Room for commonsense
In order to reduce the risk of a man going Mad, men rely upon machines and Mechanical systems to operate what are grandly called 'fail-safe' procedures so that a nuclear exchange does not begin by mistake—it being difficult to imagine an ex- change being started on purpose. The trouble Is that machines do not discriminate nor have machines any commonsense. In the nervous official reaction that is to be ex- Pected from the emergency created in Washington by the non-existent emergency that was erroneously announced and happily ignored, it is to be hoped that more complex machinery is rejected as the answer. At no Point in the process taking place in the mid- dle of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado (Where the wrong bit of tape was put into the telex machine), does there appear to have neen the opportunity for human discrimina- tion, for commonsense, to have supervened. It is no use endeavouring to eliMinate human error if you also eliminate human judgment. bon't fling the baby out with the bathwater.
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