Science Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn’s sentence does what his career always did: it drags high-minded morality into the fluorescent-lit conference room where existential decisions get itemized, costed, and scheduled. Written in the shadow of nuclear strategy, it’s an attempt to seize the ethical high ground for deterrence and defense planning. The provocation is deliberate: in most moral vocabularies, violence needs justification. Kahn flips the burden. The real immorality, he argues, is passivity in the face of catastrophic danger.

The phrasing “almost any point of view” is a tell. It’s not philosophical humility; it’s a tactical move to build a coalition. Pacifist, realist, Christian just-war theorist, liberal internationalist: pick your framework, and Kahn wants you to feel cornered by the prospect of “very grave and terrible threats.” He’s sketching an ethics of responsibility that treats inaction as a choice with victims, not an innocent default.

Then comes the pressure valve: “even as there are limits to the means.” Kahn knew the critique aimed at cold-war “rationality” was that it could launder atrocity through spreadsheets. This clause concedes boundaries, but it keeps them vague, almost performative. He signals moral constraint without letting constraint disable defense.

The subtext is a rebuttal to both anti-nuclear idealism and fatalistic cynicism: if you refuse to prepare because preparation feels dirty, you outsource your fate to the most reckless actor. Kahn’s intent isn’t to glorify force; it’s to normalize planning for the unthinkable, while insisting that ethics must operate under terror, not after it.