{"product_id":"the-worlds-of-herman-kahn-the-intuitive-science-of-thermonuclear-war","title":"The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War","description":"\u003cp\u003eHerman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. Indeed  galumphing around stages across the country  joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario after another  he came frighteningly close. In telling the story of Herman Kahn  whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War catapulted him into celebrity  Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi captures an era that is still very much with us--a time whose innocence  gruesome nuclear humor  and outrageous but deadly serious visions of annihilation have their echoes in the \"known unknowns and unknown unknowns\" that guide policymakers in our own embattled world.  Portraying a life that combined aspects of Lenny Bruce  Hitchcock  and Kubrick  Ghamari-Tabrizi presents not one Herman Kahn  but many--one who spoke the suffocatingly dry argot of the nuclear experts  another whose buffoonery conveyed the ingenious absurdity of it all  and countless others who capered before the public  ambiguous  baffling  always open to interpretation. This  then  is a story of one thoroughly strange and captivating man as well as a cultural history of our moment. In Herman Kahns world is a critical lesson about how Cold War analysts learned to fill in the ciphers of strategic uncertainty  and thus how we as a nation learned to live with the peculiarly inventive quality of strategy  in which uncertainty generates extravagant threat scenarios.  Revealing the metaphysical behind the dryly deliberate  apparently practical discussion of nuclear strategy  this book depicts the creation of a world where clever men fashion Something out of Nothing--and establishes Herman Kahn as our first virtuoso of the unknown unknowns.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44965311217717,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674017145","price":30.34,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674017146.jpg?v=1770492564","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-worlds-of-herman-kahn-the-intuitive-science-of-thermonuclear-war","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}