Today many organizations develop all-hazards continuity of operations plans. How does the thinking behind this report comport with such modern ideas? How many of those contemporary plans include a section on nuclear war??
It's a great question. At some future point I will write about the All-Hazards approach that FEMA embraced, which many planners see as vastly better than nuclear-only planning, but in my reading of it tended to, over time, relate nuclear planning to a very niche operation. My informal discussions with current emergency planners at the federal and local level suggest that nuclear war on this scale is not planned for very specifically anymore, and that, at best, one finds planning (esp. since 9/11) for very limited nuclear detonations, such as a single, low-yield urban ground burst (e.g., nuclear terrorism) or, at most, a single high-altitude kiloton-range warhead (e.g., North Korea). To my knowledge there is not a lot of specific planning for the aftermath of a multi-warhead exchange with Russia or China (or even North Korea). Or, if there is, local emergency planners do not seem "looped in" on it, or at least weren't when I talked to them.
The report itself has a zoomed in depiction of the Northeast on page 25 and... it's still pretty much a black line. With particularly grim outcomes for anyone within 40 miles or so from NYC.
I'd be interested in any analysis which might have been done of the psychological / social impacts of nuclear war, or the credible threat thereof. What happens to society when great masses of people lose faith in the future?
Our culture is currently living in a state of deep nuclear weapons denial. This is proven by the current presidential election, where these weapons will barely be mentioned, even though we are selecting a single human being to have sole authority over their use.
What happens when that deep state of denial is suddenly unraveled? How do people react if they come to conclude that a nuclear war might actually happen? Or worse, has actually happened.
If everything we've ever known is about to be over, why go to work? Why follow the law? Why be faithful to your spouse? Why do anything that you don't want to do?
My Dad was a WWII veteran and I recall him telling me when I was a teen that civilization is a thin veneer over the raw state of nature. Puncture the veneer, and my guess is that we're back to the law of the jungle in very short order.
Any idea that the national government would do this or that after a nuclear war seems absurd. Most of the major agencies of the federal government are all bunched up together in Washington DC, which would obviously be target priority #1 for any attacker. The entire city would most likely be vaporized.
Re: social impacts — definitely something that this particular study did not look at, at all. As a National Academy of Sciences study from 1986 on the Medical Implications of Nuclear War noted:
"Perhaps the most serious shortcoming we have found in the works cited above is the lack of social science input. Except for Katz (1982), economic projections are made without even a passing reference to behavioral and institutional considerations. One thing is clear. A nuclear exchange of the magnitude reported in these studies would cause a rapid collapse of the nation's social and economic infrastructure. The speed with which a new system could be erected is an open question, and one which may never be answered."
For psychological impacts, I'm not sure there are great ways to know. There are studies (notably those by Robert Jay Lifton) that looked at the impact of the atomic bombings on the psychology of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors (and were important for the development of PTSD as a diagnostic category). But of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as horrible as they were, are quite localized compared to the total destruction contemplated in these later war scenarios, and were studied at a time in which the US Occupation had taken over the job of stabilizing postwar Japan, charting paths forward, and so on. And they were also attacks on a people who were already in a context of being bombed, as a nation. Would any results there be comparable or generalizable to Cold War (or later) Americans who suddenly found their world destroyed over the course of a matter of hours? I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to know. In fact, I'd rather keep on NOT knowing...
But I will be writing something on the "survivors would envy the dead"/"I'd rather go out in the flash" trope. My sense, as a historian, is that on average the will to survive is pretty strong, even in the face of unimaginable loss. People tend to underestimate it when it is posed in the abstract, or as a hypothetical, and are more resilient in practice, after the immediate shock of change has passed.
The US did put a lot of work into "continuity of government" plans, so that the core federal government could hypothetically survive such an attack. How well that would work, and of what good it would be, I don't know. I have always thought the idea of Congress hiding out in its bunker, nominally pretending to be important and relevant to a ruined nation, somewhat grim and unlikely.
Rebecca Solnit's classic "A Paradise Built in Hell" seems relevant here, although all the disasters discussed in her book were much, much more localized. But the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" is maybe much less accurate than people think! The 1906 San Francisco earthquake/fire took out most of the city, and the governmental response didn't help, but people seemed to cooperate pretty well. And I think there were efforts by the survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (as opposed to outside help) to get organized, though they had very little to work with.
