DDP Newsletter Vol. XXXVII, No. 5
Stanley Kubrick’s satirical nuclear apocalyptic movie Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, starring Peter Sellers in three roles, is still available, but likely of less interest now. The fearmongers are focused on another type of apocalypse. Even Physicians for Social Responsibility (psr.org) seems to have paused its “bombing runs,” though it still has a Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program. The “gravest dangers to human health” featured on its home page include climate change and fracking.
Ever since the film’s release in 1964, Herman Kahn has been referred to as the real Dr. Strangelove. When quizzed about the comparison, Kahn would tell Newsweek, “Kubrick is a friend of mine. He told me Dr. Strangelove wasn’t supposed to be me.” But others would point out the many affinities between Stanley Kubrick’s classic character and the real-life Herman Kahn.
During the Cold War, Kahn’s job was to think about the unthinkable. His seminal work, On Thermonuclear War (https://tinyurl.com/2xzhxfy3), published in 1960, presented multiple scenarios with potential responses and possible outcomes, and had an enormous impact on geopolitics and foreign policy. He rejects the popular mutual annihilation concept, such as the two-scorpions-in-the-bottle analogy. An “unprecedented catastrophe” is not the same as an unlimited one, he writes. The effects on the attacker and the defender might be very different. “Most important of all, sober study shows that the limits on the magnitude of the catastrophe seem to be closely dependent on what kinds of preparations have been made and on how the war is started and fought.”
One of Kahn’s enduring legacies is the World Economic Forum (WEF). “The [WEF’s] recorded history has been manufactured to appear as though the organisation was a strictly European creation, but this isn’t so,” writes investigative journalist Johnny Vedmore from Cardiff, Wales (https://tinyurl.com/2p8fbhk4). Schwab attended Harvard in the 1960s, where he met Henry Kissinger. At the end of the 1960s, Kissinger introduced Schwab to John Kenneth Galbraith at Harvard. Galbraith flew to Europe in 1970, along with Herman Kahn, to help Schwab convince the European elite to back the WEF project, originally called the European Management Symposium/Forum. Galbraith was the keynote speaker at the historic first session.
In 1967, Herman Kahn wrote what is considered one of the most important futurists works of the 20th century, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. Soon after, he released a document that mapped out how to achieve the future society that The Year 2000 had envisaged, entitled Ancillary Pilot Study for the Educational Policy Research Program: Final Report (https://tinyurl.com/yabvayzb).
Under a section entitled “Special Educational Needs of Decision-Makers,” the paper states: “The desirability of explicitly educated decision-makers so that they are better able, in effect, to plan the destiny of the nation, or to carry out the plans formulated through a more democratic process, should be very seriously considered. One facet of this procedure would be the creation of a shared set of concepts, shared language, shared analogies, shared references.” He goes on to state in the same section that: “Universal re-teaching in the spirit of the humanistic tradition of Europe—at least for its comprehensive leadership group—might be useful in many ways.”
In Vedmore’s opinion, Kahn is suggesting the subversion of democracy “by training only a certain group in society as potential leaders, with those pre-selected few who are groomed for power being able to define what our shared values as a society should be. Maybe Herman Kahn would agree with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader scheme, which is the exact manifestation of his original suggestion.”
Just after leaving the sphere of influence that included the two most significant experts on thermonuclear war, and within the same year as leaving Harvard, Schwab helped form Sulzer AG by the merger of Sulzer and Escher Wyss, where his father Eugen Schwab had worked on the Nazi atom bomb effort. Sulzer AG, where Schwab would serve as director, aided South Africa in its illegal thermonuclear bomb program.
Kahn came to believe that no major nuclear power would dare fire a thermonuclear weapon as an act of aggression. In fact, “the Establishment thinking had changed significantly, to the point where Herman Kahn and others were advising that, in certain scenarios, making a country such as France a nuclear power could have significant benefits to security both regionally and globally…. Thermonuclear war was no longer the be all and end all of strategic defence policy, and it was in the dying embers of the 1960s where the same people who had caused all of the fear of a thermonuclear apocalypse, really did stop worrying and learnt to love the bomb.”
Schwab was very well acquainted with three powerful men trying to determine the future of Europe, using any and all methods, including fear of impending doom. He is apparently trying to create the world Kahn predicted in Year 2000. But while Kahn refuted the dire forecasts in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, Schwab has made them “central to his machinations.” Schwab, Vedmore writes, “would soon become everything Herman Kahn had feared during his most pessimistic predictions.”
“Schwab’s main ideological product, ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ will see the transfer of power away from true democratic processes and onto a system of governance by a small preselected leadership group, who will be trained to continue the agenda set for them by the previous generation, as predicted by Herman Kahn. They will hold all the cards, whilst the common people will be left with just illusory pseudo-democratic processes, poverty, and constant absurd psychological operations to distract us all constantly.”
Kahn warned: “It has become increasingly clear that our technological and even our economic achievements are mixed blessings…. Perhaps most crucial, choices are posed that are too large, complex, important, uncertain, or comprehensive to be safely left to fallible humans.”
The new real Dr. Strangelove apparently believes himself to be infallible. Not just a technocrat, “he has been very vocal on his intention to fuse his physical and biological identities with future technology.”
KAHN ON THE YEAR 2000
In 1967, Herman Kahn’s first 10 predictions included: multiple applications of lasers; extreme high-strength structural materials; giant or supersonic jets; and extensive commercial applications of shaped-charge explosives. Other predictions included: improved capability to change sex of children and/or adults; automated universal (real time) credit, audit and banking systems; commercial extraction of oil from shale; pervasive business use of computers; personal pagers (perhaps even pocket phones!); and home computers to “run” households and communicate with the outside world (https://tinyurl.com/4db6x9ac).