The Oscar-shortlisted documentary Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner, finds its origins in Eric Schlosser's book and continues to explore the little-known history of the management and safety concerns of America's nuclear aresenal. “A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Fascinating.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine “Perilous and gripping . . . Schlosser skillfully weaves together an engrossing account of both the science and the politics of nuclear weapons safety.” —San Francisco Chronicle A myth-shattering exposé of America’s nuclear weapons Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved—and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind. While the harms of global warming increasingly dominate the news, the equally dangerous yet more immediate threat of nuclear weapons has been largely forgotten. Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America’s nuclear age.

The book contains Michael Matsas's personal record of his one teenage year with villagers of Psilovrahos during the second world war, and a young boy's experience with the Andartes who fought their nation's enemies.

This volume contains studies of one particular category of risky situations, namely, those involving highly negative consequences with low probabilities. Situations of this type involve both natural and man-made disasters (e.g. floods, technological hazards, economic crises, epidemics, etc.). Such risks are characterized by two features: (1) they occur relatively rarely (the probability of their occurrence is very low) and (2) they have extremely negative consequences (they are catastrophic). Such events generally cannot be prevented, but one can both try to anticipate them and undertake actions aimed at ameliorating their negative consequences. Consequently, the first part of the book is devoted to risk perception issues. It includes studies devoted to the following questions which arise when people have to deal with probabilities, and small probabilities in particular: How can probabilistic information be communicated effectively? What is the impact of emotions on perceptions of, and reactions to, probabilistic information? Other relevant issues are also discussed. The second part of the book is devoted to protection and insurance against risk. Thus, it includes studies answering the following questions: What determines a person’s willingness to take preventive actions in areas susceptible to severe flooding? How do people form their own risk estimates? Research presented in the book extends our knowledge of human behavior in situations characterized by large risks and low probabilities, leading to better comprehension of the functioning of cognitive and affective processes in perception and decision making in situations where uncertainty and risk are accompanied by highly negative consequences.

The Illusion of Safety chronicles the little known history of the Holocaust in Greece. Through a collection of personal memoirs of survivors and resistance fighters and wartime reports form the U.S. State Department and Great Britain, Michael Matsas recounts the tragic loss of Greek Jewry. Late in WWII, while the Allied governments knew about Hitler's "Final Solution" and had the means to disseminate information in Greece, the Greek Jews were kept uninformed of the death camps and lulled into complacency,. 87% of this historic community was destroyed. In addition, the author recounts his own survival story, as a boy of 13, of his year in a mountain village with his parents and sister, the villagers, and the partisans who saved them.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores the implications of acknowledging uncertainty and black swans for regulation of high-hazard technologies, for stakeholder acceptability of potentially hazardous activities and for risk governance. The conventional approach to risk assessment, which combines the likelihood of an event and the severity of its consequences, is poorly suited to situations where uncertainty and ambiguity are prominent features of the risk landscape. The new definition of risk used by ISO, “the effect of uncertainty on [achievement of] one’s objectives”, recognizes this paradigm change. What lessons can we draw from the management of fire hazards in Edo-era Japan? Are there situations in which increasing uncertainty allows more effective safety management? How should society address the risk of potentially planet-destroying scientific experiments? This book presents insights from leading scholars in different disciplines to challenge current risk governance and safety management practice.

A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.