U.S. Planning for Pandemics and Large-Scale Nuclear War

ABSTRACT How does the United States develop plans to prevent, prepare for, and/or mitigate disasters? I first discuss planning for the possible: preparedness programs to deal with terror attacks and environmental disasters. I then consider planning for the impossible, or at least, planning for a disaster beyond history: nuclear war. I ask how military planners avoid focusing on the civilizational consequences of the verything they are planning. My answers include two well-known responses: the belief that war plans and capabilities maintain deterrence, and that destroying population is not an objective. I add three additional explanations. Refusing an assignment can be costly for a career. More important, planners focus on solving complex and abstract mathematical problems; this distances them from dwelling on the human consequences. At the same time, planners’ jokes demonstrate that they understand the catastrophic consequences were the war plans they develop to be implemented.

Under the Department of Homeland Security, the National Exercise Program rehearsed what to do in the event of various disasters and catastrophes. Exercises could be high-level, local-level, or multi-level, and they could be small or large. " Table-top" exercises are just what they sound like: a group of people more or less seated around a table, working through a scenario or scenarios with the help of professional facilitators using scripts that the facilitators may abruptly change as part of the exercise. (These changes are termed "injects.") Depending on the presidential administration, larger exercises may use what is called a "whole of government" approach. These are not "table-tops," and can involve fire departments, police departments, military personnel, radiological teams, medical personnel, governors and other state-level officials, federal executive and department personnel, and lawyers expert in various areas, along with "subject matter experts" and, perhaps, a national television news reporter playing him-or herself.
The whole of government approach is both vertical and horizontal. It is especially useful in the sprawling multi-level federal system that governs the United States of America. "Vertical" refers to hierarchical communications and directives from presidential and federal department levels to state and local levels of government. To do this well requires listening to and taking into account the needs and demands of lower levels of government, and also not taking responsibility for, or dictating, actions better taken at more local levels. "Horizontal" means communication and coordination across government institutions, including a relatively clear division of labor and adherence to the law among the office of the president, executive departments, and Congress. This is an ideal that can be strengthened through practice, including participants thrashing out sometimes competing historical prerogatives and powers, referred to as "equities," confirming the specific laws and regulations ("authorities") that apply or may apply, and developing the fine-grained knowledge of specific offices and people whom federal employees should call at the state and/or local levels, and vice versa.
Of course, the United States had developed numerous preparedness exercises at least since the end of World War II -think of "duck and cover" exercises as schoolchildren dived under their desks to prepare to survive an atomic attack 2 . The wide-ranging whole of government exercises became much more prominent early in the Bush administration 3 , and they continued during the presidency of Barack Obama.
2 The scholar Lee Clarke has insightfully explained how US government publications on civil defense from nuclear weapons, and other events such as nuclear reactor explosions and oil tanker accidents, are "fantasy documents" (Clarke 1999;Clarke and Perrow 1996). 3 I participated as a member of a team from Stanford University that formally observed a large national exercise called TOPOFF-2 (TOPOFF for Top Officials) in 2003. TOPOFF-2 involved simulating a deliberate attack using a large radiological dispersal device in Seattle and a serious outbreak of plague in Chicago. The response to both was in large part coordinated by the federal government in Washington D.C. -in concert with its state and local partners. I learned several things: Civilian exercise programs are largely modeled on military scenario planning and exercises. Scales of exercises vary, from "table-top," where a dozen or more experts talk through a given hypothetical situation, to large multi-city exercises in which a number of groups and agencies at the municipal and regional levels (for example, fire-fighters, police, medical personnel, mayors, local newscasters, and "subject matter" experts), to state and federal government officials or stand-ins for such officials -for example, stand-ins for the president or very high-ranking officials. The value of such exercises generally is not in developing specific solutions, since what is anticipated is very unlikely to be precisely what will occur. Rather, participants become sensitized to some of the issues that may be encountered. Analysis by participants is likely to occur immediately after the exercise in what is called a "hot wash." More in-depth analyses will also be developed over longer time frames. An example of how exercises can be helpful was one known as Hurricane Pam, which took place in July 2004, just over a year before Hurricane Katrina. Participants worked out plans to change traffic from two-way in and out of New Orleans and points further south to only one-way: north, out of the area. This contraflow plan was implemented just before the hurricane hit, and it was highly successful. Other aspects of the exercise were not so successful. See the US government report on exercise Hurricane Pam, "A failure of Initiative," https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/katrina/govdocs/109-377/pam.pdf.
