Politics & Power Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn is warning that nuclear weapons do not merely raise the stakes of existing conflicts; they multiply the number of actors who can rewrite the script. The line is coldly procedural, almost managerial: diffusion creates both capability ("able") and incentive ("pressure"). That pairing is the tell. He is not talking about some abstract apocalypse. He is describing a system where possession turns into compulsion, where having the matchbox makes you a potential arsonist, and occasionally a coerced one.

The subtext is a critique of the comforting bipolar fantasy of the early Cold War: two superpowers, one balance, one set of rules. Kahn, ever the systems analyst, sees proliferation as a jump from chess to a crowded poker table. More players means more misreads, more bluffing, more side bets. A small state might escalate an incident to force protection, extract concessions, distract domestic opponents, or exploit a superpower's credibility trap. Nuclear capability becomes leverage in crises that are not "theirs" in the moral sense, but are very much theirs in the strategic sense.

Context matters: Kahn wrote in a period when deterrence theory tried to make the unthinkable governable. His intent is less doomsaying than diagnosis. Proliferation, in his view, introduces catalytic war: a third party provoking or amplifying a conflict between bigger powers. It's a bleak insight about modern agency: once nuclear weapons are widely distributed, even "minor" actors can manufacture major consequences.