Abstract

The subject of the dissertation is the futurological problem of the containment and structure of uncertainty by means of systems analysis and related techniques in a book written by the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn entitled On Thermonuclear War published in 1960. The dissertation closely examines how Kahn articulated specific contents for fighting and and surviving a hypothetical and uncertain future war. Kahn considered his mode of systems analyses, scenarios, war-games, and analogies to comprise a scientific method which was both more comprehensive and more precise than the work produced by his national security counterparts. To a large degree, he attributed the greater definition and refinement of his method to the central importance it gives to the otherwise undervalued status of hypothetical possibility. ;His unbounded field of historical possibility suggests the primary epistemological question of the dissertation. In a situation of general uncertainty, how did Kahn draw forth the specific features of any individual condition? I will examine his employment of an abstract quantitative idiom in calculating risks, and his characteristic methods for circumscribing and plotting the scenario-sets which I designate as the dialectic of faith and insight. By tracing the articulation of the originating field, I shall identify the points at which Kahn set limits to hypotheticals. ;How did Kahn make the future an object of study? How did he block or limit the disruptions of variable uncertainty in his scenarios and calculations? How did he manifest his claim for the scientific integrity of his method? In consequence of my attention to Kahn's rhetorical and scientific performances, my review of his ideas focuses on the formal means of the futurological domain: its idiom, elements, themes, and combinatorial patterns. Only this close and serious scrutiny of Kahn's practices of composing the speculative object will yield an understanding of the specific form of planning which shaped, and one might even say, determined, the American nuclear arsenal