Australian Left Review
Article Title
Books: 4. On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios
Abstract
HERMAN KAHN, a mathematician rumoured to have an IQ of over 200, once referred to himself as an “amateur strategist”. But since the conditional acceptance of his style of strategy by the US administration he has moved into the lucrative and powerfield of prediction and pontificating — his Hudon Institute team is now “investigating” the twenty-first century. However, in greater measure even than similar general theories of the Buckminister Fuller/Marshall McLuhan type, Kahn trades in errors of fact and in generalisation so loose it can be shown to be untrue (see the discussion of his first two books in Dissent, X, i, 1963).
This paper has been withdrawn.