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The Middle East crisis of 1973 clearly demonstrated West European vulnerability to Arab use of oil as a political weapon. The oil which has begun to flow from fields in the North Sea and which will before long flow from sources in more northern waters will have far reaching implications for Western Europe and NATO. It is expected to solve many pressing economic problems, particularly for the United Kingdom, and generally bring a level of prosperity to Norway and the United Kingdom which would have been thought impossible a decade ago. By 1985 North European oil can significantly reduce the susceptibility of Western Europe to international blackmail with respect to energy and may thereby alleviate a major problem for US foreign policy. These oil resources have altered the strategic importance of this area of the world and have presented the individual nations and NATO with challenging political and security problems., Published in Parameters, v6 n1 p87-96, 1976.

The government needs to determine an acceptable level of risk for offshore operations that is consistent with national policy. For the purpose of its work, the panel assumed that the acceptable level of risk for offshore operations is zero accidents, zero deaths, and zero oil spills--though this goal may not be attainable. The panel realizes that neither the law nor any government regulation can prevent all possible accidents or malfunctions in complex systems such as offshore oil and gas production facilities. While it is an incontrovertible fact that offshore oil and gas production equipment has earned a remarkable record for safety in the past 25 years, human performance has often been attributed as a cause of failures and mishaps. The BAST requirement is limited to technologies on the OCS and is not designed to mitigate human errors. This leads to the second issue, which is the problem of calculating incremental benefits and costs related to obtaining a desired level of risk. These problems are discussed in detail in the report.