Science Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn is almost daring his own tribe to remember theyre human. Coming from a Cold War-era systems thinker famous for turning apocalypse into charts, this line reads less like a soft appeal to conscience than a hard warning about bad analysis. In the world Kahn helped build - game theory, deterrence math, cost-benefit rationality - the greatest temptation is to treat people as variables and ethics as noise. His phrasing pushes back against that, but in a characteristically technocratic way: human and moral factors arent framed as lofty ideals, theyre framed as inputs you ignore at your peril.

The repetition is doing quiet work. "Must always" and "must never" isnt moral poetry; its procedural language, almost like a lab protocol. Hes telling policymakers and fellow experts that values are not optional add-ons once the equations are done. They belong upstream, shaping the goals, constraints, and acceptable risks before policy becomes a machine that optimizes the wrong thing brilliantly.

The subtext is a critique of public discourse too. Kahn isnt only addressing war rooms; hes pointing at the way debates get flattened into metrics - GDP, body counts, victory probabilities - while the moral costs get outsourced to rhetoric or, worse, to silence. Read in context of nuclear strategy, the line becomes starker: when the subject is mass death, "missing" moral factors isnt abstract; its the difference between a framework that restrains power and one that launders brutality through expertise.