Herman Kahn (February 15, 1922 – July 7, 1983) was an American physicist and a founding member of the Hudson Institute, regarded as one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century.

Kahn posited the idea of a "winnable" nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War for which he was one of the historical inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire Dr.

[5] Kahn graduated from Fairfax High School in 1940 and enlisted in the United States Army in May 1943, serving during the Burma campaign in World War II in a non-combat capacity as a telephone lineman.

[8] Kahn's major contributions were the several strategies he developed during the Cold War to contemplate "the unthinkable" – namely, nuclear warfare – by using applications of game theory.

He recruited sociologist Daniel Bell, political philosopher Raymond Aron and novelist Ralph Ellison (author of the 1952 classic Invisible Man).

The first ten predictions were: In Kahn's view, capitalism and technology held nearly boundless potential for progress, while the colonization of space lay in the near, not the distant, future.

[16] In 1970, Kahn published the book The Emerging Japanese Superstate in which he claimed that Japan would play a large role in the world equal to the Soviet Union and the United States.

[17] In the book, he claimed that Japan would pursue obtaining nuclear weapons and that it would pass the United States in per-capita income by 1990, and likely equal it in gross national product by 2000.