The thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks.

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

Martin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming 'I have a nightmare'

The thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks.

To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk, the ineveitable concomitants of a system geared to the domination of nature and the reflexive making of history. Fate and destiny have no formal part to play in such a system, which operates (as a matter of principle) via what I shall call open human control of the natural and social worlds.

High-consequence risks have a distinctive quality. The more calamitous the hazards they involve, the less we have any real experience of what we risk: for if things 'go wrong', it is already too late.

The body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.