Politics & Power Quote by Herman Kahn

Kahn’s provocation is that the “arms race” was never the symmetrical sprint Americans liked to imagine. He flips the familiar Cold War screenplay: instead of two superpowers locked in equal, compulsive escalation, he frames the competition as fundamentally reactive on the Soviet side - a long chase scene, first to close a gap, then to overtake. The line reads like a debunking, but it’s also a rhetorical land grab: if the race wasn’t mutual, American buildup becomes less a fever and more a baseline, a posture of dominance that others strain to match.

The intent is strategic, not merely semantic. Kahn, a systems-minded defense intellectual, is arguing over agency. If Moscow is the primary accelerator, Washington can cast itself as reluctant, stabilizing, even innocent - a useful narrative when budgets, missile deployments, and political legitimacy are on the line. “To the extent that there was” works like a legal disclaimer: he grants just enough to acknowledge visible competition while denying the premise that both sides were equally responsible for dangerous escalation.

Context sharpens the edge. By the early 1960s and into the 1970s, U.S. public debate oscillated between fears of a “missile gap” and later anxieties about Soviet parity. Kahn’s formulation threads that needle: America didn’t need to panic, because it started ahead; the real risk was Soviet ambition to surpass, which demands vigilance but also invites a colder conclusion - deterrence isn’t a shared equilibrium, it’s an unequal contest managed by perception as much as hardware.