William,
I've learned to ask a simple question - "Have you ever worked a program where death is the outcome - either intentional or accidental?" No, then you're view of programmatic and technical risk management, might be limited by your experience.
This is an issued in our modern world and was present in the past. Experience comes at a high cost. The notion of senior technical management is not present in many domains. My first boss was my age now (60's) when he asked us control system guys "do you yokels know what you doing," after the very large radar antenna (30' in diameter) banged against the stops when our digital control system that was replacing his analog control system took a path we had never thought it would. "Nope I guess not," should have been the answer. But we were so dumbfounded we had no answer.
"OK, boys, back to work, call me when you think you've discovered all the other failure modes you don't know about yet."
