Science Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn’s provocation is engineered to sound like a lab report, not a sermon: nuclear weapons aren’t “evil,” he implies, they’re instruments. That dry neutrality is the hook. It strips away the comforting idea that morality lives inside objects, then forces the reader to relocate blame to doctrine, leadership, and institutional incentives. In Cold War America, that was a radical repositioning. It was also a protective one: if the bomb is morally inert, then strategists can model its use without sounding like villains - and without admitting, too openly, that they’re normalizing the unthinkable.

The key phrase is “more prone.” Kahn concedes what pure technocratic language can’t hide: scale changes ethics. Nuclear weapons compress decision time, expand blast radius beyond combatants, and make “mistake” a civilization-level category. They are uniquely compatible with immoral outcomes because they magnify the two classic engines of atrocity: distance and abstraction. You can kill without seeing; you can justify without counting.

Subtextually, Kahn is defending deterrence thinking while warning about it. If nuclear weapons are more likely to be used immorally, then a rational system must be built to prevent not just intentional aggression but panic, miscalculation, and bureaucratic momentum. The sentence reads like permission for cold-blooded analysis, but it’s also a quiet indictment of any politics that treats these weapons like just bigger artillery. Kahn’s intent isn’t to absolve; it’s to make responsibility unavoidable, and terrifyingly human.