As the United States transitioned from the Obama administration to the Donald Trump administration, the US government was relatively well-prepared to deal with a possible future pandemic. During the formal transition to the Trump administration, the Obama administration put together large packages of documents for the incoming administration. One of those sets of transition documents was on how to prepare for a pandemic. One week before Trump took office, a high-level exercise involving several dozen people from both administrations was carried out. According to one account, The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was "paramount"-warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis 4 .
Of course, as we know, the personnel turnover throughout the Trump administration was unprecedented. In addition, within the White House's National Security Council staff, the specific suborganization responsible for preparing for a pandemic or deliberate biological attack was dismantled by then National Security Advisor John Bolton. Discontinuities in staff and in organization were not the only problems. In this situation, the Trump administration did not believe in exercising the power of the federal government itself, for example, in directing or mobilizing the public sector. The president did not believe his medical doctors and scientists. The president saw political opportunity in discouraging the wearing of masks. Many in the Republican party professed to believe that COVID-19 was a hoax. In certain parts of the country, strongholds of support for President Trump, it became fashionable to resist public health measures.
The tragic bungling of the ongoing pandemic was not inevitable. It is a case study of how not to run a government.

Planning for the Impossible: Nuclear War
US planning to fight and prevail in a nuclear war has been far less buffeted by changing administrations. The question I ask here is not about incompetence, but rather is moral and social/psychological: what has enabled US military officers to make highly detailed plans to fight and "prevail," in President Ronald Reagan's words, in "a nuclear war [that] cannot be won and must never be fought"? 5 Developing a plan, including various options, does not mean that state officials want or intend to go to war; it means that if a state goes to war, planning options are already prepared for military use. We expect such plans to be developed for conventional armed conflict and war. Although hard to comprehend, such plans are also developed for nuclear war 6 . Stated otherwise, what are the governmental and organizational processes that have made it possible for dedicated and hard-working people of high integrity to plan actions that, if realized, would cause calamity on an incomprehensibly vast scale? How are those involved in detailed nuclear war planning able, to some degree, to avoid thinking, and having "some pretty strong feelings" about the consequences of nuclear war, at least enough to get on with their work of planning it? What are the social, in this case, mostly organizational, mechanisms that enable officers to plan the end of the world, at least the world as we know it?
For example, toward the end of the Cold War, a government official working in strategic nuclear war planning told me that it was [an] emotional burden to read the war plans. You begin to lose sight that you're talking about the end of civilization. You look at this and think you might actually have to employ one of these [plans] some day and it's just mind boggling . . . . I thought, "My God, [it] isn't just an abstraction, it's real. This is what we intend to do in x, y, or z situation." So that was incredibly overwhelming and . . . . It was actually hard to work during the first couple of weeks. Hard to take any of them seriously because I . . . wanted to shake them and say, "Are you fucking kidding me? . . . . Are you out of your mind? How can you possibly consider an attack option that looks like that?" . . . . I think that when you work long enough on targeting, you . . . at a certain point [you]  How do people in an organization stop, or avoid, thinking about the results of the very thing they are planning?
Below, I briefly describe the specific nuclear war planning organization to which I refer. I then describe five organizational processes that enable war planners to carry out their tasks. Underlying most of these explanations is that as war planners do their jobs, they generally do not focus on the human and civilizational consequences, that is, they "stop thinking about what executing one of those options really means." Does this make war planners different from others who work in bureaucracies? We will see that, in general, the answer is no.
Organization. I focus here only on the most detailed tier of US nuclear war planning, the place where the actual detailed nuclear war plans are updated and revised. For most of the Cold War these planners worked in a multi-service ("joint") planning group called the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS). The group was joint, but it worked under the legendary military command, the Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC), located at Offutt Air Force Base, adjacent to Omaha, Nebraska. SAC personnel dominated nuclear war planning; they were "dual hatted," SAC officers who also worked at JSTPS. There were officers at JSTPS from other services, particularly the Navy, but also from the Army, Marines, and NATO members. After the Cold War more or less ended, in 1992 the name of the planning group changed, but the essential functions did not. (JSTPS changed to the more generic J-5: J for Joint, 5 for planning, a standard designation across all US military services).
