Much attention has obviously been given to the active construction of history, the material substance of which being almost infinitely malleable by the physical or ideological victors of each successive era. I would suggest, however, that it is equally important to address as a course of inquiry the construction of future histories. Irrespective of previous and current instances of speculation regarding the possible vectors of history (along with pure science fiction), one of the most compelling and concentrated efforts to construct a systematic history of the future emerged at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, and more specifically, in the work of Herman Kahn, both at RAND and later at the Hudson Institute. Kahn's 1960 work, On Thermonuclear War established an incremental series of futures, or more precisely, future world wars, which illustrated both the potentials and limits of systems analysis. Beyond this goal (and the larger goal of "thinking the unthinkable" and rendering nuclear war survivable), Kahn's seminal work also demonstrates the difficulties inherent in any attempt to quantify uncertainty and to strategize against an opponent with unknown capabilities. Compounding the difficulty of such a project was the issue of the present, where strategic theories became obsolete at the moment of their articulation due to the rapid development of technical capabilities (the hydrogen bomb, the satellite, the U2 spy plane, and ICBMs). Despite the astounding ability of Kahn to project the fantastic serialistic scenarios (culminating in his infamous automated "doomsday device") of possible futures, technological development in the 1950s and 60s seemed almost to outstrip even the most enigmatic conjectures. Utilizing game- and systems operations within the fog of the Cold War was equivalent to attempting to hit a moving target without possessing a sense of certainty that the target could even be sufficiently incapacitated if it were to be acquired--i.e. a first and second-order uncertainty. Thus, Kahn's history of the future and the early work of RAND, with its aspiration to the quantifiable, was more of a theatre of the prosthetic method as reassurance--compiling data to toss into the void. The proliferation of realism in war simulations is but one literal example of such a theatrical impulse. Even if adaptation and flexibility were the seemingly realist mantras of these cutting edge west-coast brains, Kahn's work expressed the latent substrate of such efforts, namely the spectre of historical inevitability. Contingency management was thus carried out for its own sake, as a kind of perpetual battle of wits and techniques with the Soviets (and with the researchers' own unbounded fantasies), yet was also regarded, at least by Kahn, as a pragmatic humanist response to a nihilistic inevitability. Perhaps the most valuable legacy of Kahn's work is its messy, yet virtuosic and often deviously humorous, conflation of tactical brilliance and grand strategic vision--of a feedback loop of technique imbued with a larger sense of quasi-Hegelian directionality, with Kahn the personality acting as the synthetic element. Kahn's project was carried out with a characteristically American attitude that stubbornly refused to acknowledge a distinction between the poetic and the pragmatic.