That said, Solnit's final chapters are on a time when this more optimistic angle didn't work, specifically Katrina. Her analysis was basically "Disaster = cooperation; disaster + racism = dystopian hellscape." COVID updated this to "Disaster + low civic trust = hellscape." So I think we know what situation we'd be in today... and going by your comments about survivalists' attitudes towards urban populations, I think we know how it would have played out if the bomb had dropped in the '70s, too.
...Except maybe in rural Oregon, which seems to have dodged the bombs on that map, and was lily-white. Still pretty much is. Does your game factor in race?
The game doesn't factor in race or gender from the perspective of the player character, because I've tried to avoid ascribing too many properties to the player character. Making it possible to play as a certain gender or race and have the world respond differently would be interesting, of course, but would dramatically ratchet up the complexity of things. So as it is, you can basically imagine the player character to be whatever you want them to be, and the world will regard them pretty neutrally, for better or worse.
But things like gender and race can come up with regards to individual survivors, including their interactions with other survivors if they are "recruitable." And it can come up in regards to the stories that non-recruitable survivors tell.
Makes sense. You generally want blank-slate protagonists anyway for player buy-in. But I'll be really interested to see how the game handles it if the player recruits a streetwise, early-era-hip hop rapper and brings him to a 1980s Willamette valley... It'll be a great reason to put "The Message" on the soundtrack, of course.
Thanks much for your response. Regarding psychological /social impacts.....
My generation was born just as the nuclear arms race got underway, were children in the fifties as that race exploded, and were teens at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We might see one version of the psychological /social impacts of the nuclear era in the hippy movement. As we came in to adulthood much of my generation started talking about dropping out of society, ignoring authority and existing social conventions. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die etc.
I wouldn't claim the hippy movement was a particularly coherent response to the nuclear era, and there were other factors involved besides nukes. But perhaps that social revolution provides a hint of how things could unfold.
I don't see it mentioned explicitly, but it looks like the report assumes that after the extremely public evacuation the Soviets still hit the now-empty cities, and not the places people moved to?
I think that the world leaders would be more, inclined to NOT press their nuke button. They usually are people with high stakes-investments, multimillion dollar assets holdings, ext., ext. They would value any nuclear exchange, only as "You nuke me, I'll have no choice but to nuke you".
Why would any world leader want to destroy, what they spent their business career building only to have it wiped out by a few nukes on any of the major cities and their respective markets? Or, for example a strike on a major oil producing resource would not only cripple that as a military resource but would send the oil market into chaos. Any effect to one would have at the least a limited effect on the global trade market, and the one who gave the launch order.
I think that "Doomsday Scenario's" only make for good Hollywood TV and movies, but not more than that.
I'm really fascinated to learn more about this ADAGIO computer program mentioned in one of your quotes, the assumptions put into it, who wrote it and how they thought about it (indeed, if it was meant to be used this way), and if it was every updated. Sadly the 2 documents I could find on it both have dead PDF links: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA022799 and https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD0787614
Relocation would never have worked. Too many people being moved requiring too many resources - that need to have been prepared for this event far in advance. That level of evacuation could very well have been interpreted as unequivocal preparation for war. In a way, a premature massive evacuation ordered in panic or in poor anticipation of future events, might trigger the very war everyone feared.
The movement is to move people away from the specific areas they think would be subjected to blast/fire damage, and extreme fallout. The remaining people would then have to be sheltered. Even then (as the report makes clear) there are areas where people would still die in a pretty good (PF = 50) fallout shelter. But the idea is that you'd minimize death that way.
All of which is, I think, true in the sense that, yeah, if you could do all that, and said people had access to food and security and medical care and so on, you'd get that result. Whether any of that relocation and access to necessary facilities is itself plausible is, well, debatable. To say the least.
The report in question goes into EXTREME Ohio-related detail, if you are curious about it. It is an interesting study, and one sort of wishes similar studies existed for other states: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/tr/ADA080063
✍️ don't be...near bombs...when they detonate...✍️
One weird trick that the Soviets don't want you to know!
Today many organizations develop all-hazards continuity of operations plans. How does the thinking behind this report comport with such modern ideas? How many of those contemporary plans include a section on nuclear war??