These planners use and must follow increasingly detailed guidance: first, broad presidential guidance, then more detailed Department of Defense directives, and yet more detailed instructions from Joint Chiefs of Staff planners on how to "build" war planning options. In addition, planners developed their own secret translation of instructions, known as the "Blue Book," for many years unknown at higher levels to even exist 8 . Toward and after the end of the Cold War, very significant changes in targeting were put into place. Most important, numerous targets in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states were removed, deployed nuclear warheads were greatly reduced, and more stringent oversight of targeting began. As the Cold War ended, SAC was reconfigured as a joint command now known as the Strategic Command (STRATCOM). From the mid-1950s, nuclear war planners have worked in the same set of offices in an underground annex to SAC/STRATCOM headquarters. This annex is located three stories below ground under the front lawn of what for decades was the SAC/STRATCOM headquarters building. It could be reached from inside headquarters by underground stairs and an industrial-style ramp. It was known informally as the "basement," the "mole hole," the "underground." Most of the planners are active military officers. Over time, some planners stayed on or came back as retired military working for, or as, contractors. These former military may have considerable expertise, and, as well, provide important continuity.
What Enables? First, planners understood, and continue to understand, that the purpose of nuclear weapons and nuclear war plans is, above all, to deter an opponent, or enemy, from taking actions antithetical to American and America's allies' interests. How do plans, capabilities, and willingness to act if necessary, deter? They demonstrate what would await an enemy should it attack what it must not. However, should deterrence fail, and US nuclear weapons use were deemed both legal and necessary, under presidential order the war plans could be implemented to get the best political-military results possible, whether through options based on first use, retaliation, massive attack, or limited or "tailored" use. For most of the Cold War, Air Force leaders generally thought nuclear war could be meaningfully won. Military leaders do not say that today, though for some, depending on the circumstances, choosing some options over others could, or even would, make a significant difference, a better outcome for the United States and its allies.
Second, nuclear war planners (and military officers who would launch weapons under authenticated orders) do not intend to kill civilians. Planners do have options, measures, and procedures to "withhold" attacks against major urban areas. Planners do know that many civilians would be killed in nuclear war -but only when unavoidable. Civilians per se are not an objective of war planning, or, as planners say, civilians are "not objective to" the plan.
Third, military career paths can make dissent extremely costly. The criteria for career success in the military is different from those in the civilian world. In the civilian world, one can move, and "move up the ladder," by switching job sectors, or employers, possibly many times. Or if one is self-employed, one may have flexibility in what one does, where, and how. By contrast, a full career in the military requires at least 20 years of service; a substantial number serve longer. Every service member takes an oath of office to defend the US Constitution, to act honorably, and to obey only legal orders, including the laws of war. Rarely do service members formally question the legality of orders given or of actions taken. Service members are obligated not to act illegally; the issue is who decides what is legal, and what will questioning legality do to a military career? 9 In addition, military careers will be greatly enhanced by serving honorably in armed conflict and war. Few civilian careers require such bravery and/or excellence in command, at times under remarkably fast-paced and exceptionally dangerous conditions. (Emergency workers and managers, including those who work on oil derricks or explosion containment, police, fire fighters, and medical personnel, are among such civilian careers -though they generally are not as dangerous or soul-shattering as being in sustained combat.) The continuity in career commitment requires that for those who are ambitious, as many are, excellence must be reflected in performance reviews. In addition to what I have discussed above, sheer hard concentrated work is required, including serious study in the evenings; paying great attention to detail; repeated practice of what must be mastered, and successful performance in various kinds of tests. One should be highly capable as a team player and leader. One has an obligation to report poor compliance and bad conduct. At the same time, in some circumstances, it is prudent not to express thoughts that go against widely accepted political or other views or to raise hard questions that really cannot be answered. In all, career service officers face more difficult choices when assigned to do something one might rather not, such as planning nuclear war. Officers have pledged loyalty. In most circumstances, they cannot modify the work they do. And exit is a radical, career-changing, option (Hirschman 1970) 10 .
