Universal Adversary

Eric Lipton and former Senator Sam Nunn made my morning. Eric was writing in the New York Times, and Senator Sam was talking to National Public Radio.

If it had not been for them, I would have had no idea what to panic about today, since the anthrax scare of yesterday appears to be a case of mis-calibration on a contractor’s testing gear, and Big Pink’s security force, a Pakistani man of a certain age who sleeps in his van in the parking lot at night, once more protected us from machete-wielding gang members.

I mean, things were looking up. Condy Rice is in Dehli, and the relations with India appear to be warming, as they are with Pakistan. That is a good thing. I had a marvelous dialogue with some Indian colleagues in 2002, not long after everyone got scared about the prospect of a nuclear exchange on the subcontinent. The President sent a number of teams over to chat, and after a long day and a pleasant lunch, we could find nothing that we really disagreed with.

The Indian Government purged my opposite number not long thereafter, but it seemed as though a thaw was beginning in the decades-long chill.

So I was gratified that some hapless Hawaiian bureaucrat mistakenly posted the National Planning Scenarios to the Web. It brought back the familiar jolt of adrenaline that I need to start my day. The Scenario document is an ancillary component to the National Response Plan, one of the key initiatives of the Department of Homeland Defense.

The Plan is the blueprint for how the government will respond to crisis or disaster, and orchestrates the ponderous Federal creature in roles and missions, and who will do what to whom in the event of catastrophe. There is no specific enemy mentioned, since they have a way of changing and the document would have to be constantly revised.

We could call the perpetrators of disaster terrorists, or The Bad Guys, but Mother Nature does things on her own sometimes. The Government has settled on the moniker ”The Universal Adversary” as the opponent. It has a catchy ring, a one-size-fits-all approach to planning. Timeless.

I am a little uncomfortable in calling Mother Nature an adversary, since sometimes I think it is vice versa, but all planning has to start somewhere.

The new Plan was necessary because everything has changed with the creation of the Department, and it is necessary to codify the new structure. That is good. We want to be organized, even if planning for mass casualties is an uncomfortable business. There is a role for the Federal Government, of course. But like politics, every disaster is local. The Feds can help, but it is the local Police and Fire responders who must deal with things on the ground.

We should note that the planning, at its root, is about money. The Government is in a quandary about how to distribute funds to the states and special cities. New York and Washington have a strong case for special treatment. Chicago has a case, since the Universal Adversary has dispatched a mad bomber to that city as well.

But the clamor for money is likewise universal. The initial plan for distribution was done by dividing the available money by the number of states, which seemed fair enough, on its face, but resulted in defending Mount Rushmore as a priority equal to that of the Empire State Building. Changing the funding formula is highly emotional, and that is the biggest challenge confronting new DHS Secretary Chertoff.

The Administration wants to distribute the money based on actual risk, and consequently his first enormous task is to channel this planning drill into a funding formula. That is not the action item I would like to have on my to-do list in a new job.

I left the government not long after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and I know several of the items on the scenario list quite well. Here they are, if you need the general list. I find it helps to chant them:

”A nuclear bomb; explosion of a liquid chlorine tank; an aerosol anthrax attack; a radiological dirty bomb; an influenza pandemic; an earthquake over seven on the Richter scale; a Category 5 hurricane; release of Sarin nerve agent in office buildings; a truck bombing of a sports arena; pneumonic plague spread at major public venues; infecting cattle with foot-and-mouth disease.”

The most catastrophic scenario, of course, is that the Universal Adversary gets their hands on a real nuclear weapon. Former Senator Nunn was interviewed this morning about his opinion on the Administration’s efforts to help control the nuclear inventory of the former Soviet Union.

Senator Sam’s courtly Georgia voice sounded a little querulous as he handed out failing marks. ”They didn’t cancel the programs,” he said ”But they have added nothing.” He went on to darkly describe what would happen if the bomb was used in a major metropolitan area.

That has been nightmare number one since the beginning. I recall reading a message from the White House in late 2001. I was in a deep bunker. The planning factor was for the effects of a nuclear bomb of several yields, detonated on the National Mall. It was a scary piece of paper. But I have largely got my sleep habits under control in the years since.

This is just about planning. And we need to have plans.

But I can just imagine what the poor local worker in Honolulu thought when he read the Planning Scenarios.

I’m not surprised that he thought people should know.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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