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Technology and Culture 44.4 (2003) 848-850



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Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology. By James R. Chiles. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Pp. xxx+338. $28/$15.95.

For several years, risk has been big publishing business. Over the last eighteen months, however, the terror agenda has transformed a steady stream into a raging torrent of books directed at both specialists and generalists. James R. Chiles's readable survey falls into the latter category. In a rapidly updated paperback version, it begins with an introduction that engages head-on with the Twin Towers tragedy. In his overview, Chiles claims that, had the Empire State Building also been pinpointed for destruction, it would have suffered an "immediate, avalanche-like collapse on the impact side." But the rest of the structure might well have survived (p. xxvii). Here, as elsewhere, Chiles makes use of extensive oral testimony to support the hypothesis that highly developed economies now find themselves located at a "machine frontier" characterized by "dangers and rewards [and] bounded at the edges by unknown territory." "If we wanted to plot a movie," he argues, "prototype testers would be our explorers: facility operators would be the cowboys; and entrepreneurs eager to dominate the new markets would serve as our cattle barons" (p. 14).

Working at the interface between, on the one hand, government, corporations, technicians, and security personnel and, on the other, the "big machine," Chiles switches back and forth between the present and the past; he identifies the moment at which large-scale disaster begins to write itself into technological scripts; and, in an overly sanguine conclusion, he suggests [End Page 848] ways in which Homo sapiens may one day learn to live with and control large-scale systems. Narrative and analysis are presented in a style resembling a nontheorized variant of social constructivism. Whether struggling to prevent a newly built Tay Bridge from plunging into the estuary, or an R 101 dropping out of the sky, human actors—before, during, and after the moment of catastrophe—are depicted as possessing a greater or lesser degree of control over semiautonomous planes, submarines, oil rigs, structures, and nuclear reactors. Superbly clear diagrams, complemented by a step-by-step verbal breakdown of how an "ordinary day" can suddenly be transformed into hell on earth, indicate to even the least technically adept reader the precise point at which things can begin to fall apart.

From a historical perspective, however, Inviting Disaster evades more questions than it answers. Overwhelmingly concerned with the nuts and bolts of technological analysis, Chiles is largely indifferent to politics, culture, and place. A useful synopsis of the Bhopal disaster is undermined by a failure to engage with problems associated with globalization, international capital movements, and the nonimplementation of local safety regimes. A synoptic account of Chernobyl provides a terrifying picture of ad hoc improvisation on the part of technicians under orders to make good a serious electricity shortage, but Chiles fails to situate events within the political framework of a command-and-response economy during the final days of the Soviet Union. Likewise, a section devoted to Apollo 13 says little about the drive for national prestige that shaped ideological and cultural contexts and contributed to systems collapse.

Chiles is also insufficiently sensitive to the shifting scale of manmade disasters over time. A useful appendix lists every calamity and near miss cited in the body of the text. Yet little is made of the fact that, between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth, very few technologically driven catastrophes claimed the lives of more than hundreds, let alone thousands of victims. In this respect, the First World War may have been a turning point. Fifteen hundred went down with the Titanic, and more than two thousand perished when in 1917 the French freighter Mont Blanc, carrying picric acid and TNT, was rammed in Halifax Harbor by the Belgian Imo. Thereafter, death rates spiraled. When sixty-two dams collapsed in Henan province in the Peoples' Republic of China during 1975, fatalities numbered more than twenty-five thousand. Mortality...

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