War & Peace Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn’s coolly qualified reassurance is the kind of sentence that only makes sense inside the Cold War’s technocratic bunker: a world where the unthinkable had to be rendered discussable, and where “nuclear war” became just another scenario to model. The intent isn’t to deny catastrophe; it’s to domesticate it. By front-loading “from a scientific perspective” and “some indication,” he claims the authority of measurement, then uses probability talk (“less likely”) to turn apocalyptic possibilities into tolerable risk categories.

The subtext is a bid for governability. If a nuclear exchange won’t “destroy” either “the created order” or “mankind,” then planning for it becomes rational, even moral. That’s the real move: to shift the policy conversation away from taboo and toward management - survivability, continuity, postwar rebuilding. Notice the phrasing “in the process.” It concedes horrors while insisting they remain bounded, containable, not terminal. This is escalation control as rhetoric.

Context matters: Kahn, a systems analyst in the era of RAND, wrote when deterrence theory needed narratives of endurance to be credible. If leaders believed nuclear war ended everything, deterrence collapses into fatalism; if they believed society could limp on, threats and counter-threats regain strategic meaning. The line about “created order” is especially revealing: it smuggles in a near-theological comfort, as if physics itself guarantees that history doesn’t get to end. The chill comes from how the sentence treats existential terror as an engineering constraint, not a moral abyss.