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11%OFFLynn Eden - Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation - 9780801472893 - V9780801472893
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Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation

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Description for Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation Paperback. Series: Cornell Studies in Security Affairs. Num Pages: 384 pages, 30. BIC Classification: 1KBB; HBJK; HBLW3; JWMN. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 145 x 229 x 29. Weight in Grams: 532.

Whole World on Fire focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war?

U.S. bombing in World War II caused massive fire damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later war plans took account only of damage from blast; they completely ignored damage from atomic firestorms. Recently a small group of researchers has shown that for modern nuclear weapons the destructiveness and lethality of nuclear mass fire often—and predictably—greatly exceeds that ... Read more

How could this have happened? The answer lies in how organizations frame the problems they try to solve. In a narrative grounded in organization theory, science and technology studies, and primary historical sources (including declassified documents and interviews), Eden explains how the U.S. Air Force's doctrine of precision bombing led to the development of very good predictions of nuclear blast—a significant achievement—but for many years to no development of organizational knowledge about nuclear fire. Expert communities outside the military reinforced this disparity in organizational capability to predict blast damage but not fire damage. Yet some innovation occurred, and predictions of fire damage were nearly incorporated into nuclear war planning in the early 1990s. The author explains how such a dramatic change almost happened, and why it did not.

Whole World on Fire shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't do well, may build a poor representation of the world—a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences. In a sweeping conclusion, Eden shows the implications of the analysis for understanding such things as the sinking of the Titanic, the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and the poor fireproofing in the World Trade Center.

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Product Details

Publisher
Cornell University Press
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2006
Series
Cornell Studies in Security Affairs
Condition
New
Weight
532g
Number of Pages
384
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
ISBN
9780801472893
SKU
V9780801472893
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Lynn Eden
Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research/Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. She is the author of Crisis in Watertown, coauthor of Witness in Philadelphia, coeditor of Nuclear Arguments, and an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History.

Reviews for Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation
This investigation leads Eden into the more arcane and unsettling aspects of nuclear planning, and students of this area will find in her book much fascinating detail. More broadly, however, she seeks to demonstrate how institutional knowledge often leaves out critical facts—leading to disaster when incomplete information becomes the basis for action.
Foreign Affairs 83:1
Whole World on ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation


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