Columbia Disater

ABOUT THE WRITER

Lloyd J. Dumas, author of "Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility
and Dangerous Technologies" (Palgrave, 1999), is professor of
political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The tragic breakup of the space shuttle Columbia as it re-entered the atmosphere once more underlines the vulnerability of highly complex technologies whose operation we have come to think of as routine. Regardless of what caused the shuttle to disintegrate - human error, technical failure, or something else - the lesson is clear - when fallible human beings interact with powerful technologies, failures are inevitable. Even when thousands of highly trained people are intensely focused on making sure that nothing goes seriously wrong, failure can and does still occur

This time, the failure took the lives of seven exquisitely trained astronauts. The next catastrophic human-technical failure could take the lives of many thousands of ordinary people, if it involves a nuclear power plant, highly toxic chemicals facility, or nuclear, biological or chemical weapon of mass destruction.

Few of us realize that the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 could easily have been a much greater disaster. The next Challenger launch was scheduled to contain a Centaur rocket carrying an unmanned spacecraft powered by 46.7 pounds of plutonium. Had Challenger exploded on that mission, triggering an explosion of the Centaur, well over 100,000 lethal doses of plutonium (0.007 ounce per dose) would have been dispersed into the air. According to John Goffman, former associate director of the Livermore nuclear weapons labs, "If it gets dispersed over Florida, kiss Florida good-bye." Yet last October, NASA announced a contract with Boeing to further develop nuclear power for space uses as part of a $2 billion "nuclear systems initiative" advocated by the space agency’s chief, Sean O’Keefe.

We have had only three fatal U.S. space craft accidents in the 42 years since the launch of Alan Shepard’s historic flight on May 5, 1961: the January 27, 1967, fire that destroyed the Apollo 1 spacecraft with three astronauts aboard during a ground test; the Challenger launch tragedy on January 28, 1986, that took the lives of seven astronauts; and now the loss of Columbia and its crew. We went more than four decades- more than 100 re-entries of American manned space vehicles - without a single re-entry mishap, but in the end, our fallibility still caught up with us.

We humans are extraordinarily capable, but we are not perfect, and we never will be. Not a single technology, from the wheel to the space shuttle, has worked perfectly all the time. Along with all the benefits technology has brought us, we have developed a small but increasing number of extremely dangerous technologies that have a potential for disaster that is incompatible with our inherent fallibility. Some, from nuclear weapons to nerve gas, were designed to be dangerous. Others, such as nuclear power and highly toxic industrial chemicals, were designed for a benign purpose, but can cause disasters if enough things go wrong, as Chernobyl and Bhopal demonstrated with alarming clarity.

We must never permit the enthusiasm we justifiably feel for all the marvelous things that technology can do to allow us to forget that accidents are not bizarre aberrations. They are everyday occurrences. Complicating this is the fact that we live in an era when deliberate acts of mass destruction - whether due to terrorism, sabotage or war - have become altogether too commonplace. Those ready to commit such acts have ever-greater access to increasingly dangerous technologies mankind has created, to use as weapons or targets of opportunity.

We are greatly alarmed that Iraq and North Korea may have, or will soon get, weapons of mass destruction. We should be alarmed by the proliferation of such technologies to other countries and even to terrorist groups. But we should also be alarmed about their continued existence anywhere - even in our own arsenals. They are an open invitation to disaster in the hands of a species as prone to error and destructive behavior as we are. This is not mere speculation: there were 89 publicly reported major accidents involving nuclear weapons from 1950-1994, an average of one every six months for 45 years.

The Columbia tragedy is the latest in a series of warnings that we must find ways to eliminate the most dangerous technologies from our arsenals and from our industries if we are to permanently avoid catastrophe. As we mourn the brave Columbia crew, we must not overlook the most important lesson they taught us: we can enjoy the many benefits technology offers, from cell phones to CDs, but we cannot indefinitely continue to win a game of chicken against our very nature.