Whole World on Fire

Whole World on Fire
Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Total Pages : 390
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0801435781
ISBN-13 : 9780801435782
Rating : 4/5 (782 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Whole World on Fire by : Lynn Eden

Download or read book Whole World on Fire written by Lynn Eden and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 of nuclear blast. This has major implications for defense policy: the U.S. government has underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons, Lynn Eden finds, and built far more warheads, and far more destructive warheads, than it needed for the Pentagon's war-planning purposes. 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.


Whole World on Fire Related Books

Whole World on Fire
Language: en
Pages: 390
Authors: Lynn Eden
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2004 - Publisher: Cornell University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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
Whole World on Fire
Language: en
Pages: 392
Authors: Lynn Eden
Categories: Business & Economics
Type: BOOK - Published: 2004 - Publisher: Cornell University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The author explores how the US government has underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons, leading it to build far more - and far more destructive - war
Whole World On Fire: Organizations, Knowledge And Nuclear Weapons Devastation
Language: en
Pages: 392
Authors: Lynn Eden
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2004 - Publisher: Manas Publications

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, the US govt failed to predict nuclear fire damage
How to Set the World on Fire
Language: en
Pages: 258
Authors: T.K. Riggins
Categories: Juvenile Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-05-15 - Publisher: Franchise Publishing

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Quest Series is an annual competition at The Academy that challenges warrior, wizard and scholar students. In teams of four, they travel across the realm to
A World on Fire
Language: en
Pages: 432
Authors: Joe Jackson
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2007-02-27 - Publisher: Penguin

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Like Charles Seife’s Zero and Dava Sobel’s Longitude, this passionate intellectual history is the story of the intersection of science and the human, in thi