Books by Herman Kahn

Probes the dynamics of escalation and demonstrates how the intensification of conflict can be depicted by means of a definite escalation ladder, ascent of which brings opponents closer to all-out war. This book asks the reader to face unemotionally the terrors of a world fully capable of suicide and to consider the alternatives to such a path.

On Thermonuclear War was controversial when originally published and remains so today. It is iconoclastic, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and finally it is calm and compellingly reasonable.

In this widely discussed and influential book, Herman Kahn probes the dynamics of escalation and demonstrates how the intensification of conflict can be depicted by means of a definite escalation ladder, ascent of which brings opponents closer to all-out war

?A primer on nuclear armtwisting. On Escalation is not designed to shock but to instruct--to show how we can use our atomic weapons and still, perhaps, come out alive.... Kahn constructs an escalation ladder by which nations can work their way up a series of forty-four graduated rungs from ordinary cold war unpleasantness to all out nuclear oblivion. With the aid of analogies from history and hypothetical confrontations at various points along the ladder, Kahn demonstrates some of the options that are open in the game of chickenmanship.?-New York Review of Books

From Simon & Schuster, Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s is Herman Kahn's revisiting of the classic work on nuclear war.Herman Kahn's brilliant, original thoughts on nuclear war generated widespread controversy following the 1962 publication of Thinking About the Unthinkable—those same thought (and controversy-stirring thoughts) are now available in an updated version.