Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has taken a lot of heat for his evasive explanation during a February, 2002 press briefing, in which he used the seemingly nonsensical phrase “unknown unknowns” to address the lack of evidence that the government of Iraq had supplied weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
As we now know in hindsight, the Bush administration’s case for waging war on Iraq was based on flimsy and misleading evidence, perhaps criminally so.
Mr. Rumsfeld was hung out to dry for his verbal sophistry, which famously included a break-down of the limitations all decision-makers need to account for:
“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Of course, there’s another category, perhaps the most dangerous of all, which Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t touch on that day: things we think we know, but are wrong about. Like, for instance, the mistaken, but expedient, conclusion that Sadaam Hussein had formed a far-fetched alliance with Al-Qaeda, and was supplying it with fictional weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Rumsfeld very carefully avoided the category of “mistaken knowledge” partly for self-serving reasons, but mainly because public figures don’t have much scope for apology in this hyper-partisan, litigation-mad era.
I wish Mark Twain had been in the briefing room that day for the Q and A. He might have stood up, brushed his white trousers, hung a thumb under his lapel, and delivered one of his most famous aphorisms:
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”
(Readers of this column may remember a piece I wrote last May, “Ekalled by Few & Exceld by None” on this very quotation, which probably wasn’t Mark Twain’s after all. You can read it on my website at http://www.matthewolshan.com in the Op-Ed Archive on the “My Op-Eds” page.)
“Things we know that just aren’t so” is a phrase that’s been on my mind a lot in the past few weeks, as the world has watched the unfolding crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Residents of Perry County may have found themselves flashing back to the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.
Three Mile Island may seem far removed these days, but it’s a little less than 50 miles from our place on St. Peters Church Road. In other words, if the Olshans were living in Japan, at the same distance from Fukushima Daiichi, we would be evacuating our house, and facing the possibility of never being able to return.
I’m not an alarmist about nuclear power. The disaster in Japan was caused by geological factors — the largest earthquake ever measured in Japan, followed by a catastrophic tsunami. The causes of the accident at Three Mile Island, by contrast, were mechanical in nature, followed by human mistakes.
But the problem of safely engineering a nuclear power facility – or, for that matter, a deepwater drilling operation – takes us back to Mr. Rumfeld’s celebrated list.
The Japanese are known for far-sightedness. Japan is one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced countries in the world. Setting aside the scandals over the years that have suggested shady cost-cutting measures during the construction of their nuclear power facilities, one would expect the Japanese, with their long experience with earthquakes and tsunamis — not to mention the trauma of being the only nation in the world ever to have been attacked with nuclear weapons — to be as prepared as any people could be against the possibility of a nuclear accident.
The engineers who designed Fukushima Daiichi knew there would be earthquakes, so they called for a system of control rods to shut down the reactor in the event of a major quake. That system worked. They anticipated the possibility that power to critical cooling pumps might be interrupted, so they called for back-up diesel generators. Those generators, did, in fact, kick in after the quake. They knew that they needed to account for a tsunami, so they called for a sea wall.
These were all “known knowns.”
The size of these anticipated earthquakes and tsunamis were unknown, so they prepared for a really bad one, the worst the country had ever experienced.
This was one of the “known unknowns.”
What they didn’t know, and, in the words of Mr. Rumsfeld, “didn’t know they didn’t know,” was that preparing for the worst earthquake and tsunami the country had ever experienced simply wasn’t good enough. They needed to be prepared for an even bigger earthquake and a truly monstrous tsunami like the one that struck on March 11th, which took out the back-up generators, initiating a series of disastrous meltdowns.
Finally, what they “knew that just wasn’t so,” was that the economic and strategic benefits of building Fukushima Daiichi would outweigh the cost of a nuclear disaster there.
Engineers, including the kind who design nuclear power facilities, have the unenviable task of deciding just how much preparedness is enough. Often, market and political pressures bear on those decisions. There’s a practical pressure, too: the common sense test. If every facility had to be prepared for every eventuality, even the absurdly unlikely, such as a direct hit from a huge meteorite, nothing would ever get built. The world is a risky place. Earthquakes happen. Tsunamis happen. The answer can’t be to stop building power plants and abandon the search for oil.
But we are all watching, with a combination of horror and pity, what happens when the best laid plans of man are overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity of nature.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 24 March 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
