social life of risk

Preparing for the Next Emergency

Andrew Lakoff

This essay describes the emergence and extension of “pre-

paredness” as a form of rationality for approaching questions of domestic security
in the United States. Preparedness provides security experts with a way of grasp-
ing uncertain future events and bringing them into a space of present intervention.
An analysis of this form of rationality helps to address a puzzling aspect of state-
based security practices in the contemporary United States: how a series of seem-
ingly disparate types of events — ranging from terrorist attacks, to hurricanes
and earthquakes, to epidemics — have been brought into the same framework of
“security threats.” More broadly, such an analysis allows us to address the ques-
tion, what is the logic through which potential dangers to collective life are being
taken up as political problems?
In order to show what is distinctive about preparedness, this essay begins by
comparing it to a different form of security rationality: insurance. Preparedness
becomes an especially salient approach to perceived threats when they reach the
limits of a rationality of insurance. These are threats that are not manageable
through techniques of probabilistic calculation: preparedness typically approaches
events whose probability is not calculable but whose consequences could be cata-
strophic. The essay then traces the history of preparedness as a rationality of
domestic security, beginning in the early period of the Cold War and following it
to its current articulation in the Department of Homeland Security. The analysis

The research on which this essay is based is part of a collaborative project on contemporary
security expertise conducted under the auspices of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research
Collaboratory. Many of the ideas in the essay developed in conversation with the co-principal inves-
tigators on this project, Stephen J. Collier and Paul Rabinow. It has also benefited from comments by
members of the 2005  –  6 International Center for Advanced Studies seminar at New York University,
led by Tim Mitchell, as well as the suggestions of Craig Calhoun, Nils Gilman, Gregoire Mallard,
and Christopher Otter.

Public Culture 19:2  doi 10.1215/08992363-2006-035

Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press 247
Public Culture is framed by a discussion of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which revealed
both the centrality of preparedness to the contemporary politics of security and
its limitations as an approach to catastrophic threats.

We Are Not Prepared

One evening the week after Hurricane Katrina struck, the intrepid news anchor
Anderson Cooper was featured on the Charlie Rose Show. Cooper was still on
the scene in New Orleans, the inundated city in the background and a look of
harried concern on his face. He told Rose that he had no intention of returning to
his comfortable life in New York City any time soon. Cooper had been among the
reporters to challenge official accounts that hurricane relief operations were func-
tioning smoothly, based on the stark contradiction between disturbing images on
the ground and governmental claims of a competent response effort. He seemed
shocked and dismayed by what he had seen in New Orleans, but was also moved,
even transformed, by his role as witness to domestic catastrophe. He had covered
disasters in Somalia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, he said, but never expected to
see images like these in the United States: widespread looting, hungry refugees,
corpses left on the street to decompose. Toward the end of the interview, Rose
asked him what he had learned from the event. Cooper paused, reflected for a
moment, and then answered: “We are not as ready as we can be.”
Insofar as the hurricane and its aftermath could be said to have had a shared
lesson, it was this: we are not prepared — whether for another major natural disas-
ter, a chemical or biological attack, an epidemic, or some other type of emergency.
This lesson has structured political response to the hurricane in terms of certain
kinds of discussions and not others. This is one reason why Katrina has arguably
failed to be a politically transformative event, despite widespread expressions of
outrage at the role of structural inequality in making certain citizens vulnerable
to catastrophe. Instead, the event has intensified and redirected processes that
were already under way. To see this, it is necessary to analyze the development of
preparedness as a guiding logic for domestic security in the United States.
Preparedness provides a way of understanding and intervening in an uncer-
tain, potentially catastrophic future.1 Unlike other issues that were initially raised
by the hurricane and its aftermath, such as racial inequality, concentrated urban
poverty, the social isolation of the elderly, or the short-sightedness of environ-

1. Stephen J. Collier, Andrew Lakoff, and Paul Rabinow, “Biosecurity: Towards an Anthropol-
ogy of the Contemporary,” Anthropology Today 20, no. 5 (2004): 3  –  7.

248
mental planning, the demand for preparedness is a matter that enjoys widespread Preparing for the
political agreement on the necessity of governmental intervention. In other words, Next Emergency
in the norm of preparedness, we find a shared sense of what collective security
problems involve today. The need to be prepared is not in question; what can be a
source of dispute is, rather, how to prepare and what we need to prepare for.
In the aftermath of Katrina, it was common to see comparisons made between
the failed governmental response to the hurricane and the more successful
response to the attacks of September 11. To an observer a decade before, it might
have been surprising that a natural disaster and a terrorist attack would be con-
sidered part of the same problematic. And the image, three weeks after Katrina
struck, of George W. Bush flying to the headquarters of USNORTHCOM — a
military installation designed for use in national security crises — to follow the
progress of Hurricane Rita as it hurtled toward Texas might have been even more
perplexing. The aftermath of Katrina also pointed forward to other possible emer-
gencies, such as a novel and deadly infectious disease. In announcing its $7.1
billion pandemic preparedness program the following month, the Bush adminis-
tration declared avian flu an urgent matter of national security.2 This grouping of
various types of possible catastrophe under a shared rubric of “security threats”
is exemplary of the rationality of preparedness. Preparedness marks out a limited
but agreed-upon terrain for the management of collective life. Its techniques focus
on a certain set of possible events, operating to bring them into the present as
potential future catastrophes that point to current vulnerabilities.

The Probabilistic Future: Insurance

In its mode of future orientation and in its way of approaching threats, prepared-
ness can be usefully contrasted with another form of security rationality — insur-
ance. As Francois Ewald points out, insurance is an “abstract technology” that
can take concrete form in a variety of institutions, including mutual associations,
private insurance firms, and state-based social welfare agencies. It is a means
of distributing risk. Here the term risk does not refer to a danger or peril, Ewald
specifies, but rather to a “specific mode of treatment of certain events capable
of happening to a group of individuals.”3 This treatment involves, first, tracking

2. See Monica Schoch-Spana, “Post-Katrina, Pre-Pandemic America,” Anthropology News,

January 2006, 32.
3. Francois Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),
199.

