"Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity"
About this Quote
Kahn is needling a moral reflex: the desire to turn a terrifying, abstract risk into a concrete villain you can hate. By calling nuclear war "such an emotional subject", he’s not offering sympathy; he’s diagnosing how panic short-circuits analysis. The line pivots on "the weapons themselves" as "the common enemy" - a phrasing that gently mocks the comforting fantasy that you can exorcise the danger by condemning an object, rather than confronting the political choices and strategic incentives that make the object relevant.
The intent is characteristically Kahn-esque: to pull the conversation away from taboo and toward systems. In the Cold War world he inhabited, nuclear weapons weren’t just instruments of annihilation; they were also instruments of bargaining, deterrence, and status. Treating them as a standalone moral contaminant lets states and publics avoid harder questions about escalation control, misperception, alliance commitments, and the human appetite for brinkmanship. It also smuggles in a kind of absolution: if the bomb is the enemy, then the people designing doctrines, building arsenals, and playing chicken with them are merely corrupted by circumstance.
Subtextually, Kahn is arguing for a colder kind of responsibility. You don’t prevent catastrophe by hating the hardware; you prevent it by understanding how leaders think under pressure, how bureaucracies behave, and how accidents happen. The provocation is that anti-nuclear sentiment, while ethically appealing, can become strategically lazy - a substitute for grappling with the messy reality that the enemy is human decision-making, not metal and megatons.
The intent is characteristically Kahn-esque: to pull the conversation away from taboo and toward systems. In the Cold War world he inhabited, nuclear weapons weren’t just instruments of annihilation; they were also instruments of bargaining, deterrence, and status. Treating them as a standalone moral contaminant lets states and publics avoid harder questions about escalation control, misperception, alliance commitments, and the human appetite for brinkmanship. It also smuggles in a kind of absolution: if the bomb is the enemy, then the people designing doctrines, building arsenals, and playing chicken with them are merely corrupted by circumstance.
Subtextually, Kahn is arguing for a colder kind of responsibility. You don’t prevent catastrophe by hating the hardware; you prevent it by understanding how leaders think under pressure, how bureaucracies behave, and how accidents happen. The provocation is that anti-nuclear sentiment, while ethically appealing, can become strategically lazy - a substitute for grappling with the messy reality that the enemy is human decision-making, not metal and megatons.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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