Thus we hardly could be more sensitized to the question Morone and Woodhouse raise in their book: "Why, despite close calls, have risky civilian technologies produced no catastrophes in the United States? Have we simply been lucky—or is our good fortune at least partly the result of deliberate efforts to protect against these hazards?"
The authors are social process-oriented. They confess: "At the outset of this research, we approached this subject with the commonly held assumption that the United States had botched the job of regulating risky technologies. Yet when we actually delved into how regulators have coped with the various risks, we discovered a surprisingly intelligent process."
Five case studies on U.S. civilian technologies form the core of the analysis in Averting Catastrophe: toxic chemicals, nuclear reactors, recombinant DNA research, threats to the ozone layer and the atmospheric greenhouse problem. As the authors recognize, any book based on only ...
