Normal accidents

In the last forty years we have experienced an unprecedented technical acceleration that has allowed the development of extremely intense air traffic, biotechnological advances and artificial intelligence. At the same time, population density and social inequalities grew as never before. The coronavirus pandemic is a consequence of the combination of these vertigos: a “normal accident” of this era, which I call Tecnocene, which has among its key milestones the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the attack on the Twin Towers and deployment by Y2K. Life on the planet is at stake and will be for hundreds of generations. A global politics of risk control through cooperation becomes the only "vital politics", or affirmative biopolitics, that we would consider reasonable.

In February 2014 at the WIPP transuranic waste repository in New Mexico, a drum erupted in fire. It exposed 22 people to radiation, shut down the underground facility for 35 months and cost the United States over a billion dollars. Heat and pressure had built up in the drum due to chemical reactions with an organic kitty litter, Swheat Scoop, which had been mistakenly added to it at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. This article disrupts two prominent narratives: (a) that the accident was induced by a typographical error made after a waste packaging operations supervisor misheard 'inorganic kitty litter' as 'an organic kitty litter' during a meeting, and (b) that it was induced primarily by 'mismanagement' at WIPP, Los Alamos and the DOE's New Mexico field offices. It does so by exploring how a series of overambitious political initiatives, fraught labor relationships, financialized subcontracting arrangements and US Department of Energy (DOE) performance incentives set the stage for Los Alamos's notorious error by accelerating US waste packaging, shipping and repository emplacement rates beyond systemic capacity. Attention to operational temporalities shows how an often-overlooked nexus of schedule pressures, political-economic imperatives and regulatory breakdowns converged to modulate nuclear waste management workflows and, ultimately, trigger a radiological accident.

In 2009, after US president Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for, amongst others, his commitment to long-term nuclear disarmament (BBC,2009), Time Magazine published an article titled “Want Peace? Give the Nuke a Nobel”. This reflects the long-standing claim that, far from a threat to world peace, nuclear weapons--or the fear of them--can actually be instrumental in reducing the incidence of violent conflict, by deterring not merely their own use, but also any conventional war that could trigger a nuclear exchange. Though the fear of 'Mutually Assured Destruction' has long been a well-established concept in (nuclear) deterrence theory, few have taken this argument to its logical conclusion--the idea, developed most famously by Kenneth N. Waltz in his controversial ‘The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May be Better’ (1981), that if the mutual fear of nuclear war can deter states from conventional war, and if such deterrence is stable, then perhaps measured nuclear proliferation to other countries could be the best stabilizer of regional and global conflict, ultimately creating zones of 'Nuclear Peace'.

The suggestions that nuclear weapons might be ‘the best [and] only peacekeeping weapon that the world has ever known’ [Sagan & Waltz,2010: 92], and that their ‘horizontal’ proliferation to other states might constitute ‘an international good’ [Waltz, 2009, 431], are remarkable and highly controversial, as they fly in the face of both the Non-Proliferation Treaty (‘NPT’), as well as dominant attitudes in the West towards many nuclear-threshold states, such as Iran and North Korea.

Driven by the question "would the world be safer if more nations had nuclear weapons?", this article examines the chief arguments presented against and in favor of broad nuclear proliferation, and their counterarguments. To answer this question, I briefly theorize the positive or negative impact, on deterrence
stability and military-organizational safety, of conditions such as asymmetrical strategic force strengths or -postures (counterforce / countervalue); novel technologies (cost-effective missile shields), operational protocols
(‘launch-on-warning’) and finally several ‘deterrence-breaking’ strategies ('Hamburg grab'; 'madman strategy').

In terms of structure, this essay will present the general architecture of deterrence theory; common arguments against Waltz's 'laissez-faire' nuclear proliferation--and their validity. It will be considered if the ‘nuclear peace’-model, even if valid for the Cold War, is sufficiently applicable and transposable to other contexts to warrant Waltz’ advocacy of ‘total proliferation’—or whether proliferation should be ‘limited’ because the safety and stability of nuclear deterrence are not assured, either because its strategic logic can be subverted in ‘rogue states’ who lack rationality and restraint, or because the 'vulnerability' of 'poor’ nations small arsenals invites a decapitation strike. I will argue that this is not the case, and that Waltz’s ‘total’ form of proliferation optimism is indeed the most, or even the only legitimate ‘pro-proliferation’—or indeed, non-disarmament—argument.

Nevertheless, I conclude that even Waltz's cogent formulation fails to make the case for a ‘nuclear world’ being meaningfully safer, as it does not come to terms with how instability, irrationality, and most importantly organizational accidents are not mere imperfections of nuclear deterrence, but rather irreducible, essential, and inevitable to it, making systemic breakdown inevitable, cataclysmic, and in the long-term terminal.

