> Reading the New York Times article, "At Warning Center, Alert for the
> Quake, None for a Tsunami" (appended below), and thinking of my
> experience with investigating earthquakes for the US government for
> almost 22 years and doing research on seismological techniques to
> monitor underground nuclear explosions, I believe that the US
> military/CIA had critically useful information about the tsunami while
> it was in progress.
WS: This is an ex post facto rationalization bordering on a conspiracy theory. To my limited understanding, predicting tsunami or its effect is quite difficult because it depends pretty much on the underwater topography, and the type and location of the quake - not just the magnitude. Therefore, claiming that a 8.9 quake will certainly produce a devastating tsunami is a long stretch - to say the least.
But even more importantly, the knowledge of the imminent disaster is pretty much useless if there is no functioning warning and evacuation system in place. Tsunamis travel at a great speed and they can reach the shores within minutes from the event. So even if a warning is issued - that may give perhaps 20-30 minutes to evacuate millions of people. That borders on impossibility, especially in the more remote or densely populated areas.
There is something in the human nature that makes us uneasy when we feel not being in full control. For our own peace of mind, we would like to think that we can tame any disaster. But often times, that peace of mind is an illusion based on magic thinking.
In his classic study of Trobriand islanders, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski observed a marked difference in the natives' attitudes related to seemingly similar activities, such as fishing. Some fishing expeditions were mundane everyday endeavors, while other were preceded by elaborate magic rituals. Malinowski explained that difference by the level of control the natives had over the fate of each expedition. The lagoon expeditions were under a great deal of control, because the natives knew the area and could predict weather patterns. In the open sea expeditions, on the other hand, their level of control was minimal, because their navigational skills and knowledge of weather patterns were insufficient to avoid disasters. The magic rituals accompanying the open sea expeditions were thus attempts to exercise symbolic control in situation where actual control was technologically impossible.
The focus on tsunami warning systems following the latest disaster is but a modern form of such magic. The sober fact is that humans can do very little to effectively protect themselves from such disasters (and other kinds of disasters as well) - but realizing that would be quite disturbing indeed. Therefore, we engage in risk management that amounts to magic rituals - it cannot prevent the disaster, but it gives us an illusion that we can escape the danger.
For an interesting discussion on this topic see _Mission Improbable : Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster_ (The University of Chicago Press, 1999) -by Lee Clarke who was my professor of organizational behavior at Rutgers.
Wojtek