Whole World on Fire

Lynn Eden

3.62 · Rating details · 13 ratings · 6 reviews

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 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. ...more

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Paperback, 384 pages

Published March 30th 2006 by Cornell University Press (first published November 21st 2003)

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May 14, 2013 Victor Gonzalez rated it it was ok

We can only imagine the damage that a nuclear weapon can cause, we can read articles and hear news about it but we not fully understand all the effects of a nuclear weapon. We are not scientist and we are not military so it is ok for us not to understand completely the damage that it cause We believe that the military and the scientist involved in that area (that study the effects, that design the weapons, etc.) know.

In the book ‘Whole World on Fire’, Lynn Eden shows how the US government We can only imagine the damage that a nuclear weapon can cause, we can read articles and hear news about it but we not fully understand all the effects of a nuclear weapon. We are not scientist and we are not military so it is ok for us not to understand completely the damage that it cause We believe that the military and the scientist involved in that area (that study the effects, that design the weapons, etc.) know.

In the book ‘Whole World on Fire’, Lynn Eden shows how the US government underestimated the damage that nuclear weapons can cause by ignoring the effect that mass fire damage can cause. The book relates how the government developed models to calculate effect from the blast but constantly ignored the fire because of the “difficulty” of predicting the effect of the fire. Ignoring the effect of fire in a nuclear weapon makes believe that the weapon is not as powerful as it really is.

Eden focus her study in a discussion that is not fully closed, where scientist are still discussing the matter if fire damage should be taken into account or not. This makes the book fascinating in a way because it involves the reader into a story that hasn’t had a satisfactory conclusion for the scientist involved. I must clarified that the author is biased towards the need of including fire damage into the calculation of damage caused by a nuclear weapon and make strong arguments about it. Other scholars have criticized her for taking a side, arguing that as a sociologist you shouldn’t intervene in the discussion of the scientist but Eden is conscious of her decision and argues that it is her right to take a side as long as the facts come to the light, making sure that her bias does not prevent that.

Who are the people to discuss about technology and its development? Not only scientist can be involved, but the discussion should be led by many people involved because at the end society is affected by those decisions. If facts prove that fire damage can be calculate then the discussion of including them in the damage created by nuclear weapons should involve not only the scientist that study them.

Eden’s work is based on social constructivism shows the social component on the calculation of damage caused by nuclear weapons. She uses the concept of organizational routines, organizational frames and path dependence to unfold her study. Hugh Gusterson claims that her work can be seen as two separate book one that elaborates the work as social constructivism, opening the black box, and another that deals with the bureaucracy. I think the even though the two topics can be separate and can be seen clearly in the book, it is the combination of this that make the complete picture of what Eden wants to portrait with the use of the three concepts mention above.

At the end of the book Eden mentions technological catastrophes and tries to compare them to the fact that fire damage is not being calculated in the damage caused by nuclear weapons. I think that this is not so complete and the comparisons do not match. I know that it is difficult for her to prove her point since there hasn’t been a nuclear attack since the ones in Japan.
To study a problem that hasn’t had a satisfactory conclusion shows the courage that the author has as well as her abilities. The merger of the three concepts helped her proved her point, even if others scholars thought that that help prove technological momentum not much her point. ...more

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Nov 05, 2013 Nate Hendrix rated it did not like it

I think this might be meant as a textbook. Very dry. I read a little, skimmed even more and then gave up.

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Oct 25, 2013 Will rated it liked it · review of another edition

"The rapid scale-up of thermal radiation has strong implications for damage prediction. Because thermal radiation increases more rapidly than does blast overpressure, in higher-yield weapons mass fire ignition and resulting damage would occur to a distance beyond that of significant blast damage. For nuclear weapons of approximately 100 kilotons or more, fire damage would occur far beyond the perimeter of the blast damage; blast damage would be engulfed by the effects of mass fire.

However, the ...more

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Oct 27, 2016 Eric B. Kennedy rated it liked it

Shelves: fire, research, sociotechnical-systems

Useful examination of institutional knowledge systems, and particularly the self-reinforcing way certain topics can gain traction at the exclusion of others. Read in the context of wildland fire, it tells a very peculiar side of the story (e.g., not surprising that wildland foresters weren't terribly interested in modelling Eden's pet topic, nuclear firestorms, given they were mostly interested in different kinds of fires), but one that will be of interest to nuclear weapons buffs.

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Dec 02, 2009 Jwhitley rated it it was amazing

This book pointed out an egregious shortfall in planning outcomes of nuclear attacks - the fires created and the additional damage they would cause. US planners ignored the phenomenon for many, many years and as a long time member of the fire service, this was an incredible discovery!

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