It is one of the perversities of human nature that people have a far greater capacity for enduring disasters than for preventing them, even when the danger is plain and imminent. Winston Churchill, for all his prescience and eloquence, was powerless to prevent the Second World War: He wrote in 1936 of an England “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” The question for us today is whether, we can succeed where Churchill failed—a tall order Indeed— by preventing disaster so as not to have to endure it.