Fourth, to succeed at nuclear war planning, officers must focus on highly prescribed analytic tasks. Mathematical abstraction -specifically, the process of optimizationprovides the planning framework. Within this framework, linear programming techniques are used to achieve a goal optimally. The goal is termed the objective function and is expressed as a maximum or minimum quantity, subject to constraints (Albers and Constance Reid 1986) 11 . For example, for an investor, the objective could be to maximize expected return on a financial portfolio or to minimize tax payment on given financial investments -subject to constraints of law and regulation. For a package delivery company, the objective function could be to minimize the time of arrival of packages at specified locations, subject to constraints of handling so that packages do not arrive with battered contents.
For nuclear targeting, the objective function is to maximize the achievement of specific damage goals to classes or categories of targets. These goals are termed damage expectancy (DE). Achieving damage expectancy requires most efficiently allocating several types of nuclear warheads carried on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and aircraft to types of targets; assigning specific warheads to specific targets and timing their launches for particular times of arrival and heights of burst, in order to achieve, with specified probabilities, designated damage goals. For a notional example, for a specific class of massive industrial structures, the damage expectancy could be severe damage with 90% probability. In other words, on average, for every 100 such targets, the goal would be to completely destroy no less than 90. To make such structures functional again, each would have to be entirely rebuilt (a broad definition of severe damage). Using Monte Carlo methods, targeteers then simulate these planned courses of action to assess the degree to which they have succeeded in achieving their goals. In the above example, suppose that once tested, on average, "only" 70 targets would be severely damaged. This could require, for this class of weapons, using different warheads, more warheads, or moving the locations above which the weapons would be detonated, that is, the Designated Ground Zeroes (DGZs). The above hints at the level of abstraction and what is left out: images of people, a sense of daily and cultural life, places as they would be experienced by sight, sound, smell, and movement beyond what is represented on navigation maps and in computer code. Except for "withholds" against certain urban areas, under specified conditions, there is no hint of the violence being planned, nor would we expect there to be. The purpose is seemingly pragmatic: to enable the United States military to take specific actions to achieve specific damage effects, for example, "light," "moderate," or "severe" damage 12 . Civilian deaths are not included in the categories and formulae used because, as noted above, civilians are "not objective" to the plan. In nuclear targeting procedures and officers' required focus, it is as if people, and civilization, do not exist. They certainly do not count.
What me worry? Fifth and finally, one might think that people who plan nuclear war would be an unusually sober bunch. What could be more catastrophic, more morally disturbing for a nuclear war planner than having the government use, actually "employ," a nuclear weapon or nuclear weapons according to options he or she may have helped develop?
Yet It is precisely in situations of past, present, or possible destruction, injury, and death that "dark," or "sick" humor flourishes -for example, among surgeons, meat packers, accident and crime scene investigators, pathologists, medical examiners, morticians, and nuclear war planners. "Sick humor" is a slap at euphemism. In humor and jokes, people with shared experiences can say what they cannot say otherwise. Doing so unmasks the technical labelling and the abstract concepts required for the job. Sick humor can be caustic and can provide emotional and moral distance. At the same time, such humor also acknowledges what technical terms do not. From this perspective, joking can help restore a sense of self.
In translating classified material to civilian audiences, planners may refer to targets as "ping pong balls," "paddle manufacturers," "shoe factories," "tennis shoe factories," "toy production," "toy manufacturers," and "makers of baby rattles." For example, one officer said: Let's say I want you to be able to hold at risk and attack, if necessary, the ability of the Soviet Union to hit ping pong balls. One target set will be the manufacturers of paddles. There may 12 Historically, the damage criteria have been regarded by some as grossly understated. For example, the standard handbook on nuclear weapons effects defines "moderate" damage to a multistory reinforced concrete building, three to eight stories, as "exterior walls several cracked. Interior partitions severely cracked or blown down. Structural frame permanently distorted . . . ." (Glasstone and Dolan 1977, 214). Damage criteria are part of the larger damage expectation formula, Damage Expectancy (DE). DE = Probability of Arrival (PA) x Probability of Damage (PD), which is applied and calculated for broad categories of targets. PA includes the probabilities of arrival and detonation. In other words, PA is "scenario dependent" and is composed of several probabilities. The most important is the probability that the weapon is available to launch -that is, that it has not already been destroyed before being launched. This probability is termed the pre-launch survivability (PLS), and it is particularly salient for the land-based ICBM force. Another part of Probability of Arrival is the weapon system reliability (WSR), and the probability that the weapon will penetrate to its point of detonation, that is, the probability to penetrate (PTP). In other words, PA = PLS x WSR x PTP. The Probability of Damage (PD) has to do with the interaction of weapon types and target types. Weapon characteristics include yield, accuracy, and height of burst. Targets are characterized by the strengths of their materials and structures to various forces produced by specific weapons effects. This encoding of types of targets and their vulnerabilities to particular effects is called the "Vulnerability to Kill," or VNTK system. I have drawn here particularly from Seiler and Captain (1983, 11-13). Also see Postol (1987); Eden (2004) on the development of the VNTK system. be only one or two manufacturers of paddles. I'll have to hit them. So there's no leeway there. But let's say the guidance says that you have to attack toy production. There will be a lot of different toy manufacturers and a lot of leeway. We can say we can get the makers of baby rattles but not some other toy manufacturers 13 .
