"New developments in weapon systems during the 1950s and early 1960s created a situation that was most dangerous, and even conducive to accidental war"
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Kahn’s phrasing is clinical on purpose: “new developments” sounds like a trade-journal update, not a countdown to catastrophe. That chilliness is the point. Writing out of the 1950s and early 1960s - the era of thermonuclear leaps, ICBMs, nuclear-armed bombers on alert, early-warning radar, and increasingly automated command-and-control - he frames danger as an emergent property of systems, not a melodrama of villainy. The menace isn’t only Soviet intent or American bravado; it’s the machinery of deterrence getting fast, complex, and hair-trigger.
“Most dangerous” is a restrained superlative that lands harder because it refuses panic. Kahn is doing what his profession rewarded: translating apocalypse into risk analysis. The subtext is a critique of technological optimism. As weapons become more “advanced,” the margin for human judgment shrinks. Speed compresses decision time; dispersal multiplies failure points; delegation of launch authority (implicit in maintaining readiness) widens the pathway from error to escalation. “Conducive” is especially damning: it suggests the environment itself has been engineered to favor catastrophe, like building a city out of dry timber and then marveling at fires.
Context matters: post-Korean War militarization, the arms race, and the shadow of incidents and false alarms that Cold War institutions preferred to bury. Kahn’s intent is not pacifist lament but strategic warning: deterrence doesn’t just stabilize; it also manufactures novel ways to die by mistake. The sentence reads like an engineer’s fault report on civilization.
“Most dangerous” is a restrained superlative that lands harder because it refuses panic. Kahn is doing what his profession rewarded: translating apocalypse into risk analysis. The subtext is a critique of technological optimism. As weapons become more “advanced,” the margin for human judgment shrinks. Speed compresses decision time; dispersal multiplies failure points; delegation of launch authority (implicit in maintaining readiness) widens the pathway from error to escalation. “Conducive” is especially damning: it suggests the environment itself has been engineered to favor catastrophe, like building a city out of dry timber and then marveling at fires.
Context matters: post-Korean War militarization, the arms race, and the shadow of incidents and false alarms that Cold War institutions preferred to bury. Kahn’s intent is not pacifist lament but strategic warning: deterrence doesn’t just stabilize; it also manufactures novel ways to die by mistake. The sentence reads like an engineer’s fault report on civilization.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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