Have you ever wondered what happens if there is actually a nuclear war?  What the plan is?  Have you ever wondered, is there a plan?

The answer to these questions reflects a good-news, bad-news situation.  Yes, the federal government has a plan for such a situation.  On the other hand, it's the federal government that would handle it.

The U.S. federal government is, as we all understand, in equal measure incredibly powerful and, well -- ponderous.  It's a giant.  It is strong, but not at all quick.

Homeland Security has something called its National Incident Management System.  This was in place for Hurricane Katrina, but it was not procedurally clear what was required to activate the system.  Futher, once the system was activated, no procedure existed for the activating incident to trigger a specific plan.  This according to the 2006 Homeland Security publication The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina:  Lessons Learned.

The plan that wasn't triggered in a timely fashion in Katrina is called the National Response Plan.  The trick with the NRP, currently, is that, in order to get everyone working according to the same game plan, it double-mobilizes operations in such a way that people report to two bosses.  This is a known management structure with known advantages and disadvantages.  It is used in the corporate world, for example, to ensure a product creation team work closely with both engineering and marketing.

To some extent, appying this structure to the NRP is logical.  For example, after a large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons, the resulting electro-magnetic pulse fries all electronics on the continent.  Since automobiles these days all have onboard computers, or "brains," no car will then start until someone tears out the electronic ignition, and, as I'm told, installs a carbeurator. 

If you happen to have a vehicle that's old enough (as always happens in the movies), your car might indeed start.  But this won't do you any good because the roads are liable to be clogged with dead cars.  Until the cun on carbeurators is settled, we have national gridlock.

Who deals with this?  --FEMA and the DOT.  The double-mobilization is necessary, since FEMA doesn't know a lot about the transportation infrastructure, while the Department of Transportation is mostly used to making sure truckers are up to code and not so much dealing with nuclear warfare.

If I sound skeptical of the federal government's readiness to respond quickly and appropriately to a nuclear war, I am.  In fact, I am skeptical of the federal government's ability under any circumstances to handle such a situation, by nature of the situation and what kind of critter the federal government is.

It's pretty clear, if you read the FEMA publication Oversight of Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery that the action of disaster recovery, as understood by the minds of the people who wrote this report, lies in auditing emergency funding, investigating fraud, making arrests, and recovering defrauded funds.  A major preoccupation of the report is ensuring competition during a crisis so that suppliers cannot gouge Uncle Sam.  This is what recovery is.

That version of recovery works under normal circumstances.  However, I fear that these normal circumstances, on which business as usual relies, rest on certain criteria which may not pertain after a nuclear war.

I am not at all certain, for example, that money would be any good.  Money is only worth anything because people suppose it is.  Our currency used to be backed by the gold standard, and that was worth something because gold is shiny and people like it. 

But now money is worth something because of financial institutions like the Securities and Exchange Commision, and because we borrow a lot of money from China, and for a lot of reasons I do not thoroughly understand.  Most people do not understand them, and that's a serious problem when the value of money suddenly relies on the man on the street's untrammeled confidence in that money after a nuclear war.

Therefore, the federal government's ability to work recovery using its financial muscle may be severly curtailed.

The gridlock I mentioned, if it extends through enough of our infrastructure, may itself be enough to take us down.  Industries are mutually interdependent.  If you lose power, but the guys with bucket trucks can go out and patch things up, that's fine.  If all cars need carbeurators, that's a bigger project, but it can be done.  But if you lose power and cars do not work and everything electronic is fried and people start getting hungry, the system as a whole could fail.

Continuity of Government.  The U.S. has a plan to ensure that the federal government, in the case of a calamity, does not topple.  This is important to people who work for the U.S. government.  There are diverse strategies for keeping the government intact.  It's not just the President's nuclear powered plane that can fly around endlessly without refuleing, and it's not just the Vice President's secret bomb selter that Dick Cheney had built under his office like a James Bond villain.  There is an elaborate legal structure such that if just one federal employee remains standing after the catastrophic failure of civilization, the whole thing can re-spawn itself like a Starbeast out of a 1950s science fiction movie.

But as important as this is to people in government, it might not be enough.  Government is an effect of civilization, not a cause.  So if we get an advanced state of gridlock, if people start getting hungry, if we lose faith in money, the problem is not that we need a strong Republican or Democrat in the White House who can declare military law and have the U.S. Army get things shipshape again.  The problem is that we cannot any longer organize our economic activity over the vast distances currently required to get raw materials to our computerized (and therefore dead) factories and then to distribute the resulting products to their markets.

The danger is that, with the infrastructure no longer functioning, with gridlock having set in, economic activity -- meaningful work -- may be reduced to muscle power, and may reach only as far away as the next town.  It's not that people might forget how to make microchips:  it's that people might be too busy surviving to bother making microchips, which are really only useful once society has the economic reach to build big projects and to sett stuff to lots of people.

My thinking therefore is that we should act now to cover this contingency.  A monolithic, top-down federal approach simply won't work here, because it is the system that the federal government reaches the terrain through that we must suppose may fail.  We need to prepare for the failure of centralization while our centralized resources are still good, by ensuring every town has a wood-fire kiln it can make bricks in and instructions in how to use that kiln to make a blacksmith's furnace, and so on.

It is very clear that our military men and people in the geopolitical know consider the chances of nuclear war to be nonzero.  If those chances are high enough to justify spending billions of dollars on military preparedness every year, then surely we must be willing to spend a few million dolloars on economic preparedness for the same contingency.  Not to do so is simply insane.