What do these substitutions mean? At first glance, installations such as paddle manufacturers or tennis shoe factories, or toy manufacturers, appear trivial. On the one hand, this triviality conveys that the speaker is not talking about real nuclear war planning, because there would be no military purpose in trying to destroy toy factories. Thus, such terms allow both speaker and listener to distance themselves from the enterprise of planning nuclear war by saying: These are not real targets, and, by extension, this will not come to pass. On the other hand, and much more important, the triviality implies that much more will be destroyed than is officially acknowledged. A phrase not quoted above, "three and four holers," refers to outhouses and connotes a vast level of destruction throughout the land, including in impoverished rural areas. These substitutions also point to the types of things that would be destroyed: not only official categories of targets such as military assets and "war supporting" industries, but activities related to leisure, to play, particularly by children -"ping pong ball manufacturers," "tennis shoe factories," "toy production" -and even babies -"makers of baby rattles." These terms connote "targets of opportunity," targets of less than vital interest. According to one officer: "In applying a weapon, you may see that you will damage an installation that you had not intended to damage originally. But if it falls within the guidance, you include it" and say things like "Oh, this will make Soviet [children] very unhappy." 14 Targeteers' humor is a devil's brew that says what cannot be said otherwise. Apparent callousness, bad taste, wise guy, and sick humor acknowledge all that has been expunged and, with a straight face, must not be said in "serious" situations.
In sum, I have tried to explain how decent and ordinary -if unusually committed and hard-working -people can plan the worst thing in the world, nuclear war. The answer is multi-fold, but the essence is that as they work, planners strip out the human meaning of the consequences of the hypothetical actions they are planning. They do this because the complex and detailed tasks that command their attention have already removed vivid references to human society and appear to be about matching objects (warheads and bombs) to other highly coded objects (targets) to cause predesignated levels and types of damage -all of this to be done as efficiently as possible using abstract mathematical techniques encoded in numerous computer programs. Targeteers are constrained by the laws of physics, number of weapons, organizational rules, and time pressure. They do not have time on the job to dwell on the human consequences of execution.
At the same time, they are aware that the specific and broad consequences would be horrific. Through inappropriate labeling, exaggeration, and saying the opposite of what official words and phrases mean, they indicate to themselves and to others that they are (and this is generally true) decent and good human beings.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Nagasaki University.

Notes on Contributor
Lynn Eden is senior research scholar (emeritus), at Stanford University. Her Ph.D. is in sociology from the University of Michigan; she works at the intersections of sociology, history, and political science. For most of her career, Eden was senior research scholar at the Center for International Security & Cooperation (CISAC) in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University; she was also associate director for research at CISAC for many of those years. Before that, Eden taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University. Eden has written on how people in small communities do, or plan, harm to others. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown, was a finalist for a U.S. National Book Award. She also wrote on the 1964 Ku Klux Klan murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Most of Eden's work, including articles, chapters, and co-edited volumes, has been on US politics, nuclear arms control, and US foreign and military policy. Her book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton award for best book in science and technology studies. Using historical documents and personal interviews, Lynn Eden is currently writing on how organizational routines, narratives of deterrence, and jokes and humor make it possible for highly ethical US military officers to revise and develop the operational war plans to "prevail" in a nuclear war.