It's a great question. At some future point I will write about the All-Hazards approach that FEMA embraced, which many planners see as vastly better than nuclear-only planning, but in my reading of it tended to, over time, relate nuclear planning to a very niche operation. My informal discussions with current emergency planners at the federal and local level suggest that nuclear war on this scale is not planned for very specifically anymore, and that, at best, one finds planning (esp. since 9/11) for very limited nuclear detonations, such as a single, low-yield urban ground burst (e.g., nuclear terrorism) or, at most, a single high-altitude kiloton-range warhead (e.g., North Korea). To my knowledge there is not a lot of specific planning for the aftermath of a multi-warhead exchange with Russia or China (or even North Korea). Or, if there is, local emergency planners do not seem "looped in" on it, or at least weren't when I talked to them.
The first map is fascinating... Especially how I-95 is basically a solid, thick, black line from DC to NY.
The report itself has a zoomed in depiction of the Northeast on page 25 and... it's still pretty much a black line. With particularly grim outcomes for anyone within 40 miles or so from NYC.
I went and took a gander at that, and, yow...
I'd be interested in any analysis which might have been done of the psychological / social impacts of nuclear war, or the credible threat thereof. What happens to society when great masses of people lose faith in the future?
Our culture is currently living in a state of deep nuclear weapons denial. This is proven by the current presidential election, where these weapons will barely be mentioned, even though we are selecting a single human being to have sole authority over their use.
What happens when that deep state of denial is suddenly unraveled? How do people react if they come to conclude that a nuclear war might actually happen? Or worse, has actually happened.
If everything we've ever known is about to be over, why go to work? Why follow the law? Why be faithful to your spouse? Why do anything that you don't want to do?
My Dad was a WWII veteran and I recall him telling me when I was a teen that civilization is a thin veneer over the raw state of nature. Puncture the veneer, and my guess is that we're back to the law of the jungle in very short order.
Any idea that the national government would do this or that after a nuclear war seems absurd. Most of the major agencies of the federal government are all bunched up together in Washington DC, which would obviously be target priority #1 for any attacker. The entire city would most likely be vaporized.
Re: social impacts — definitely something that this particular study did not look at, at all. As a National Academy of Sciences study from 1986 on the Medical Implications of Nuclear War noted:
"Perhaps the most serious shortcoming we have found in the works cited above is the lack of social science input. Except for Katz (1982), economic projections are made without even a passing reference to behavioral and institutional considerations. One thing is clear. A nuclear exchange of the magnitude reported in these studies would cause a rapid collapse of the nation's social and economic infrastructure. The speed with which a new system could be erected is an open question, and one which may never be answered."
For psychological impacts, I'm not sure there are great ways to know. There are studies (notably those by Robert Jay Lifton) that looked at the impact of the atomic bombings on the psychology of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors (and were important for the development of PTSD as a diagnostic category). But of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as horrible as they were, are quite localized compared to the total destruction contemplated in these later war scenarios, and were studied at a time in which the US Occupation had taken over the job of stabilizing postwar Japan, charting paths forward, and so on. And they were also attacks on a people who were already in a context of being bombed, as a nation. Would any results there be comparable or generalizable to Cold War (or later) Americans who suddenly found their world destroyed over the course of a matter of hours? I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to know. In fact, I'd rather keep on NOT knowing...
But I will be writing something on the "survivors would envy the dead"/"I'd rather go out in the flash" trope. My sense, as a historian, is that on average the will to survive is pretty strong, even in the face of unimaginable loss. People tend to underestimate it when it is posed in the abstract, or as a hypothetical, and are more resilient in practice, after the immediate shock of change has passed.
The US did put a lot of work into "continuity of government" plans, so that the core federal government could hypothetically survive such an attack. How well that would work, and of what good it would be, I don't know. I have always thought the idea of Congress hiding out in its bunker, nominally pretending to be important and relevant to a ruined nation, somewhat grim and unlikely.
Rebecca Solnit's classic "A Paradise Built in Hell" seems relevant here, although all the disasters discussed in her book were much, much more localized. But the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" is maybe much less accurate than people think! The 1906 San Francisco earthquake/fire took out most of the city, and the governmental response didn't help, but people seemed to cooperate pretty well. And I think there were efforts by the survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (as opposed to outside help) to get organized, though they had very little to work with.
