So I cannot remember exactly where I heard this story, otherwise I'd provide a cite, but the story goes that toward the end of his life, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- the historian and former aide to President John F. Kennedy -- was at luncheon with a journalist many years his junior. The younger man was discussing the effect of layoffs on those left behind, now with both increased workload and increased insecurity, and then said, "It's like Herman Kahn's observation: 'After the nuclear missiles start flying, the survivors will envy the dead.'"
Kahn, who, like me, "thought about the unthinkable" for many years at the RAND Corporation in California, was the model for the nuclear intellectual character in Dr. Strangelove.
In my book, Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World, released earlier this year from Rutgers University Press, I examine the effect of nuclear detonations on the survivors and the dead, four alarming scenarios by which such detonations could come about tomorrow morning, and how we might march toward the summit of nuclear weapons abolition.
But Schlesinger immediately interjected, "It wasn't Herman Kahn who said that. It was Nikita Khrushchev. And I'll tell you how I know."
Khrushchev made the remark in a speech in Moscow. The New York Tiimes reported it the next day. President Kennedy read it first thing in the morning. He always read the New York Tiimes before anyone else in the White House operation. So I'm asleep at home, and the phone rings, and it's the president. He tells me about Khrushchev's remark. Then he paused.
And then President Kennedy said, "Why can't you and Sorensen write stuff like that for me?"