Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination Book

Al Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in Times Square during rush hour, wiping out half of Manhattan and killing 500,000 people. A virulent strain of bird flu jumps to humans in Thailand, sweeps across Asia, and claims more than fifty million lives. A single freight car of chlorine derails on the outskirts of Los Angeles, spilling its contents and killing seven million. An asteroid ten kilometers wide slams into the Atlantic Ocean, unleashing a tsunami that renders life on the planet as we know it extinct. We consider the few who live in fear of such scenarios to be alarmist or even paranoid. But Worst Cases shows that such individuals?like Cassandra foreseeing the fall of Troy?are more reasonable and prescient than you might think. In this book, Lee Clarke surveys the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination, from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics. Along the way, he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has rendered them ordinary and mundane: very real threats like a killer flu or an American Hiroshima have become so common that they have lost their ability to shock us. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases will be must reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear. It concerns the categories and processes people use to look forward, and backward, to envision the worst. Disasters, even worst cases, are normal parts of life. They are prosaic. We can lead safer and more interesting lives by coming to grips with living and dying in a worst case world. How do we imagine the worst that can happen? What happens when our leaders fail to imagine worst cases? Why is disaster sometimes good for society? Why should we doing more worst case thinking? The usual view about danger and catastrophe is that it?s irrational to worry about low probability events: airplane crashes and nuclear power meltdowns are good examples. That?s probabilistic thinking and in modern times it is equated with reason itself. Worst case thinking is different. Worst case thinking is possibilistic thinking, and we need it as a complement to probabilistic thinking. It emphasizes consequences over probabilities: what if terrorists commandeer four airplanes simultaneously, what if five major universities are attacked at once? what happens if the power-grid goes down for two months? Thinking about worst cases is fundamentally an exercise in thinking about the social organization of imagination. Even wealthy societies?where people live longer?are vulnerable to worst cases. This is because of hubris, interdependence, and population concentration. An example of hubris is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers trying to control the Mississippi River, actions that in part set the conditions for the Great Flood of 1993 as well as Katrina?s destruction of New Orleans. The dangers of interdependence were apparent in the SARS outbreak, which is significant more for its spread-rate than its morality-rate. If avian flu mutates so that human to human transmission is easy, it will be social interdependence that quickly spreads it around the world. Examples of concentration are working in tall buildings, living near coast-lines, or Airbus Industries? new A380, a four-aisle, two-story behemoth that could carry 800 people. Calamity is with us as never before. But we are poorly prepared for it. Too much disaster policy takes a command-and-control stance. And we pay only a smattering of attention to preparing for disaster where they really happen?at the local level: in offices, schools, trains, and the like. Adopting a strategy of preemptive resilience to foster response abilities before catastrophe strikes would mark a much needed change in how we approach disaster. What might get us closer to preemptive resilience? An increase in the frequency and intensity of disasters could prompt a reorientation in thinking. So could a deeper appreciation of worst cases.Read More