In the late winter of 2003, a number of livestock animals in the Midwest were poisoned due to accidental contamination of a popular commercial feed with a lethal additive. Although all the evidence indicates this incident had no malicious or terrorist intent, it is informative as a case study highlighting potential security implications with respect to a terrorist event directed at U.S. agriculture.

In all the discussions of agricultural terrorism, the threat of deliberate and malicious introduction of a contaminant to animal feed has barely warranted a sentence in policy papers and legislation. Yet the historical record shows that individuals from New Zealand to Kenya to the U.S. have seen contamination as an easy method to kill animals.

In the November 2004 issue of the Journal of Animal Science (the leading peer-reviewed, technical animal science journal), this article discusses the poisoning of livestock alpacas (a smaller cousin of the llama) in early 2003. The animals were killed by accidental contamination of a popular commercial feed with a lethal additive parts per million (ppm) level. Although the absolute number of animals affected was small, if a similar percentage of beef livestock were poisoned, it would correspond to a loss of over 400,000 cattle in the U.S.

The article provides a brief history of incidents of chemical contamination and the political (failure of re-election bid by the Belgian Premier in 2000) and human effects (documented cases of lymphoma, breast and digestive cancers in Michigan among those who ate fire retardant-tainted meat in 1973.) Also addressed are the relative risks to agriculture by biological agent versus chemical agent and concludes with specific recommendations for bringing feed security into the agricultural terrorism dialogue.

The dominant (though contested) wisdom among international relations scholars is that military officers tend to be more cautious than their civilian counterparts about initiating the use of force. Sobered by the experience of combat, the theory holds, soldiers are hesitant to recommend military action except under the most favorable of circumstances. It might be the case, however, that military conservatism is simply a product of strong civilian oversight. Indeed, scholars have suggested that military officers actually have powerful incentives to promote the use of force, but these predilections may be muted when civilian leaders can punish officers for botched military adventures. In this article, the author details a quantitative, competitive test of these propositions, showing that states with strong civilian control are on average less prone to initiate military action than states without it. The results suggest that civilian control should play a central role in future models of conflict initiation.

This volume offers a unique perspective on the discussion of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by broadening the terms of the debate to include both secular and religious investigations not normally considered. The volume contains a structured dialogue between representatives of the following ethical traditions: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, feminism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, liberalism, natural law, pacifism, and realism. There are two introductory chapters on the technical aspects of WMD and international agreements for controlling WMD. A concluding essay compares the different ethical traditions. All the authors address the same set of moral issues and this creates a dialogue both within and across traditions. The debate structure is particularly useful and appealing for pedagogical purposes. The introductory essays on the technical and legal aspects of WMD could easily be used to introduce the subject to students.

Human cooperation remains a puzzle because it persists even in contexts where traditional theories predict it should not do so (i.e. among unrelated strangers, who never meet again and where reputation effects are absent). The leading explanation argues that cooperation occurs only if non-cooperators are punished. However, punishment is costly, so "second-order" non-cooperators may arise who defect from contributing to punishment, thus unravelling this solution. We propose an alternative: during our history, the fear of supernatural punishment (whether real or not) deterred defectors and may therefore represent an adaptive trait favoured by natural selection. Supernatural beliefs are universal among human societies, commonly connected to taboos for public goods, so it seems plausible that they serve an important function in fostering cooperation. This hypothesis offers an explanation for (a) geographic variation in religious practices as solutions to local cooperation problems; and (b) the power of political appeals to religion to elicit cooperation.

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?

US bombing in World War II caused massive fire damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later war plans took account only of damage from the 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 mass fire often--and predictably--greatly exceeds that of blast effects. This has major implications for defense policy: the US 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 US Air Force's doctrine of precision bombing led to the development of very good predictions of nuclear blast--a significant achievement--but did not advance 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 1990's. 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 this 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.

This book won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology. It was published in 2005 by Manas Publications in New Delhi, India.