249
Public Culture the occurrence of such events over time across a population and, second, apply-
ing probabilistic techniques to gauge the likelihood of a given event occurring
over a given period of time. Insurance is thus a way of reordering reality: what
had been exceptional events that disrupted the normal order become predictable
occurrences.
In this way, insurance takes up certain kinds of external dangers and trans-
forms them into manageable risks. The events that insurance typically takes up
are dangers of relatively limited scope and statistically regular occurrence: ill-
ness, injury, accident, and fire. When taken individually, such events may appear
as contingent misfortunes, but when their occurrence is plotted over a population,
they show a normal rate of incidence. Knowledge of this rate, gained through care-
fully plotted actuarial tables, makes it possible to rationally distribute risk. Thus,
insurance removes accidents and other misfortunes from a moral-legal domain of
personal responsibility and places them in a technical frame of calculability.
As an abstract technology, insurance can be linked to diverse political objec-
tives. Beginning in the nineteenth century, insurance was harnessed to a politics
of solidarity in the development of state-based social welfare programs — what
can be called “population security.” Population security aims to foster the health
and well-being of human beings understood as members of a national popula-
tion. It works to collectivize individual risk — of illness, accident, or infirmity.
Paul Rabinow describes the distinctiveness of this approach to future threats: “A
security apparatus takes up the problem of how to manage an indefinite series of
elements that are in motion. This motion is understood within a logic of probable
events.”4 Through calculation of the rates of such events across populations over
an extended period, population security seeks regularities, such as birth and death
rates, illness prevalence, and the occurrence of accidents. Planners can then target
intervention into the social milieu that will improve collective well-being.5 Exam-
ples of population security mechanisms include mass vaccination, urban water
and sewage systems, guaranteed pensions, and health and safety regulations.
As analysts of the European welfare state have argued, this “social” form of

4. Paul Rabinow, “Diffusion of the Human Thing: Virtual Virulence, Preparedness, Dignity,”
(working paper, Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory, 2005), anthropos-lab
.net/documents. See also Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de
France (1977  –  1978), ed. M. Sennelart (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004).
5. As Foucault writes, “Security mechanisms have to be installed around the random ele-
ment inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life.” “Society Must Be
Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975  –  76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fon-
tana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 246.

250
security was based on the premise that technical rationality would be increas- Preparing for the
ingly capable of managing collective risk.6 By the mid-twentieth century, such Next Emergency
risk management had taken on a relatively stable form in the West in the various
forms of collective security provision associated with the welfare state. Develop-
ments in science and technology — such as food production or industrial hazard
mitigation — promised to further improve and stabilize the health and well-being
of the population. Toward the end of the century, however, this stability began to
break down, and many of the population security mechanisms associated with
social welfare either were dispersed outside of the state or were allowed to fall
into disrepair.
Meanwhile, another challenge to the capacity of insurance mechanisms to
provide adequate security came from the emergence of novel threats. A series
of environmental and health hazards appeared whose scale and incalculability
seemed to push them beyond the scope of insurability. In some cases, these new
vulnerabilities were generated by the extent, power, and uncontrollability of the
life-supporting systems that had been developed in the context of population
security. These new hazards were characterized by their unpredictability and by
their catastrophic potential.

The Limits of Insurance: Precaution

Ulrich Beck contrasts the optimism associated with the development of the Euro-
pean welfare state — that one could fully manage risk and plan for the future
through technical calculation — with current perceptions of these new forms of
vulnerability: “The speeding up of modernization has produced a gulf between
the world of quantifiable risk in which we think and act, and the world of non-
quantifiable insecurities that we are creating.”7 According to Beck, society has
entered a condition of “reflexive modernity,” in which the very industrial and
technical developments that were initially put in the service of guaranteeing
human welfare now generate new threats. Our very dependence on critical infra-
structures — systems of transportation, communications, energy, and so on — has
become a source of vulnerability. His examples include ecological catastrophes

6. Francois Ewald, “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon: An Outline of the Philosophy
of Precaution,” in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed. Tom
Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 273  –  301; Ulrich Beck,
World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
7. Ulrich Beck, “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited,” Theory, Culture and Soci-
ety 19, no. 4 (2002): 40.

251
Public Culture such as Bhopal and Chernobyl, global financial crises, and mass-casualty terrorist
attacks. Such hazards can cause global, irreparable damage, and their effects may
be of unlimited duration. These dangers shape a perception that “uncontrollable
risk is now irredeemable and deeply engineered into all the processes that sustain
life in advanced societies.”8 They outstrip our ability to calculate their probability
or to insure ourselves against them. According to Beck, the noninsurability of
these megahazards is exemplary of a new social world in which technical exper-
tise cannot calculate and manage the risks it generates.9
Building on Beck’s analysis, Ewald suggests that this new sense of vulner-
ability has led to the rise of “precaution” as a new logic of political decision under
conditions of uncertainty. From the European vantage, environmental and health
hazards such as global warming, mad cow disease, and genetically modified food
indicate that technical expertise has lost its certain grasp on the future. These
are cases in which decisions cannot be made on the basis of a cost-benefit bal-
ance, which remains unknown. Ewald writes of the limits of an insurance-based
approach in such cases: “One cannot foresee what one does not know, even less
what one cannot know.”10 And further, catastrophic and irreparable events cannot
be adequately compensated. If the likelihood of the event is not measurable and
its extent is not assessable, it is not a “risk” in the technical sense of a danger that
has been brought into the realm of calculative decision.11
How do political actors assume responsibility for dealing with this new form
of threat? Catastrophic threats that seemingly cannot be mitigated may enjoin
decision makers to avoid taking risks. Whereas, in an insurantial regime, risk
is normal and the question is how to distribute it, under a regime of precaution
potential catastrophe is to be strictly avoided rather than seen as a risk that might
be taken. The catastrophe, as Niklas Luhmann writes, is “the occurrence that no

8. Beck, “The Terrorist Threat,” 46.

9. The criterion of noninsurability is a matter of some controversy, since practical solutions have
in fact emerged to what initially appears as the limit point of insurance — e.g., reinsurance, catastro-
phe securities, or governmental “backstops.” See Philip D. Bougen, “Catastrophe Risk,” Economy
and Society 32 (2003): 253  –  74. Nonetheless, it is clear that certain novel threats have posed chal-
lenges to an actuarial rationality of security.
10. Ewald, “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon,” 282.
11. What constitutes a catastrophic event is, of course, a matter of perception. An event whose
extent would be catastrophic (and therefore outside of cost-benefit logic) for some may be manage-
able to others. The field of catastrophe modeling seeks to bring events of uncertain probability but
potentially catastrophic extent — e.g., natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and new epidemics — into
a space of insurability. See Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle, “Catastrophe Risk, Insurance and
Terrorism,” Economy and Society 33 (2004): 135  –  73.

