Book Excerpt and Articles by Ghamari-Tabrizi

Read an excerpt from The Worlds of Herman Kahn
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Ghamari-Tabrizi on Homeland Security’s Lethal Fantasies
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This was my critique of the Bush Administration’s Department of Homeland Security response to Hurricane Katrina in light of its worst case scenario planning.

“Lethal Fantasies,” 2006, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 62(1): 20-22; Reprinted in 2007, Homeland Security Annual Edition, Thomas J. Badey, ed., McGraw-Hill.

On the Dropping of the Atom Bomb
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This was my attempt to compress in the fewest pages the most important threads going into President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as well as the American response to the bombing.

“1945, August 6, 10:45 am. Nobody apologized. Nobody atoned. The Atomic Bomb,” 2009, The New Literary History of America, Greil Marcus, Werner Sollers, eds., Harvard University Press: 780-786.

Role-Playing Nuclear War in the 1950s and ‘60s
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This is a long research article about defense analysts role-playing nuclear war in the 1950s and ‘60s. I discuss how the nuclear war-gamers understood what they were doing to be a matter of intuition and insight, fantasy and hunches, rather than well-grounded prediction.

“Simulating the Unthinkable: Gaming Future Wars in the 1950s and 1960s,” 2000, Social Studies of Science, 30(2): 163-223.