Lynn Eden - Böcker

On May 19, 1968, the minister of the Congregational Church of Watertown, Wisconsin, was fired. Alan Kromholz was 29 when he came to Watertown with his wife and two small boys. Kromholz began his ministerial duties in February 1967, seven months before Father James Groppi began marching in Milwaukee. In the middle of September Watertown's city attorney received a model fair housing ordinance from the state, with a recommendation that it be adopted. Thus the polarization began. It was sharpened by the publication of an underground newspaper and the establishment of a coffee house, by feelings that Kromholz was neglecting his pastoral duties and providing a subversive example for the young, by rumors of a black invasion. On May 19, 1968, Reverend Kromholz was fired. Visiting Watertown two years later, Lynn Eden captured the voices of protest and approval —voices that you have heard in your own town, in your own neighborhood, in yourself. The result is Crisis in Watertown: a true and remarkable document of our times.

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.