Politics & Power Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn writes like a man trying to smuggle moral urgency into the calm, antiseptic language of systems analysis. “Hopefully” is doing a lot of work: it softens what is essentially an indictment, a warning that the world’s most catastrophic technology is being managed with the complacency of routine bureaucracy. He’s not pleading for perfect safety; he’s pointing out how modern states rationalize risk until the risk becomes an event.

The key phrase is “refuse to accept a situation.” Kahn’s target isn’t the physics of nuclear power or weapons so much as the political psychology around them: institutions normalize near-misses, treat low-probability disasters as rounding errors, and only “learn” after a body count forces the lesson. By framing accidents as something nations might “accept,” he hints at a grim truth: acceptance is often what arrives first, dressed up as pragmatism, cost-benefit logic, or national security necessity.

Context matters. Kahn, a Cold War strategist and futurist, helped popularize thinking about the unthinkable - nuclear war, deterrence, escalation ladders. This line reads like the sober aftertaste of that project. Once you build elaborate models for catastrophe, you also see how easily humans mistake a model for control. His insistence on “correct[ing] a system which makes them likely” is quietly radical: it shifts responsibility from individual error (the scapegoat operator, the unlucky malfunction) to design, incentives, and governance.

The subtext is blunt: if you wait for proof, the proof will be radioactive.