Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Eric Dyke's avatar

Great essay and comments. Here are my two cents.

When I was a very little boy, one dinner time my father started talking about nuclear war, nuclear weapons, and the radiation that would come right through the walls and kill you. I remember how terrified I was, and I remember looking out the window and saying, Right through the glass? Yes, right through the glass.

I was too young to know about the Cuban missile crisis, but years later my father told me how frightened he had been. The Korean War had ended only a few years before, and my father's six years in the artillery in WWII was not a distant memory.

Funny how a scare turns to fascination. I read everything with the word nuclear in it, and 60 years later I build equipment for the nuclear industry. I am sure it started with that conversation.

I have been trained in something called Root Cause Analysis, common in the nuclear industry. When there is a catastrophe or a near miss (funny term that!) you analyse the snot out of it until you know what has to be done to prevent recurrence.

Complex systems like nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons systems, economies and countries have many checks, approvals, barriers to failure, redundancies and automated detection systems, so a catastrophe almost always has multiple causes.

Complex systems are never static. They either adapt and renew, or they stagnate and deteriorate. People leave, experience is lost, procedures are revised, equipment is replaced, minor problems have temporary fixes that become permanent, all with unforeseen consequences. Niall Ferguson in one of his books said that complex system can go on for years, seemingly healthy, with the residents blissfully unaware of the rot within. Then one day, a small operator error, a minor equipment failure, a valve that doesnt close at TMI, a foreclosure in 2008, or a gun shot from an obscure Serbian nationalist triggers a cascade of events that crashes through all the inadequate measures and best intentions in place. Black Swan! Unforeseen but predictable.

It is interesting that when you stand amidst the wreckage and the bodies, looking back in time, with a little investigation the path to failure is relatively easy to see, right back to the initiating event. But, when you go back in time and look forward, all you see is a mass of potential problems and which one is key? Resources are finite and you can rarely deal with them all. I like Kissinger's observation that choices are never between a good option and a bad option. They are about finding the least worst option.

One cause that comes up frequently is over confidence, ie hubris. With respect, I hear that in some of the comments.

I think America and its allies are going to be tested soon.

I like WigWag's comment about the disconnect between the college educated elite and the working class joes. No wonder Labour is switching to the Republicans in the US and the Tories in the UK. Charles Murray observed that today there is a cohort of wealthy young Americans that are going from high school to college to business, academia or politics, who have never worked with their hands, never mowed lawns, never waited on tables or cleaned toilets or worked in a factory.

Expand full comment
Judith's avatar

Chilling and important, Claire.

It also lead me to a disturbing insight about stubbornness in refusing to abandon long-held views in the face of evidence. You mention KAL007. I am objectively certain later revelations support the “tragic accident” view you cite.

However, I was the leader and minder of 30 British university students studying Russian in Soviet Ukraine that fatal night, and not only recall every tense hour, and the fear we shared with our hosts, but came to support the cogent arguments of R.W. Johnson that it was not an accident. Many did: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n13/paul-foot/the-scandal-that-never-was

Here I am, in 2021, knowing the later revelations and stil unwilling truly to accept them,Still thinking more about hysterical Americans pouring Stolichnays in the gutters, while our Soviet hosts hugged us. About the air boycott, so we barely got to make it home vis Air India

So I tell the story your way, but a part of me is waiting for new evidence....

I relate this to shed light on the stubborn cognitive dissonance of others... and my own.

Expertise on how to break through this?

Expand full comment
56 more comments...

No posts