252
one wants and for which neither probability calculations nor expert opinions are Preparing for the
acceptable.”12 In the context of possible catastrophe, notes Ewald, calculation is no Next Emergency
longer relevant — one must take into account not what is probable or improbable,
but what is most feared: “I must, out of precaution, imagine the worst possible.”13
Thus, a principle of precaution in the face of an incalculable threat enjoins against
risk-taking — for example, the implementation of new and uncertain technologies
such as genetically modified food. In this manner, it seeks to keep the dangerous
event from occurring.14

From Risk to Preparedness

The precautionary principle has been an influential response to certain novel

forms of threat in Europe, especially those linked to the environment. Although
it is addressed to the limit point of insurance, precaution still operates within
an insurance type of rationality — that is, it concerns the probability of future
events. In contrast, a very different way of approaching uncertain but potentially
catastrophic threats has emerged and extended its reach first in the United States
and increasingly transnationally: the rationality of preparedness. Like precau-
tion, preparedness is applicable to events whose regular occurrence cannot be
mapped through actuarial knowledge and whose probability therefore cannot be
calculated. In contrast to precaution, however, preparedness does not prescribe
avoidance; rather, it enacts a vision of the dystopian future in order to develop
a set of operational criteria for response. Preparedness does not seek to prevent
the occurrence of a disastrous event but rather assumes that the event will hap-
pen. Instead of constraining action in the face of uncertainty, preparedness turns
potentially catastrophic threats into vulnerabilities to be mitigated.
Both insurance and preparedness are ways of making an uncertain future
available to intervention in the present, but they demand different types of exper-
tise, and they call forth different forms of response. Preparedness assumes the

12. Niklas Luhmann, “Describing the Future,” in Observations on Modernity (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 70.
13. Ewald “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon,” 286.
14. The 1992 Rio Declaration articulated this new relation between uncertainty and risk avoid-
ance: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by
States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack
of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to pre-
vent environmental degradation.” U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Report of the
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, 3  –  14 June 1992),”
1999, www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm.

253
Public Culture disruptive, potentially catastrophic nature of certain events. Since the probability
and severity of such events cannot be calculated, the only way to avert catastrophes
is to have plans to address them already in place and to have exercised for their
eventuality — in other words, to maintain an ongoing capability to respond appro-
priately. Although the probability and severity of a given event are not known, one
must behave as if the worst-case scenario were going to occur — that it is not a ques-
tion of if, but when. The point is to reduce current vulnerabilities and put in place
response measures that will keep a disastrous event from veering into unmitigated
catastrophe. Moreover, the two forms of rationality differ in their object of protec-
tion: whereas insurance focuses on individuals and groups, preparedness protects
the operations of “critical infrastructures.” These latter are systems — such as infor-
mation and communications, finance, transportation, and energy — whose continu-
ous functioning is understood to be vital for economy and polity.
Preparedness organizes a set of techniques for maintaining order in a time of
emergency. First responders are trained, relief supplies are stockpiled, and the logis-
tics of relief distribution are mapped out. During the event itself, real-time “situ-
ational awareness” is critical to the coordination of response. The duration of direct
intervention by a preparedness apparatus is limited to the immediate onset and
aftermath of crisis, but the requirement of vigilant attention to the prospect of crisis
is ongoing, permanent. Techniques such as early warning systems make possible
such sustained attention. An apparatus of preparedness comes to know its vulnera-
bilities through practices of imaginative enactment: tools such as scenario planning
and simulation exercises test the response system and reveal gaps in readiness.
Here is a partial list of types of preparedness techniques:
•  Scenarios and simulations
•  Early warning systems
•  Stockpiling of relief supplies
•  Plans for coordinating response among diverse entities
•  Crisis communications systems
•  Metrics for readiness assessment

It should be emphasized that these techniques are not unique to U.S. domestic
security: scenarios and simulations, early warning and detection systems, and
plans for coordinating response can also be found in areas such as humanitarian
relief, environmental planning, and international health — in any field oriented
toward managing potential emergencies. Thus, like insurance, preparedness is an
abstract form that can be actualized in diverse ways, according to diverse politi-
cal aims.

254
Table 1  Forms of Security Rationality Preparing for the
Next Emergency
Insurance Preparedness

Type of event addressed Regularly occurring, of Not calculable, potentially

limited scope: one can catastrophic scope: one can say
predict how often it will that it is likely to happen, but not
occur, but not to whom when or where
Knowledge required Archival Narrative, imagined
about event
How the possible event From external danger to From unpredictable threat to
is transformed manageable risk vulnerability to be mitigated
Technical operation Calculate probability using Gauge current vulnerabilities
tables of frequency through imaginative enactment
How to alleviate threat Spread risk over Build capabilities for response to
population multiple threats
Temporal orientation Continuing, modulated Ongoing vigilant alertness;
intervention sporadic intervention, lasting only
for duration of event and recovery
Initial site of application Seventeenth-century Cold War threat of atomic attack
shipping and navigation
Extension to new sites Property, illness and Natural disaster, ecological
mortality, accident, catastrophe, emerging infectious
infirmity disease, terrorism
Note: This comparison table was developed in collaboration with Stephen Collier.

Table 1 indicates some of the basic distinctions between insurance and pre-
paredness as forms of security rationality.

A Continuous State of Readiness

While techniques of preparedness are now applied to a variety of potential disas-

ters, they were initially assembled in the Cold War United States, in response to
the threat of a surprise nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. This was the context
for the rise of the U.S. national security state, in which a huge military buildup
arguably took the place of what in Western Europe became the welfare state. At
this stage, “preparedness” referred to massive military mobilization in peacetime
in order to deter or respond to an anticipated enemy attack. The nation would

255
Public Culture have to be permanently ready for a nuclear catastrophe, requiring ongoing crisis
planning in economic, political, and military arenas. Civil defense was one aspect
of such preparedness. Although the most ambitious aspects of civil defense were
never fully implemented, many of its elements gradually came to take on broader
significance as they migrated into new domains of threat, such as natural disasters
and environmental accidents.
Cold War civil defense plans were developed in response to the rise of novel
forms of warfare in the mid-twentieth century: first, air attacks on population and
industrial centers in World War II, and then the prospect of nuclear attack after
the war. As World War II came to an end, U.S. military planners sought to ensure
that the country did not demobilize after the war as it had after World War I. They
argued that a weak military had invited the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Now
the Soviet Union presented a new existential threat. To meet it, argued strategists,
the United States would have to remain in a state of permanent mobilization.
What historian Michael Sherry calls “an ideology of preparedness” thus emerged
even before the Cold War had begun.15
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted between 1944 and 1946,
reported on the consequences of air attacks in England, Germany, and Japan and
the effectiveness of these countries’ civil defense measures. It recommended shel-
ters and evacuation programs in the United States, “to minimize the destructive-
ness of such attacks, and so organize the economic and administrative life of the
Nation that no single or small group of attacks can paralyze the national organ-
ism.”16 The report pointed to the need to disperse key industries outside of dense
urban areas and to guarantee the continuity of government after attack.17 As Peter
Galison notes, the survey led military strategists to envision the United States in
terms of its key sites of vulnerability — to see the national territory and population
in terms of a set of targets whose destruction would hamper future war efforts.18
Given their anxiety about U.S. vulnerability, military planners sought to make

15. Michael Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941  –  
1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).
16. Lawrence J. Vale, The Limits of Civil Defense in the U.S.A., Switzerland, Britain and the
Soviet Union: The Evolution of Policies since 1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 58.
17. Andrew Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Develop-
ment during the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001), 145 (see n. 57).
18. Peter Galison, “War against the Center,” Grey Room 4 (2001): 6  –  33. For a detailed discus-
sion, see Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, “Distributed Preparedness: Space, Security and
Citizenship in the United States,” in War, Citizenship, and Territory, ed. Deborah Cowen and Emily
Gilbert (New York: Routledge, 2007).

