Books: Dr. Doomsday's Sunshine Scenario

THE COMING BOOM by Herman Kahn; Simon & Schuster; 237pages; $14.95

The latest sooth, says the veteran think-tank commander Herman Kahn, is that prosperity and stability are probably just around the next bell curve. Barring bad luck and bad management, the last 18 years of the century should see higher productivity, lower inflation and a resurgence of traditional values. This upbeat news comes from a man who has taken a particular pleasure in bucking intellectual trends. Kahn, a co-founder and director of the Hudson Institute, infuriated liberals of the early '60s with two books that can still start an argument. On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable asserted a simple premise: since an exchange of atomic weapons was possible, speculation on the circumstances and consequences of such conflict was natural and useful.

Kahn gave the public one of its first looks at the world of war games and doomsday scenarios, linkages of events that could trigger a nuclear catastrophe. It all read like a strange new genre: a nonfiction science fiction for an age of "value-neutral" technocrats. Predictably, traditional humanists who felt their influence slipping considered Kahn's intellectual game playing to be an amoral acceptance of mass annihilation. Kahn is, in fact, a conservative moralist. He is also a systems evangelist who puts his faith in the power of reason and works hard to appear more holistic than thou. The result is a fast-talking, all-inclusive style that announces to laymen and rival alike: "My big picture is bigger than your big picture."

And getting bigger. It would be futile to put a frame around The Coming Boom. The book is more like a sprawling by-the-numbers kit used to paint the dome of a new Renaissance chapel. There the enervated finger of post-industrial Adam is about to be plugged into the socket of divine science. One can even find a title for this vaulting masterpiece: CI. It stands for command, control, communications, computing/information and intelligence. Kahn is not too specific about command and control. His discussion of CI other components describes an information network that he believes should enable government and business to make faster and better decisions. What of the Big Brother potential? He admits the danger, but with the impatience for outside skeptics that characterizes his book, he concludes that the benefits of "massive data banks" would outweigh the risks.

Kahn's sunshine scenario has no room for the critics he labels neo-liberal symbolists. Again, the author is soft on specifics. His futurology appears to be identifying a group as yet unborn. Perhaps "neoliberal" is simply a term invented to oppose "neo-conservative." The derisive use of "symbolists" suggests that the author himself does not communicate in symbols. He does. What, in fact, are words and pseudomathematical formulations like CI?