Lethal Arrogance

by Dumas, Lloyd J.

• ISBN13: 9780312222512
• ISBN10: 0312222513
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-12-01
• Publisher: St Martins Pr

Summary

Sounds an urgent wake-up call to put mind over matter and exercise human judgement over technological dominance. DLC: Technology--Risk assessment.

Author Biography

Lloyd J. Dumas is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas. He was formerly Associate Professor of Industrial and Management Engineering at Columbia University and served as a consultant to the Los Alamos National Laboratories. He has published more than 80 works in journals and periodicals, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, Technology Review, and Defense News.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Preface	ix
PART I THREATENING OURSELVES
Prologue Will Twentieth-Century Incidents Become Twenty-First-Century Nightmares?	3	(6)
Technology, Human Fallibility and Survival	9	(20)
PART II WHAT COULD HAPPEN?
Terrorism and Dangerous Technologies	29	(28)
Controlling Dangerous Inventories	57	(26)
Accidents	83	(26)
Appendix: Major Nuclear Weapons-Related Accidents	100	(9)
Holocaust by Accident: Inadvertent War with Weapons of Mass Destruction	109	(34)
PART III WHY IT CAN HAPPEN HERE: THE MANY SIDES OF HUMAN FALLIBILITY
The Fallibility of Individuals: Alcohol, Drugs and Mental Illness	143	(24)
The Fallibility of Individuals: The Nature and Conditions of Life and Work	167	(20)
Bureaucracy, Groupthink and Cults	187	(32)
PART IV WHY IMPROVING TECHNOLOGY WON'T SAVE US
The Failure of Technical Systems	219	(32)
Computers and the Technological Fix	251	(28)
PART V WHAT CAN AND MUST BE DONE
Understanding and Assessing Risk	279	(24)
Preventing Disaster	303	(26)
Notes	329	(36)
Index	365