256
sure that the nation could quickly generate an efficient war machine in the midst Preparing for the
of emergency.19 The 1947 National Security Act, perhaps the first explicit artic- Next Emergency
ulation of the concept of “national security,” established the National Security
Resources Board (NSRB), which centralized domestic war preparedness efforts.
The NSRB laid the foundation for much Cold War civil defense planning. The
agency organized its programs assuming the need to anticipate a massive surprise
attack by the Soviet Union: “The national security requires continuous mobili-
zation planning and, to maximum possible degree, a continuous state of readi-
ness.”20 Anxiety about the threat of attack intensified following the Soviet Union’s
explosion of its first nuclear weapon in 1949. The United States responded with an
immediate threefold increase in its defense budget.
National security in the face of the Soviet threat comprised three interrelated
strategies: containment, deterrence, and preparedness. While containment and
deterrence focused on ways of managing and confronting the enemy, prepared-
ness referred to continuous war mobilization on the home front. For the nation
to be ready for a surprise attack, it would be necessary to have an economic and
military infrastructure for waging full-scale war already in place. The strategy
of preparedness involved a number of interrelated measures: gauging the vulner-
ability of U.S. forces to a first strike, putting attack detection systems in place,
and ensuring that the civilian infrastructure would continue to function even in
the face of a massive first strike. The latter, civil defense, would remain the least
developed of these measures.
An early definition of civil defense was “the mobilization of the entire popula-
tion for the preservation of civilian life and property from the results of enemy
attacks, and with the rapid restoration of normal conditions in any area that has
been attacked.”21 Based on a proposal from the NSRB, President Harry S. Tru-
man established the Federal Civil Defense Administration in 1950. Congress then
passed the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, which distributed a series of civil
defense tasks to state and local offices: coordinate volunteers, hold training exer-
cises, mount public awareness campaigns. However, the most ambitious and costly
civil defense program — a nationwide shelter system — was never implemented,
as officials remained ambivalent about civil defense. Insofar as the military’s

19. As Sherry writes, “If attack were to come without warning, the war machine had to be ever
ready.” Preparing for the Next War, 235.
20. Cited in Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red, 36.
21. Thomas J. Kerr, Civil Defense in the U.S.: Bandaid for a Holocaust? (Boulder, Colo.: West-
view Press, 1983), 20.

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Public Culture nuclear deterrence strategy was based on mutually assured destruction, strategists
saw civil defense either as ineffectual or as destabilizing to the strategic balance.
Moreover, the military did not want responsibility for the protection of the civil-
ian population. Further, civil defense was, and would continue to be, politically
unpopular: the public tended to see it as a futile — and dangerous — way of plan-
ning for nuclear war.22
In the early 1960s, President Kennedy made a strong case for the development
of a nationwide fallout shelter system, arguing that it would provide a form of
protection against accidental nuclear exchange. The Cuban Missile Crisis lent
some urgency to his proposal, but by the mid-sixties these plans had once again
fallen flat.23 Thus, efforts to fully implement civil defense measures as an element
of nuclear attack preparedness were mostly blocked over the course of the Cold
War. Nevertheless, the underlying logic of civil defense — the need to anticipate
a surprise attack — as well as many of the institutions and forms of expertise that
were developed as part of civil defense, provided the basis for what would eventu-
ally be a more fully articulated form of security rationality.

Techniques of Preparedness I: Scenario Development

While mutually assured destruction was the predominant nuclear strategy within
the Department of Defense in the 1950s, experts outside of the military were
rethinking the basic tenets of deterrence. Civilian defense intellectuals with the
RAND Corporation, with backgrounds in technical fields such as physics, math-
ematics, and economics, honed methods for simulating the conduct of war in
order to advise military planners on weapons systems, arms control issues, and
other strategic questions.24 Advocates of this approach argued that in the case of
thermonuclear war, modeling the stages of confrontation and conflict was critical,
since no one had any actual experience with this new form of war.
Using game theory, the RAND strategists tried to foresee the moves of the
adversary in the lead-up to superpower confrontation. On this basis, they argued

22. Vale, The Limits of Civil Defense.

23. By this time, the key debate in nuclear defense strategy concerned antiballistic missiles
(ABMs). An ABM system had two possible implications for civil defense: either it would render
civil defense unnecessary, or civil defense would be a “backup” to the ABM strategy, given that some
incoming missiles would be missed and that exploding them would generate fallout against which
civilians would need shelter.
24. Fred M. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon: Strategists of the Nuclear Age (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1983).

258
that mutually assured destruction was not credible as a strategy for deterrence Preparing for the
against Soviet aggression in Europe. The Soviets might well decide that even if Next Emergency
their tanks rolled into West Germany, the United States was unlikely to unleash
global nuclear annihilation in response. The RAND strategists’ alternative was
to develop plans for a limited nuclear engagement in which there would be the
opportunity for intrawar negotiation between stages of escalation. From this van-
tage, civil defense measures such as rapid evacuation plans and shelter systems
became an important aspect of deterrence strategy: first, having these measures
in place would discourage enemy attack on an otherwise temptingly unprepared
target; second, it would reinforce the enemy’s belief in U.S. willingness to use
strategic retaliatory power.25
The problem civil defense approached was how to maintain the nation’s war-
fighting and postwar recuperation capacities even in the face of a devastating
attack. For RAND strategists such as Herman Kahn, this issue was imperative
given U.S. military doctrine: in order for the strategy of deterrence to work, the
enemy had to be convinced that the United States was prepared to engage in
a full-scale nuclear war and had thus made concrete plans both for conducting
such a war and for rebuilding in its aftermath. Kahn criticized military planners
for their failure to concretely envision how a nuclear war would unfold. If plan-
ners were serious about the strategy of deterrence, he argued, they had better
be prepared to actually wage nuclear war. It was irresponsible not to think in
detail about the consequences of such a war: What civil defense measures would
lead to the loss of only fifty million rather than a hundred million lives? What
would human life be like after a nuclear war? How could one plan for postwar
reconstruction in a radiation-contaminated environment? Prewar preparation was
necessary for continued postwar existence.
In the quest to be prepared for the eventuality of thermonuclear war, Kahn
counseled, every possibility should be pursued. “With sufficient preparation,” he
wrote, “we actually will be able to survive and recuperate if deterrence fails.”26
Kahn honed a method for “thinking about the unthinkable” that would make
such planning possible: scenario development.27 For Kahn, scenarios served two

