War & Peace Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn’s sentence is a technician’s confession, delivered with the chill of a lab report: he has been running two mental programs at once, and he refuses to pretend that only the noble one counts. The first clause nods to the public-facing mission of Cold War strategists - “prevent war” - the kind of moral posture that makes nuclear planning sound like civic hygiene. The second clause snaps the mask into place: if war happens, he’s prepared to think through “fight, survive, and terminate” it as a management problem with phases, deliverables, and an end state.

That sequencing is the tell. “Prevent” comes first because it must; “should it occur” functions as a polite bomb shelter for what he’s really doing: normalizing the unthinkable. Kahn’s genius (and scandal) was insisting that deterrence isn’t sustained by pious hopes but by credible, explicit imagination. Survival is not an afterthought; it’s a variable. Termination is not a prayer; it’s a plan. The subtext is that refusing to model catastrophe doesn’t make it less likely, it just makes you less prepared and, paradoxically, less believable to adversaries.

Context matters: this is the voice of RAND-era rationalism, when “thinking about war” became a form of systems engineering and nuclear exchange scenarios were treated like grim actuarial tables. The intent isn’t bloodlust; it’s epistemic control. By turning apocalypse into an analyzable sequence, Kahn offers reassurance and provokes outrage in the same motion - a bracing reminder that modern security is built as much on imagination as on weapons.