Of Pandemics and Asteroids, Sea Rise and Drought, Mice and Men.
Where is the preparation and planning, the state of mind we need to move from a desperate defense to a can-do expansion and new global endeavors?
Most of the information we get today is about things that have happened or are currently happening. Such is the nature of “news”. How about if we pivot to what COULD happen?
We should be asking our government and military leaders, members of the Intelligence Community, medicine and science about bad-case What If’s.
For example, what if we did get scorched by a hemispheric, or worldwide, solar flare, an EMP-pulsing cruise missile or high altitude nuke that fries most electronics? Not just what that would look like but how would we recover? How would we get critical factories back online to make replacement power transformers, billions of replacement solid state electronic components and other things that make a power grid work? How well-shielded are our critical communications systems, really? How much of the internet, cellular, satellite and GPS infrastructure would survive a Class X solar flare?
Shouldn’t we be spending at least a tenth as much thought toward stockpiling caches of last ditch analog resources as we do toward new types of digital wizardry? We need both, I think, and should not be solely and blindly reliant on digital to function no matter what. It’s just transistors and they can smoke, I’ve seen them do it. The solid state electronics that surround us are remarkably reliable and rugged, but not impervious to static electricity, magnetism and power surges.
Should we be setting aside and preserving what remains of our old copper wire telephone and data cables that crisscross the country, in case we need basic point to point, hard wired communications such as analog voice, FAX or telegraph? What would we do if all the fiber optic switching stuff gets poofed?
Forty-eight volts of battery power and some old school telephone sets and FAX machines can enable the White House, military bases, DHS and FEMA to communicate with our cities and crisis teams. These so-called analog devices can do it with little or no digital infrastructure, as long as there is a pair of wires between A and B.
Can we mothball some of the 1980’s tech electromechanical “crossbar” telephone switching systems that don’t rely in transistors to function? You can say what you want about the 70’s and 80’s but we had some pretty damn reliable and simple phone service. Most of that stuff has been voraciously ripped out by Sprint and the other fiber-optic proponents. Call the old phone men out of retirement while we still have them and ask them how they would do it, what needs to be recovered and replaced to implement a back up national communications system.
Shouldn’t there be a government-sponsored, wireless network of shortwave “Ham” radio operators that could participate as a piece of that national emergency communication network, if the digital nets are going to be down for a few months or years?
Don’t we need to think about training up and equipping a civilian corps of post-apocalytptic Minute Men, perhaps based on the Civil Air Patrol model, to help us restore basic communications and services before civil unrest and panic sets in during one of these Bad Case situations? Just what kind of plans do FEMA, DoD and other strategic thinkers already have on the shelf and have they ever tested them under large scale, realistic stress conditions?
With the coronavirus pandemic, we are seeing one example of how an almost totally unexpected calamity can upset the world economy, geopolitical stability and cause millions of related deaths. It has forced changes on us and made us think hard about our previous ideas and, thus, has also spawned innumerable improvements.
Imagine if there were two or three calamities overlapping. Say, skirmishes erupting with China, losing another mainline naval vessel to fire or disease, or weather tipping points resulting in sudden drought in temperate climes and sooner-than-expected floods rendering Miami, New Orleans, parts of New York, the Norfolk naval yards and countless coastal cities around the world uninhabitable.
What if two or three years of minimal high altitude snow melt caused people to abandon Las Vegas because there is no water to drink or hydroelectrics to power the air conditioning and refrigeration? Would Los Angeles and the Imperial Valley survive without water from Colorado snow?
What if climate changes triggered a massive migration of Americans from the desert Southwest and coastal areas inward to the upper Midwest? What if we had, say, 30 to 50 Million displaced citizens pressuring the government and mid-central land owners to let them come in? Perhaps a new, novel and virulent form of Ebola gets launched into America by some unclear means, maybe due to climate refugee swarms or some more nefarious reason. Wars have been fought over less.
Shouldn’t we be building thirty to forty new hospitals RIGHT NOW, putting people to work building them as well as more ventilators, PPE and funerary infrastructure? Why wait until there are two million of us dead and dying? Study 1918.
Should we be training a new generation of Pandemic Medical Workers that only have specific medical training to diagnose, intubate, isolate and comfort people afflicted with an assortment of plagues and diseases
…including perhaps radiation sickness? Study Hiroshima. A Pandemic Medical Worker program could give us another 50,000–100,000 medical front liners within the next six months. Let’s put people to work where we need them and, Lord knows, we already need more doctors and nurses.
I believe that probably all of these really scary possibilities (some would say, probabilities) can be converted into Opportunities. Let capitalism at it. PPE should be an American-based industry. So should medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. But, we should be SHARING more of our innovations with the rest of the world because ,as we have seen,
when China sneezes, we get a virus.
We need to think apocalyptic and press our leadership for answers on these kinds of scenarios. Because they WILL happen, we just don’t know what, where, when or how many will hit us at once. Certainly there is much planning under way that we’re not aware of, so shouldn’t we be hearing about that too? Innovation sparks innovation. For instance, what the Navy is doing to prepare for submergence of their coastal facilities might well benefit city governments around the world. Shouldn’t that be shared? Not only would there be a net gain in helping to avoid mass population upheavals but it wouldn’t hurt our image in the eyes of the world to be seen as a bit more egalitarian and benevolent. We shouldn’t avoid trying to help Chinese or Russian or any people avoid mass disaster if we can.
You’ll notice I didn’t even touch on the asteroid freak out, perhaps the single worst case scenario and one that could jump out at us in a matter of days. What the heck would we do if NASA or some guy in Montana with a six-inch telescope spotted a rock the size of Ivanka’s wedding diamond, streaking right at the heart of the earth? Could we muster a credible response by ourselves? Shouldn’t there be a plan to coordinate a cool, calm and practiced multi-nation,multi-layered effort to try to deflect it? Do we need to run some cost-benefit analyses first?
What would be the cost of years of darkness, inches of dust around the globe, crop failures, water contamination and, possibly, an agonizing end of mankind? How foolish would it be to be wiped out because we didn’t get it together enough to launch a half-dozen of the world’s biggest rockets?
It would behoove us as world citizens to pivot from a constant war footing and adversarial posture with the other super powers to one of a common acceptance of other people’s desires, core human needs,vulnerabilities and potential achievements. Tear down the silos. Put gates in the walls. Revamp our terrible and inhibitive mess of a Patent System. Share some of our ideas among our commercial and government organizations and across the globe.
There needs to be a permanent, ongoing, well-organized effort to anticipate what could happen to us hereafter coupled with tangible, practical ideas of what to do about it. Shrugging our shoulders and kicking the hard thinking down the road is not an acceptable response. We don’t need another disorganized non-response to any more big, bad events. America only has so much luck, pluck and resilience and we wouldn’t be the first great empire to fall to our own hubris.
From chaos comes opportunity, the devil’s in the details and there is a whole bunch of chaos waiting for us if we don’t get staged for some of the details the devil may have in store. Each of these frightening pictures has a reverse side, one of opportunity, prosperity and brotherhood. All we have to do is wake up and decide that’s what we’re going to do.