Politics & Power Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn’s sentence performs a neat bit of technocratic sleight of hand: it begins in the language of balance and pluralism, then snaps shut into a single, non-negotiable priority. “Healthy and fully functioning” sounds like a civics textbook, but it’s also a diagnostic claim: if you disagree, you’re not just wrong, you’re sick. The early concession - “a variety of competing interests, all of which are more or less valid” - is there to pre-empt the obvious objection that security talk steamrolls everything else. He nods at welfare, culture, liberty, prosperity, then quietly converts them into items on a spreadsheet.

The key move is the final clause: “none of which should take precedence over national security.” Not “should routinely” or “in emergencies,” but should not, period. Kahn’s subtext is that tradeoffs are real, but the hierarchy is fixed; debate is allowed only inside the margins. It’s a worldview built for Cold War arithmetic, when Kahn’s brand of systems analysis and game theory treated nuclear deterrence as an optimization problem with moral consequences attached like footnotes.

Context matters: Kahn wrote from the era of think tanks, scenario planning, and “rational” nuclear strategy - a time when worst-case imagination was policy. The line is persuasive because it offers adults-in-the-room sobriety while smuggling in a mandate: once security is supreme, everything else becomes discretionary. “National security” functions as a trump card precisely because it’s elastic enough to absorb almost any agenda, and Kahn’s formulation gives that elasticity a cloak of scientific inevitability.