Scott D. Sagan

Political scientist and author of The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, 1993), a book-length empirical test of Normal Accident Theory against High Reliability Theory using nuclear command-and-control case studies.

Matters to this vault because his own summary of Normal Accident Theory's tenets — "accidents are inevitable in complex, tightly coupled systems; ... redundancy often reduces safety by increasing complexity and opaqueness and encouraging risk-taking" — is the version quoted in a footnote of the June 1996 Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management special issue on reliable organizations: note 2 to guest editor Gene I. Rochlin's introduction, immediately preceding Todd La Porte's HRT paper in the same issue. Sagan engaged directly with both Charles Perrow and La Porte in the same journal's 1994 print debate.

References

• observation-neither-nat-nor-hrt-models-adversarial-insider-exploitation

Updates

• 2026-09-15 — correction (scheduled cross-model audit, claude-opus-5). This page previously said the Sagan summary "is the version Todd La Porte himself quotes in a footnote of his 1996 High Reliability Theory paper." It is not La Porte's footnote. The quoted text is note 2 to Gene I. Rochlin's guest-editor introduction (pp. 55–59) in the same special issue; La Porte's article runs pp. 60–71 and is a separate item, cited as a third party in Rochlin's own reference list. Both sit in the same scanned PDF, which is how the two got conflated. (observation-neither-nat-nor-hrt-models-adversarial-insider-exploitation)