Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

Herman Kahn sought to show that even once nuclear exchanges had begun there were ways of conducting operations that might keep the pressure on the other side while avoiding Armageddon. He saw escalation as a dragon to be slain: not so much a phenomenon operating independent of human action but a possible product of inadequate intellectual and physical preparation. He introduced the idea that escalation might be a deliberate act. The noun acquired a verb when he referred to “people who wish to escalate a little themselves, but somehow feel that the other side would not be willing to go one step further.”54 Escalation was transformed from a hopelessly unruly process to one that might be tamed and possibly manipulated. In his 1965 book On Escalation, he introduced the “escalation ladder” with sixteen thresholds and forty-four steps. For most, the striking feature of the book was the possibility of anyone coming up with almost thirty distinct ways of using nuclear weapons following their first use at rung fifteen.55 The escalation up the ladder concluded, when all semblance of control had been lost, with a “wargasm.” Kahn declared himself innocent of the Freudian connotations.