25. A key moment in this was the 1957 Gaither Report, which recommended the construction of
a large-scale fallout shelter system. See Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon.
26. Cited in Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Arts of Ther-
monuclear War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 231.
27. Here Kahn was building on the use of the “attack narrative” technique that was part of early
civil defense planning. See U.S. National Security Resources Board, United States Civil Defense
(Washington, D.C., 1950); see also Collier and Lakoff, “Distributed Preparedness.”

259
Public Culture purposes. One was to assist in designing role-playing games in which decision-
makers would enact the lead-up to war with the Soviet Union. In the absence of
the actual experience of a nuclear standoff, these exercises provided officials and
military planners with something close to the sense of urgency such a crisis would
bring. The second use of scenarios was to force both planners and the public
to seriously face the prospect of nuclear catastrophe as something that must be
planned for in detail.
Through the development of scenarios, Kahn envisioned a range of postwar
conditions whose scale of catastrophe was a function of prewar preparations,
especially civil defense measures. Unfolding these scenarios generated knowledge
about the nation’s current vulnerabilities and led Kahn to proposals for mitigating
them.28 For example, in the wake of nuclear war, a radioactive environment could
hamper postwar reconstruction unless there was a way of determining individual
levels of exposure. Thus, he recommended distributing radioactivity dosimeters
to the entire population in advance of war, so that postwar survivors would be
able to gauge their exposure level and act accordingly.
The general problem scenario development addressed was how to plan for an
unprecedented event. Scenarios were not predictions or forecasts but opportuni-
ties for exercising an agile response capability. They trained leaders to deal with
the unanticipated. “Imagination,” Kahn wrote, “has always been one of the prin-
cipal means for dealing in various ways with the future, and the scenario is sim-
ply one of the many devices useful in stimulating and disciplining the imagina-
tion.”29 Scenario planning liberated security experts from reliance on prediction
or probabilistic calculation, making it possible to plan for surprise. In the wake of
Kahn’s promotion of the technique, scenario planning radiated outside of defense
strategy and began a prolific career in other arenas concerned with managing an
uncertain future, ranging from corporate strategy to environmental protection to
international public health.30

All-Hazards Planning

Although costly civil defense measures such as a national fallout shelter system
were never successfully implemented, the state and local offices spawned by the

28. Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn, 248.

29. Herman Kahn, “Some Strange Aids to Thought,” in Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable
(New York: Horizon Press, 1962), 145.
30. See, for one recent example, Peter Schwartz, Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time
of Turbulence (New York: Gotham Books, 2003).

260
Civil Defense Act served as a springboard for the extension of the rationality of Preparing for the
preparedness to new domains. Beginning in the early sixties, and with increasing Next Emergency
momentum over the next decades, an alternate variant of preparedness developed
in parallel to the federal government’s efforts to mobilize for nuclear war. State
and local agencies sought to use federal civil defense resources to prepare for
natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.31 Despite its dif-
ferent set of objects, the field of emergency preparedness was structured by the
underlying logic of civil defense: anticipatory mobilization for disaster.
Some governmental measures for alleviating the damage caused by natural
disasters, especially floods and wildfires, were already in place. These programs
included prevention efforts, such as levee construction and forest management, as
well as recovery mechanisms, such as the declaration of federal disasters in order
to release assistance funds. But beginning in the mid-1950s, state and local offi-
cials took up a number of the techniques associated with nuclear war prepared-
ness and applied them to natural disaster planning. These techniques included
monitoring and alert systems, evacuation plans, first-responder training, scenario
planning, and training drills to exercise the system.
The two kinds of preparedness did not easily coexist. First, there were ten-
sions over whether locally based emergency management programs should focus
their planning efforts more on nuclear war or on likely natural disasters. There
were also tensions between the military dimension of civil defense, which implied
norms of hierarchical command and control, and emergency management, which
had a distributed, decentralized structure: while its broader vision was federally
coordinated, natural disaster planning efforts took place at state and local levels
and involved loosely coupled relations among private sector, state, and philan-
thropic organizations.32
Despite these differences in mission and organization, civil defense and

31. As a leading figure in the development of emergency preparedness put it: “At the national
level, a civil defense system developed earlier than any comparable disaster planning or emergency
management system. However, at the local level, the prime concern after World War II became to
prepare for and respond to disasters.” E. L. Quarantelli, “Disaster Planning, Emergency Manage-
ment, and Civil Protection: The Historical Development and Current Characteristics of Organized
Efforts to Prevent and Respond to Disasters” (Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware,
1995), www.udel.edu/DRC/preliminary/227.pdf.
32. William L. Waugh, Jr., “Terrorism, Homeland Security and the National Emergency Manage-
ment Network,” Public Organization Review 3 (2003): 373  –  85. These tensions foreshadow some of
the issues raised in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, e.g., the role of the military and the distribution
of authority between federal and local agencies in emergency situations.

