《Whole World on Fire》是Cornell University Press出版的圖書，作者是Eden, Lynn
基本介紹
- ISBN：9780801472893
- 作者：Eden, Lynn
- 出版社：Cornell University Press
- 出版時間：2003年11月
- 頁數：384
- 定價：$ 32.71
- 叢書：Cornell Studies in Security Affairs
內容簡介
Winner of the 2004 Robert K. Merton Professional Award (Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section, American Sociological Association) 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....(展開全部) Winner of the 2004 Robert K. Merton Professional Award (Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section, American Sociological Association) 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 th
