the Fermi, was proposed: around 25 years in duration it was in line with the timescales often used by Kahn in his predictions.[^^3]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn#cite_note-2)
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http://www.nndb.com/people/583/000118229/
Hudson Institute Founder (1961-)
RAND Corporation Defense Analyst (1947-61)
American Civil Liberties Union
Americans for Democratic Action LIBERAL
First Woodlands Conference:
Limits to Growth, 1975The first Woodlands Conference was held in October 1975. The conference title reflected Mitchell’s desire to restate the original message by the Club of Rome: “Limits to Growth: The First Biennial Assessment of Alternatives to Growth,” which meant, in short, “Limits, but . . .” Mitchell was intimately involved in preparing the conference, more so than in later events. The problem “concerned me,” he said. “Therefore I took the time to try to think out what in the world was happening.” 10Dennis Meadows and John Naisbitt, then president of the Urban Research Corporation, served as conference directors. 11 The conference, held at the just-opened Woodlands Conference Center, was an enormous success, with five hundred attendees, large press coverage,
and the excitement generated at the event. Molly Ivins, coeditor of the Texas Observer, said in her review of what she called the “Doom Conference”: “I have seen the future, and I can tell you it is polysyllabic.” 12
The conference started from the premise that limits not only existed but were already having a negative effect on the global quality of life. Most participants agreed that there were some limits to be faced. They attempted to formulate a response: (1) Transition to steady state would have positive consequences for society provided action was taken in time; (2) Limits would have serious negative consequences if they were ignored so long that they began to intrude on social development; and (3) Growth had to be redirected by better balancing of economic, social, and environmental goals. 13
There were forty panelists and speakers, including Jay Forrester (who had designed the computer program that was used in the Limits to Growth study); the British economist E. F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful); World Watch Institute president Lester Brown; Herman Kahn, founding director of the Hudson Institute; Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine; Limits to Growth authors Donella and Dennis Meadows; and Ian McHarg, author of Design with Nature and planner of The Woodlands.
Other prominent speakers at the 1975 conference included Sico Mansholt (European Common Market), Amory Lovins (United Nations Environment Program), Elise Boulding (University of Colorado), U.S. senator Jacob Javits, Herman E. Daly (Louisiana State University), and Hazel Henderson (Princeton University). Many of the conference speakers became prominent in the field of sustainability studies in the years that followed. Reminiscing, George Mitchell described the highlight of the conference: a heated debate between Dennis Meadows and Herman Kahn. Kahn, a former staff member of the rand Corporation and founder of the Hudson Institute on future studies, spoke on the topic “Growth Is Good for You.”
He disagreed vehemently with the limits-to-growth thesis. Mitchell summarized Kahn’s position: “Just develop everything and technology will take care of everything.” 14 In Mitchell’s view Meadows had the better arguments in the debate that followed Kahn’s presentation, but he faced a formidable debater. Meadows put it this way: “Kahn’s viewpoint, which is shared by many other people, is that there are no limits. If something like a limit starts to show up, the market and technology will finesse it and let you keep going.”
Schmandt, Jurgen. George P. Mitchell and the Idea of Sustainability.
College Station, TX, USA: Texas A&M University Press, 2010.
ebrary collections. 25 May. 2014
. Texas A&M University Press.