That said, Solnit's final chapters are on a time when this more optimistic angle didn't work, specifically Katrina. Her analysis was basically "Disaster = cooperation; disaster + racism = dystopian hellscape." COVID updated this to "Disaster + low civic trust = hellscape." So I think we know what situation we'd be in today... and going by your comments about survivalists' attitudes towards urban populations, I think we know how it would have played out if the bomb had dropped in the '70s, too.
...Except maybe in rural Oregon, which seems to have dodged the bombs on that map, and was lily-white. Still pretty much is. Does your game factor in race?
The game doesn't factor in race or gender from the perspective of the player character, because I've tried to avoid ascribing too many properties to the player character. Making it possible to play as a certain gender or race and have the world respond differently would be interesting, of course, but would dramatically ratchet up the complexity of things. So as it is, you can basically imagine the player character to be whatever you want them to be, and the world will regard them pretty neutrally, for better or worse.
But things like gender and race can come up with regards to individual survivors, including their interactions with other survivors if they are "recruitable." And it can come up in regards to the stories that non-recruitable survivors tell.
Makes sense. You generally want blank-slate protagonists anyway for player buy-in. But I'll be really interested to see how the game handles it if the player recruits a streetwise, early-era-hip hop rapper and brings him to a 1980s Willamette valley... It'll be a great reason to put "The Message" on the soundtrack, of course.
Thanks much for your response. Regarding psychological /social impacts.....
My generation was born just as the nuclear arms race got underway, were children in the fifties as that race exploded, and were teens at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We might see one version of the psychological /social impacts of the nuclear era in the hippy movement. As we came in to adulthood much of my generation started talking about dropping out of society, ignoring authority and existing social conventions. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die etc.
I wouldn't claim the hippy movement was a particularly coherent response to the nuclear era, and there were other factors involved besides nukes. But perhaps that social revolution provides a hint of how things could unfold.
I always have a chuckle when I see maps projected nuclear warheads strikes. Where I grew up is so covered in strikes, it's almost comical. (Bay area)
I've lived my entire adult life within ten miles of a Priority One target (SSBN facilities)... So, yeah.
I don't see it mentioned explicitly, but it looks like the report assumes that after the extremely public evacuation the Soviets still hit the now-empty cities, and not the places people moved to?
I think that the world leaders would be more, inclined to NOT press their nuke button. They usually are people with high stakes-investments, multimillion dollar assets holdings, ext., ext. They would value any nuclear exchange, only as "You nuke me, I'll have no choice but to nuke you".
Why would any world leader want to destroy, what they spent their business career building only to have it wiped out by a few nukes on any of the major cities and their respective markets? Or, for example a strike on a major oil producing resource would not only cripple that as a military resource but would send the oil market into chaos. Any effect to one would have at the least a limited effect on the global trade market, and the one who gave the launch order.
I think that "Doomsday Scenario's" only make for good Hollywood TV and movies, but not more than that.
I'm really fascinated to learn more about this ADAGIO computer program mentioned in one of your quotes, the assumptions put into it, who wrote it and how they thought about it (indeed, if it was meant to be used this way), and if it was every updated. Sadly the 2 documents I could find on it both have dead PDF links: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA022799 and https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD0787614
Best advice I have seen:
When you see the bright flash of the nuclear blast:
Bend down
Put your head between your legs
Kiss your ___ goodby
Relocation would never have worked. Too many people being moved requiring too many resources - that need to have been prepared for this event far in advance. That level of evacuation could very well have been interpreted as unequivocal preparation for war. In a way, a premature massive evacuation ordered in panic or in poor anticipation of future events, might trigger the very war everyone feared.
Why all that intra-Ohio movement, when the big map shows the whole state getting zapped?
The movement is to move people away from the specific areas they think would be subjected to blast/fire damage, and extreme fallout. The remaining people would then have to be sheltered. Even then (as the report makes clear) there are areas where people would still die in a pretty good (PF = 50) fallout shelter. But the idea is that you'd minimize death that way.
All of which is, I think, true in the sense that, yeah, if you could do all that, and said people had access to food and security and medical care and so on, you'd get that result. Whether any of that relocation and access to necessary facilities is itself plausible is, well, debatable. To say the least.
The report in question goes into EXTREME Ohio-related detail, if you are curious about it. It is an interesting study, and one sort of wishes similar studies existed for other states: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/tr/ADA080063