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The Limits of State Autonomy: Societal Groups and Foreign Policy Formation . Edited by David Skidmore and Valerie M. Hudson. Boulder: Westview, 1993. 328p. $42.50 paper.

wants to avoid criticism, so he blames problems on subordinates rather than on shortcomings in policy. Does the argument stand up to scrutiny? For the most part, yes; one comes away from Limits with a profound appreciation of the roles of organizational routines and actors' interests in shaping and misshaping the implementation of nuclear weapons safeguards. Extrapolation to other hazardous technologies is but a small, and justified, step—as evidenced by the Exxon Valdez and Bhopal accidents, among others correctly attributable to organizational dysfunction, and not merely to individual human error. If the book has a shortcoming, it is that its theoretical treatment could be framed more even handedly. Limits is marvelous in depicting organizational forces leading to the breakdown of safety procedures, and the picture thereby painted is chilling. But it is perhaps equally important to ask, "Given tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, controlled by flawed humans who were supposed to respond almost instantly to ambiguous signals of Soviet threat, how did SAC and the other parts of the nuclear missile command manage to get through the Cold War without an accidental or erroneous detonation?" Part of the answer is revealed by La Porte et al.'s studies of emergency flight deck operations on aircraft carriers, management of multi-state electricity grids, and other high-reliability organizations. These scholars have identified social-organizational requisites for near-perfect performance, including a thoroughgoing commitment to safety by top executives in the organization, intense training and socialization, and redundant backup systems. Neo-incrementalists Morone and Woodhouse find that complex, risky endeavors succeed in direct proportion to the extent there is diversity of participation in decision making so that fewer considerations are overlooked, flexibility in policy trials to enable error correction, redundancy and other means of mitigating the consequences of the inevitable errors, and vigilant monitoring of policy trials. Most of these decision strategies are to be found in the U.S. missile command, and arguably go far toward explaining the extent of its success in preventing accidental detonations. Still, Sagan is right to underline the limitations of such high-reliability strategies. Limits causes us to focus more attention on conflicts of interest in organizations, even in those managing nuclear weapons and other hazardous technologies. Of redundancy, Sagan argues that at times it actually makes matters worse, inadvertently causing the very problems it was designed to prevent: SAC's redundant B-52 did crash next to the radar station in Thule, Greenland, for example, almost providing simultaneous blinding of two information sources and thereby increasing Air Force monitors' confidence that a Soviet attack was in progress. Of flexibility, Sagan points out that partisans within one organization will not necessarily find it rewarding to pursue strategies that might be sensible from some Olympian viewpoint. On socialization, Sagan argues that strong organizational control can encourage excessive loyalty and coverup to protect the reputation of the organization. These and other arguments move the normal-accidents approach to organizational reliability a good bit beyond Perrow's largely structural views, offering a richer organizational politics interpretation. I feel confident that my fellow "high reliability theorists" would join Sagan in expecting organizational politics (and the egregious shortcomings of contemporary democratic politics) often to interfere markedly with learning from experience and other facets of organizational reliability. In the case of nuclear weapons, moreover, everyone can agree that nearly perfect is not good enough. How, then, to do better? Normal accidents theory recommends making an organization less tightly coupled and less complexly interactive, so that breakdowns in one part of an organization or activity do not ramify into larger and more catastrophic problems. One of Sagan's illustrations of this is to move warheads away from missiles in the post-Cold War era, allowing more time to evaluate whether an alarm is real, and less opportunity for catastrophic accidents. (Bombs now have been removed from bombers during peacetime, following a fire in a nuclear-armed B-52). Altogether, Limits is perhaps the outstanding contribution to date in a developing genre that is rejuvenating the organization-theoretic approach to national security studies. After a long hiatus when Halperin, Steinbruner, and Allison moved into administrative positions and when neorealists and rational actor theorists were at their apex, Sagan reinvigorates the use of intra-organizational loyalties, routines, and power relations as means of understanding inter-organizational behavior in national security realms. (Also see Sagan's organizationtheoretic analysis of nuclear proliferation in International Security.) Sagan's conceptual analysis advances as well our theoretical ideas about organizational reliability under conditions of high uncertainty and potentially catastrophic risk. The book is sure to stimulate scholars from several traditions to sharpen their arguments to take account of Sagan's criticisms and insights. Limits also will encourage risk analysis scholars to take organizational politics into better account. Finally, for organization theory more generally, Sagan joins Perrow, La Porte et al., and a handful of others in forging a normative wing of the field. These scholars are concerned with developing theories about how organizations do work in order to understand how organizations and their networks can work more reliably, more fairly, and otherwise "better." As a stimulus to further development of relevant organization theory, Sagan's contribution is most welcome.