Sometime during the "Cold War," political scientists developed the complimentary concepts of crisis stability/crisis instability for describing the state of a competitive international system. They are best defined by illustrative examples. When a Soviet fighter aircraft shot down the civilian Korean airliner, KAL007, in Soviet airspace in September 1983, almost 300 lives were lost, including that of a US Congressman. Much international bluster resulted, but no war. Sixty-nine years earlier, in Sarajevo (then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire) two lives were lost in an assassination. The result was World War I, with an excess of 20 million lives lost. In the world system of 1983, a moderate perturbation remained moderate-the system was stable. In the world of 1914, a very minor perturbation of the system grew to a major disturbance, which destroyed the system. This earlier, crisis unstable, situation manifested "extreme sensitivity" to small perturbations of the system. This contrast between stability and instability in the international system sounds very much like the use of the same words in dynamical systems. In dynamics, a positive value for a Liapunov exponent for the system implies extreme sensitivity to perturbations which implies chaos.
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