In 1984, Charles Perrow (CP) released a landmark book entitled Normal Accident (NA), in which he defended the argument of the inevitability of accident in certain type of high risk systems. The aim of this paper is, thirty years after the book’s publication, to reconsider this book and offer a new interpretation. Indeed, in hindsight, the message of the book seems today as compelling as ever. Accidents and catastrophes have continued to occur over the last three decades. However, the technological determinism of the book has been criticised and shown to be too restricted to account for the social nature of these phenomena. In opposition to his structuralist view, some authors have argued an extended socio-technological model of the normality of accidents. Indeed, Charles Perrow himself  often complained about the misuse of his own technological rational to interpret accidents. Consequently, he has regularly used instead a wider, macro-social, critical and power view of organisations and society to interpret accidents. This second posture was clearly in the background of the 1984 book, but has often been neglected, unnoticed or overlooked by commentators, proponents and critics.  This paper aims to highlight this second underlying message of the book. This second message could arguably be today, in retrospect, the book’s most valuable and compelling contribution to our understanding of accidents and safety and a basis for contemporary research.

In this book, I argue that there is a need to revisit Perrow’s seminal contribution, Normal Accidents. I discuss conceptual and empirical changes in the past three decades and show the relevance of thinking our current situation with the help of this classic book when confronted to these changes; hence, the prefix “post”.

In the past two decades, Andrew Hopkins has been a very successful analyst of technological disasters and an acclaimed storyteller. In this article, I argue that he is also a theorist, and that he has developed over 40 years a normative sociological model of safety for studying major events. To do so, I first situate his contribution through a historical perspective going back to the 1970s and 1980s, a time during which Hopkins established core elements of a research program on catastrophic events subsequently deployed in late the 1990s onwards. Initially inspired in the 1970s and 1980s by the crime of the powerful, white-collar crime literature and a Marxist socio-legal perspective of society, he developed what I define as a white-collar crime model of accident (WCC-MA). He then moves in the 1990s and 2000s on to a more organisational and practical sociology of safety elaborated in his retrospective accounts of disasters. To ground this assertion, I explain how his storytelling success results from the invention of a specific narrative structure which is based on a repeated sequence of description (1), assumption (2), explanation (3), comparison (4), recommendation (5) and counterfactual reasoning (6), applied to many articulated topics. From there, I extract a (normative) sociological model of safety built over two decades, and then discuss some of the findings of this study.

En las últimas décadas vivimos una aceleración técnica inédita que permitió desarrollar un tráfico aéreo intensísimo, avances biotecnológicos e inteligencia artificial. A la par, la densidad de población y las desigualdades sociales crecieron como nunca. La pandemia de coronavirus es consecuencia de la combinación de estos vértigos, dice Flavia Costa: un “accidente normal” de esta era a la que llama Tecnoceno, que tiene entre sus hitos clave el accidente nuclear de Chernóbil, el atentado a las Torres Gemelas y el despliegue por el Y2K. La vida en el planeta está en juego y lo estará por cientos de generaciones. Una política global de control de riesgos mediante la cooperación se vuelve la única política vital, o biopolítica afirmativa, razonable.

Many observers anticipate “arms races” between states seeking to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in diverse military applications, some of which raise concerns on ethical and legal grounds, or from the perspective of strategic stability or accident risk. How viable are arms control regimes for military AI? This article draws a parallel with the experience in controlling nuclear weapons, to examine the opportunities and pitfalls of efforts to prevent, channel, or contain the militarization of AI. It applies three analytical lenses to argue that (1) norm institutionalization can counter or slow proliferation; (2) organized “epistemic communities” of experts can effectively catalyze arms control; (3) many military AI applications will remain susceptible to “normal accidents,” such that assurances of “meaningful human control” are largely inadequate. I conclude that while there are key differences, understanding these lessons remains essential to those seeking to pursue or study the next chapter in global arms control

This honor’s thesis analyzes the role of experts in East and West Germany following the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl in 1986. By looking at the role of experts in newspaper articles following the incident, the analysis reveals the dependence of technological societies upon expertise in order to quell the fear of an obtuse menace. A comparison between the articles in East and West Germany illustrates the strain upon the legitimacy of experts and their relationship to the prevailing political attitude towards nuclear energy.

This essay exposes three overarching arguments against the individual blame approach: unjust (subjective and inaccurate), ineffective (organizational myopia and inertia), and dangerous (impede organizational learning and contribute to latent error accumulation). For each argument, the paper explains in what way the no-blame strategy offers a better alternative. The final section touches on the limits and difficulties of the blame-free strategy.