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Public Culture emergency management shared a similar field of intervention — potential future
catastrophes — which made many of their techniques potentially transferable.
Moreover, complementary interests were at play in the migration of civil defense
techniques to natural disaster planning. For local officials, federally funded civil
defense programs presented an opportunity to support local response to natu-
ral disasters. From the federal vantage, given that civil defense against nuclear
attack was politically unpopular, natural disaster planning developed capabilities
that could also prove useful for attack preparedness. The practice of using civil
defense resources for peacetime disasters was institutionalized by a 1976 amend-
ment to the 1950 Federal Civil Defense Act. Over the course of the 1970s, the
forms of disaster to be addressed through emergency preparedness expanded to
include environmental catastrophes, such as Love Canal and Three Mile Island,
and humanitarian emergencies, such as the Cuban refugee crisis.
When the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was established
in 1979, the new agency consolidated federal emergency management and civil
defense functions under the rubric of “all-hazards planning.” All-hazards plan-
ning assumed that, for the purposes of emergency preparedness, many kinds of
catastrophe could be treated in the same way: earthquakes, floods, major indus-
trial accidents, and enemy attacks were brought into the same operational space,
given certain common characteristics. Needs such as early warning, the coordi-
nation of response by multiple agencies, public communication to assuage panic,
and the efficient implementation of recovery processes were shared across these
various sorts of disaster. Thus, all-hazards planning focused not on assessing
specific threats, but on building generic capabilities that could function across
multiple threat domains.33

National Security after the Cold War

The rationale for civil defense as an element of deterrence strategy, initially devel-
oped at RAND in the 1950s, finally came into favor among high-level U.S. military
planners in the 1970s. Among other reasons, this was because the Soviet Union
had developed its own extensive civil defense program, so that civil defense was
now a variable in the strategic balance. In 1975 the Defense Civil Preparedness

33. For FEMA’s institutional history, see “FEMA History” (March 21, 2006), www.fema
.gov/about/history.shtm. On all-hazards planning, Quarantelli writes: “It is being more and more
accepted that civil protection should take a generic rather than agent specific approach to disasters.”
“Disaster Planning,” 17.

262
Office recommended “Crisis Relocation Planning” as part of a capacity for flex- Preparing for the
ible nuclear response. Similarly, Samuel Huntington, adviser to President Jimmy Next Emergency
Carter, argued that the United States’ lack of a “population relocation capability”
was a strategic vulnerability that could be politically destabilizing. In the 1980s,
defense strategists embraced the notion that without sufficient protection of the
economy and government during a nuclear war, the rationale of deterrence was
not credible.34
One aspect of Cold War national security that retrospectively stands out is the
relative stability of the threat it sought to mitigate. For defense strategists, the
Soviet Union seemed to be knowable and manageable through the rational actor
model and game theory. With the end of the Cold War, U.S. national security
thinkers were almost nostalgic for a time when, however dire the threat of nuclear
catastrophe might have been, it was at least clear what one was supposed to be
preparing for. As Colin Powell said in 1991, “We no longer have the luxury of
having a threat to plan for.”35 New security formations have since consolidated
around this problem: what is the threat for which we must now plan?
The end of the Cold War undermined containment and deterrence as central
national security strategies, since there was no longer a rational enemy whose
likely actions could be calculated and managed. The key change in the nature
of threat was from the stable enemy to the nonspecific adversary.36 This shift
became even more palpable after the attacks of September 11. In a 2002 speech
to the Council on Foreign Relations, Donald Rumsfeld counseled that the United
States must vigilantly prepare for the unexpected: “September 11 taught us that
the future holds many unknown dangers, and that we fail to prepare for them at
our peril.” He elaborated, using the language of the anticipation of surprise famil-
iar from scenario planning: “The Cold War is gone and with it the familiar secu-
rity environment. The challenges of the new century are not predictable. We will
probably be surprised again by new adversaries who may strike in unexpected
ways. The challenge is to defend our nation against the unknown, the uncertain,
the unseen, the unexpected.”37

34. See Vale, The Limits of Civil Defense.

35. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking,
2004), 203.
36. See U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, September 30, 2001,
www.defenselink.mil/pubs/qdr2001.pdf.
37. Donald Rumsfeld, “Transforming the Military,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 3 (2002), www.foreign
affairs.org/20020501faessay8140/donald-h-rumsfeld/transforming-the-military.html.

263
Public Culture In the speech, Rumsfeld described the military’s strategic shift, after the Cold
War, from a threat-based strategy to a capabilities-based approach. This strategy
focused less on who might threaten the United States and more on how the United
States might be threatened. Such an approach would allow the military to focus
on the central new problem of “asymmetric threats”: instead of building armed
forces around plans to fight this or that country, Rumsfeld argued, the United
States needed to examine its own vulnerabilities — which would enable the mili-
tary to deal with multiple, nonspecific forms of threat.

Techniques of Preparedness II: Simulation

In developing protocols for all-hazards planning, one security expert in the early
1980s described the importance of simulation exercises for training purposes:
“Ideally, when a real crisis hits, no difference should exist, either operationally or
emotionally, between the current reality and the previous training simulations.”38
To design such drills requires information about the situation to be planned for:
the speed of a toxic cloud under given weather conditions, the pattern of outbreak
of an epidemic, the scale of impact of a large earthquake in a specific urban
setting. Scenario-based simulations not only exercise the system of emergency
response and produce knowledge about needed capabilities, but also generate a
sense of urgency among participants.39
In the 1980s, techniques of preparedness such as the simulation extended to
transnational health and humanitarian organizations seeking ways to plan for
possible emergencies. For example, in her book The Coming Plague, journalist
Laurie Garrett describes a 1989 conference in which 800 tropical disease spe-
cialists participated in a “war games scenario” in which an Ebola virus outbreak
was simulated. Like such exercises in national security, the goal was to expose
vulnerabilities: “The hope was that such a role-playing scenario would reveal
weaknesses in the public health emergency system that could later be corrected.”
The actual performance of the exercise pointed to a key function of simulation as
a preparedness technique — its ability to produce anxiety in participants: “What
the war games revealed was an appalling state of nonreadiness,” writes Garrett.

38. Robert Kupperman, “Vulnerable America,” in Nuclear Arms: Ethics, Strategy, Politics, ed.
James Woolsey (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1983), 202.
39. This had been one Kahn’s reasons for developing the scenario method. As Ghamari-Tabrizi
writes: “This was Kahn’s problem: how to invest hypothetical vulnerabilities, particularly unknown
and undetectable ones, with urgency.” The Worlds of Herman Kahn, 233.

264
“Overall, the mood in Honolulu after five hours was grim, even nervous. The fail- Preparing for the
ings, weaknesses, and gaps in preparedness were enormous.”40 Next Emergency
In contemporary preparedness planning, the lesson of a successful simula-
tion based on a scenario is typically the same as the one that Anderson Cooper
gleaned from Hurricane Katrina: we are not prepared. However, such exercises
typically focus on experts and leaders rather than the public. They are an incite-
ment to action: hold meetings, develop plans, release funds. Security simulations
involve enactments of scenarios of varying detail and scale, followed by reports on
the performance of response. Often former public officials play the roles of lead-
ers — presumably because they are both authoritative and available for several-
day-long exercises. In 2001, “Dark Winter” was performed, a scenario depicting a
covert smallpox attack in the United States. This was an “executive level simula-
tion” set in the National Security Council over 14 days. Current and former public
officials played the roles of members of the NSC, and members of the executive
and legislative branches were briefed on the results. One outcome was the Bush
administration’s decision to produce 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine.41
“Silent Vector” (2002) was an exercise in how to deal with the threat of an
impending terrorist attack when there is not enough information to provide pro-
tection against the attack. The president, played by former Senator Sam Nunn,
was told of credible intelligence indicating an upcoming attack on the nation’s
energy infrastructure, but was not given any information on where or when the
attack would take place. Other examples include 2003’s simulated anthrax attack,
“Scarlet Cloud,” and the biennial “TOPOFF” exercises held by the Department
of Homeland Security. TOPOFF 3 was enacted in April 2005 and included a car
bombing, a chemical attack, and the release of an undisclosed biological agent in
New Jersey and Connecticut. It was the largest terrorism drill ever, costing $16
million and including 10,000 participants. The event also included a simulated
news organization, which was fully briefed on events as they unfolded. The actual
press was not invited.
Such simulations were not limited to the United States. In the January 2005
“Atlantic Storm,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright played the U.S.
president in an exercise simulating a smallpox attack on multiple nations of the

40. Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994), 593  –  94.
41. For an anthropological analysis of bioterrorism scenarios, see Monica Schoch-Spana, “Bio-
terrorism: US Public Health and a Secular Apocalypse,” Anthropology Today 20, no. 5 (October
2004): 8  –  13.

265
Public Culture translatlantic community. Istanbul, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, and multiple U.S. cit-
ies were hit. In a mock summit, former prime ministers of European countries
played the roles of heads of state. Questions of immediate response were posed:
What kind of vaccination approach? Which countries have enough supplies of
vaccine, and will they share them? Will quarantine be necessary? After the exer-
cise, participants concluded that, first, there was insufficient awareness of the
possibility and consequences of a bioterrorist attack, and second, no organization
or structure is currently agile enough to respond to the challenges posed by such
an attack. Structures of coordination and communication of response in real time
must be put into place.
The conclusions were similar to those of other simulation exercises: govern-
ments are not adequately aware or prepared. Secretary of Homeland Security
Michael Chertoff said of TOPOFF 3: “We expect failure because we’re actually
going to be seeking to push to failure.”42 Indeed, the experience of failure is part of
a preparedness strategy. In producing system failure, simulation exercises gener-
ate knowledge of gaps, misconnections, and unfulfilled needs. These can then be
the target of intervention. In so doing, they forge new links — communicational,
informational — among various agencies: local and national government, public
health, law enforcement, intelligence. These simulations, by making infrastruc-
tural vulnerabilities visible, are part of a method for designating priorities and
allocating resources in a preparedness system.

DHS National Preparedness

In the decades after its founding, FEMA faced ongoing tension between its civil
defense function and its task of natural disaster planning. While Republican
administrations tended to emphasize the former, Democratic presidents focused
on the latter.43 The demand for a coherent domestic security system that would
consolidate multiple governmental prevention and response systems crystallized,
after the attacks of September 11 and the anthrax letters, in the formation of the
Department of Homeland Security. The new department brought together security

42. Department of Homeland Security, “Transcript of Press Conference with Secretary of Home-
land Security Michael Chertoff on the TOPOFF 3 Exercise,” April 4, 2005, www.dhs.gov/xnews/
releases/press_release_0650.shtm.
43. Robert Ward, Gary Wamsley, Aaron Schroeder, and David B. Robins, “Network Organi-
zational Development in the Public Sector: A Case Study of the Federal Emergency Management
Administration (FEMA),” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51 (2000):
1018  –  32.

266
functions from a number of areas of government: civil defense, disaster response, Preparing for the
border security, intelligence, and transportation security. FEMA’s assimilation Next Emergency
into DHS once again shifted its orientation more toward enemy attack — in this
case, toward preparation for terrorism. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that DHS
characterized its overall mission in the terms of “all-hazards” planning familiar
from emergency management. As Chertoff said in 2005 in unveiling the depart-
ment’s new National Preparedness Guidance: “The Department of Homeland
Security has sometimes been viewed as a terrorist-fighting entity, but of course,
we’re an all-hazards department. Our responsibilities include not only fighting the
forces of terrorism, but also fighting the forces of natural disasters.”44
The DHS plan elaborated a set of administrative mechanisms for making pre-
paredness a measurable condition. The plan was a guide for decision making
and self-assessment across multiple governmental and nongovernmental enti-
ties concerned with problems of domestic security. It sought to bring disparate
forms of threat into a common security field, articulating the techniques that had
been honed over the prior six decades of planning for emergency. These included
detection and early warning systems, simulation exercises, coordinated response
plans, and metrics for the assessment of the current state of readiness.45
The goal of DHS preparedness planning was to “attain the optimal state of
preparedness.”46 What is a state of preparedness, according to DHS? As the plan
defined it, “preparedness is a continuous process involving efforts at all levels of
government and between government and private-sector and nongovernmental
organizations to identify threats, determine vulnerabilities, and identify required
resources.”47 In other words, preparedness is the measurable relation of capabili-
ties to vulnerabilities, given a selected range of threats.

44. “Secretary Michael Chertoff, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Second Stage Review
Remarks” (House Security Committee, July 13, 2005), www.hsc.house.gov. For a critical discus-
sion of the multiple types of events DHS seeks to prepare for, see Ann Laura Stoler and David
Bond, “Refractions Off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times,” Radical History Review
95 (2006): 93  –  107.
45. Many of the technical elements of the National Preparedness plans were present in FEMA’s
1984 Integrated Emergency Management System, which operationalized all-hazards planning at
the federal level. The system defined a set of common preparedness measures that would make
integrated emergency planning possible: functions that were critical to a response to any disaster,
such as communications, alert, command and control, and providing food and shelter. See “FEMA
History.”
46. Michael Chertoff, quoted in Eric Lipton, “Homeland Security Chief Announces Overhaul,”
New York Times, July 14, 2005.
47. Department of Homeland Security, Interim National Preparedness Goal, March 31, 2005,
A-2. Contrast this with Foucault’s definition of population security, n. 5 above.

