The Red Light Incident

Few people apart from Warren Buffet and a handful of others recognized that the financial markets were headed for a meltdown. Even so the nature of the meltdown was unanticipated. Its roots are traceable to Bretton Woods through the Glass-Steagall Act and an unknowable number of rhizomes.

It is an example of a massive closely coupled complex network system that has evolved over decades without any break points. In comparison, the Internet is loosely coupled with many break points. In other words, financial-market networks by unintentional design were a disaster waiting to happen.

Critical infrastructure protection like all forms of planning focuses on identifiable threats and risks to a national infrastructure. It does not identify the infrastructure per se as a risk to national security.

Unlike a risk, a disaster by definition is unknowable. It is the culmination of often small events and a series of human errors that accelerate the main event out of human control.

It is a red light incident. No matter how carefully you plan your route, or how defensively you drive, you can’t protect yourself against the guy running the red light. Chernobyl goes critical. Three Mile Island barely escapes. The Queen of the North sinks.

Nonetheless, some disasters are foreseeable, in particular global warming, the lack of a Canadian electrical and energy grid; market pressures to export water and others.