Political science International security Military policy Nuclear warfare Nuclear strategy
Publisher
Princeton University Press (1960) Transaction Publishers (2007)
Pages
668
ISBN
9781412815598
OCLC
8546432
Dewey Decimal
358.39
LC Class
UF767 .K25 1961
Followed by
On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios
On Thermonuclear War is a book by Herman Kahn, a military strategist at the RAND Corporation, although it was written only a year before he left RAND to form the Hudson Institute. It is a controversial treatise on the nature and theory of war in the thermonuclear weapon age. In it, Kahn addresses the strategic doctrines of nuclear war and its effect on the international balance of power.
Kahn's stated purpose in writing the book was "avoiding disaster and buying time, without specifying the use of this time." The title of the book was inspired by the classic volume On War, by Carl von Clausewitz.
Widely read on both sides of the Iron Curtain—the book sold 30,000 copies in hardcover[1]—it is noteworthy for its views on the lack of credibility of a purely thermonuclear deterrent and how a country could "win" a nuclear war.
Kahn used the term Doomsday Machine in the book as a rhetorical device to show the limits of John von Neumann's strategy of mutual assured destruction or MAD.[2]
^Kaplan, Fred (10 October 2004). "Truth Stranger Than 'Strangelove'". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 January 2015. In 1960, Mr. Kahn published a 652-page tome called "On Thermonuclear War," which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover.
^Kahn 2011, pp. [https://books.google.com/books?id=EN2gtPTjFd8C&dq=%22doomsday+machine%22&pg=PA145 145-146.
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