No one ever had to think about how to wage a war that could obliterate the human race before. The subject was sui generis, and it was also, at the height of America's Cold War, a foreign-policy problem of the first order. The brand-new field of nuclear strategy attracted the attention of visionaries, crackpots, and ambitious intellectuals hoping to make it in Washington.

For a while, no nuclear strategist was more notorious than the RAND corporation's Herman Kahn. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi has written a first-rate history of Kahn's rise to prominence during the 1950s, culminating in the publication of his unbelievable 1960 book On Thermonuclear War. Historians have long been mining the darker terrain of American Cold War culture, but now we have a big, chunky diamond. The Worlds of Herman Kahn is a brilliant account of Kahn's own intellectual history and also the weird world of modernist American social science that he bestrode during the tense years of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The book covers a lot of ground, sometimes perhaps in too much detail and always in a luxurious, excursive style. Nevertheless, one can identify three central themes. The first two are familiar: one is the proliferation in the late 1950s of social-science think tanks and foundations, epitomized by the RAND corporation, which sought to quantify and rationalize every political and social problem America faced. Ghamari-Tabrizi takes us through the logic of systems analysis, pioneered by RAND and other think tanks (and adopted eventually by Robert McNamara as secretary of defense), and shows how Kahn parlayed his innate brilliance and scientific background into an early career as a military analyst. The other is the emergence, at precisely the same time, of nuclear strategy as an academic topic. Dissatisfied with Eisenhower's all-or-nothing approach to nuclear war, writers such as Henry Kissinger, William Kaufmann, Thomas Schelling and eventually Kahn himself sought to develop a logic of limited war, to find an alternative, as their favourite politician John Kennedy once said, to “holocaust or humiliation.”

A third theme stressed by Ghamari-Tabrizi is the unexpectedly playful, irreverent approach Kahn took to this gravest of issues. Unlike more establishment figures, Kahn attacked the problem of thermonuclear war in a modernistic and offbeat style, making fun, like Don Rickles, of Air Force lieutenants; baiting indignant pacifists; and in general mocking the commonsense rationalism of the “Greatest Generation.” What would a world after a nuclear war be like? Let us think about this with no presumptions. Let us shock the squares. When considering the world of Herman Kahn, Ghamari-Tabrizi asks, you can think of Pentagon war rooms, of ICBMs, of grim-faced political leaders playing for the highest of stakes, but you should also think of Allen Ginsberg and Mad magazine.

Indeed, Ghamari-Tabrizi is more concerned with the “mood and style” of American nuclear culture and Kahn's personification of it than with the policy implications of his writings. Indeed, she seems reluctant (103) to deal with the international politics of the Cold War at all, though an odd chapter 4 does address this. It is not hard to see why: by treating Kahn's weird world in isolation, she protects her fascinating story from being overshadowed by the crises occurring in Berlin and Cuba and the policies articulated in Washington and Moscow. If she tried to graft her story onto a familiar Cold War narrative, she would have written a lesser book.

But in disconnecting Kahn from the policies and events he so dearly wanted to influence she lets him off too easily. The man was not just joking around. Eisenhower had developed, in the late 1950s, a commonsense policy of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) based upon his intuition that war between the Soviet Union and the United States would inevitably escalate to an all-out nuclear exchange, and that his rivals in the Kremlin were sure to be as keen to avoid such an outcome as he was. This was a reasonable policy, and it turned out to have worked. But at the time it attracted furious criticism, and leading the way were Kahn, lesser strategists such as Kissinger, and many figures associated with the Democratic Party, all determined to replace MAD with a more innovative and risk-taking strategy. In particular, Kahn and others advocated the early use of limited nuclear strikes in the event of a major showdown with the Soviet Union. The new American President, John Kennedy, was initially amenable to such ideas, and invited nuclear strategists to advise him.

When, during the second half of October 1962, the possibility of world war moved from the abstract to the real, Kennedy shrank away from the notion of limited nuclear war and worked out a compromise with the Russians. We know now that had the United States launched limited nuclear strikes in response to Soviet moves in Cuba, the Soviet Union would probably have responded with a general nuclear attack. To put it bluntly, had the President followed the advice of limited-war advocates such as Kahn, there is a good chance that much of the world's population would have been killed. That is a fact about the “golden age” of nuclear strategy that just does not ever get amusing.