It was the most terrifying book I'd ever read. Not because of what he predicted, but because of what he failed to see. But Kahn and I did share one thing in common, neither of us had actually been in a war.

Kahn's nuclear war fighting scenarios are carefully thought out, but they assume the participants are intelligent, reasonable men working with detailed situational knowledge and capable and functioning communication, command and control systems.

In reality, Total Thermonuclear War will be just like every other war: confusion, uncertainty, total chaos, bad intelligence, flawed communications and a broken chain of command. The men who are closest to the fighting only see a little piece of it. Those in a position to contemplate the whole conflict are too far away from the action to make any sense of it. You can plan all you want, but once it gets rolling it has a mind of its own. No one knows what the hell is going on until years later when the historians laboriously reconstruct the whole affair--and then, they'll only get half of it right.

Shortly after I read Kahn I read Tuchman's "The Guns of August", a much more realistic assessment of the fog of war than Kahn ever imagined. TGoA was about the First World War, and it shows how the architects of that catastrophe thought they had it all thought out ahead of time, the same arrogance and stupidity exhibited by Kahn.

Tuchman never saw combat either, but she was a lot smarter than Kahn--and fortunately, much more influential. When JFK managed the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had just finished reading Tuchman's book.