---
title: "Scott D. Sagan"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Scott D. Sagan"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-09-14T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Normal Accident Theory","High Reliability Theory","Todd R. La Porte","Charles Perrow"]
seek_code_commit: "546fa57"
---


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 [[entity-todd-la-porte|Todd La Porte]]'s HRT paper in the same issue. Sagan engaged directly with both [[entity-charles-perrow|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]])