267
Public Culture National preparedness targeted vulnerabilities in the nation’s “critical infra-
structure.”48 The term “critical infrastructure” referred to sociotechnical systems
for sustaining economic and social life, many of which were initially developed
as part of population security. The sectors included in the 2006 National Infra-
structure Protection Plan were agriculture and food, public health and health care,
drinking water and waste water treatment, energy, banking and finance, national
monuments, defense industrial base, information technology, telecommunica-
tions, chemical industry, transportation systems, emergency services, postal ser-
vices, and shipping. From the vantage of national preparedness, collective depen-
dence on these systems was an ongoing source of vulnerability.
In the Interim National Preparedness Goal, threats to these systems could
come from a number of sources, including outside enemies, natural disasters, and
infectious diseases. Given the many kinds of hazards to plan for, DHS approached
threats through an emphasis on capabilities that ranged across multiple types of
events rather than a focus on specific threats. “Capabilities-based planning” was
based on Department of Defense methods developed in the wake of the Cold War
but was also coherent with the central premise of all-hazards planning: that one
should not focus on specific threats but on a range of possible responses that work
across diverse threats. As the DHS planning document put it: “Capabilities-Based
Planning is defined as planning, under uncertainty, to provide capabilities suitable
for a wide range of threats and hazards while working within an economic frame-
work that necessitates prioritization and choice. Capabilities-based planning is
all-hazards planning.”49
The plan did not claim to be able to prevent or mitigate all risks. As Chertoff
commented, “There’s risk everywhere; risk is a part of life. I think one thing I’ve
tried to be clear in saying is we will not eliminate every risk.”50 Since there were
a multiplicity of risks and finite resources for approaching them, DHS would
prioritize by focusing on the largest scale disasters: “DHS will concentrate first
and foremost, most relentlessly, on addressing threats that pose catastrophic con-
sequences.”51 Among the many dire possibilities, what were the criteria for select-

48. The National Infrastructure Protection Plan “provides a roadmap for identifying assets,
assessing vulnerabilities, prioritizing assets, and implementing protection measures in each infra-
structure sector.” According to DHS, 85% of the critical infrastructure is in the private sector. DHS,
Interim National Preparedness Goal, 12.
49. DHS, Interim National Preparedness Goal, 4.
50. Chertoff, quoted in Eric Lipton, “U.S. Report Lists Possibilities for Terrorist Attacks and
Likely Toll,” New York Times, March 16, 2005.
51. “Secretary Michael Chertoff, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Second Stage Review
Remarks” (House Security Committee, July 13, 2005), www.hsc.house.gov.

268
ing which threats were the most salient? “Risk-based” prioritization would guide Preparing for the
the allocation of federal resources. This meant distributing funds according to Next Emergency
the relative likelihood and catastrophic potential of a given attack or disaster in
a given place. However, exactly how to do this given the uncertain occurrence of
salient threats remained both a technical and a political problem.
The achievement of optimal preparedness did not require knowledge about the
norms of living beings; unlike population security, it did not develop epidemiolog-
ical or demographic knowledge. Rather, to assess and improve current prepared-
ness required techniques for generating detailed knowledge of infrastructural
vulnerabilities in relation to response capacities. Here is where scenario plan-
ning proved useful. As we have seen, scenarios are not predictions or forecasts;
rather, they map readiness for a wide range of threats. In its Interim National
Preparedness Goal, DHS selected fifteen disaster scenarios as “the foundation
for a risk-based approach.”52 These possible events — including an anthrax attack,
a flu pandemic, a nuclear detonation, and a major earthquake — were chosen on
the basis of plausibility and catastrophic scale.
The DHS scenarios made it possible to produce knowledge about current vul-
nerabilities and the capabilities needed to mitigate them. As one expert com-
mented: “We have a great sense of vulnerability, but no sense of what it takes to
be prepared. These scenarios provide us with an opportunity to address that.”53
Using the scenarios, DHS developed a menu of the “critical tasks” that would
have to be performed in various kinds of major events; responsibility for per-
forming these tasks, in turn, was to be assigned to specific governmental and
nongovernmental agencies.
The scenarios did not imply permanent agreement about the major threats;
rather, they were to be regularly evaluated and, if necessary, transformed: “DHS
will maintain a National Planning Scenario portfolio and update it periodically
based on changes in the homeland security strategic environment.”54 The plan
envisioned ongoing reflexive self-transformation in relation to a changing threat
environment: “Our enemy constantly changes and adapts, so we as a department
must be nimble and decisive.”55 National preparedness had to continually pose
itself the question, are we preparing for the right threats?

52. DHS, Interim National Preparedness Goal, 6.

53. David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, quoted in Lipton, “U.S. Report Lists Possibilities.”
54. DHS, Interim National Preparedness Guidance, 6.
55. Chertoff, quoted in Lipton, “Homeland Security Chief Announces Overhaul.”

269
Public Culture While the above describes the underlying rationality of national prepared-
ness planning, its actual operation was far from stabilized. DHS was fraught with
bureaucratic infighting, budgetary struggles, and cronyism, leading to a wide-
spread perception of its failure to achieve its mission — especially in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina.56 It is worth emphasizing, however, that such criticism pre-
sumed the normative rationality of preparedness.

Technical Reform

Scenario 10 of the DHS planning scenarios document was titled “Natural Disas-
ter — Major Hurricane.”57 As has been widely noted, the city of New Orleans had
run a hurricane simulation in 2004. Obviously, such exercises do not in them-
selves ensure a state of preparedness. Nonetheless, the perception of a massively
failed response by DHS to the actual hurricane one year later did not undermine
the presumed utility of “all-hazards” planning. Rather, from the vantage of pre-
paredness experts, it pointed to problems of implementation and coordination, of
command and control. Thus, in response to the failure, we have seen the redirec-
tion and intensification of already-developed preparedness techniques rather than
a broad rethinking of security questions.
Reform proposals have been primarily technical: in the context of the Gulf
Coast, rebuild the flood protection infrastructure; in large cities, improve evacu-
ation plans; for preparedness planning in general, ensure that there are coherent
systems in place for communication and coordination in crisis. More broadly,
scrutinize the relationships among federal, state, local, private-sector, and non-
governmental organizational responsibilities for dealing with various aspects of
disaster preparedness.58 However, under the rubric of preparedness, questions
surrounding the social basis of vulnerability are not posed. This issue should
be distinguished from debates over the privatization of social services and the
shrinking of governmental capacity. Rather, it raises the question of what kind
of governmental techniques are most salient for looking after the well-being of
citizens, and what the goals of knowledge and intervention in the name of security
should be.

56. For a description of widespread malfeasance in DHS, see Eric Klinenberg and Thomas Frank,
“Looting Homeland Security,” Rolling Stone, December 29, 2005, 44  –  54.
57. Homeland Security Council, Planning Scenarios: Executive Summaries, July 2004.
58. See, e.g., the White House, The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned
(February 2006), www.whitehouse.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned.pdf.

270
 Here we should note some of the differences between the objects and aims of Preparing for the
population security and those of preparedness. In contrast to population security- Next Emergency
based tasks such as public health and welfare provision, preparedness is oriented
to crisis situations and to localized sites of disorder or disruption. These are typi-
cally events of short duration that require urgent response.59 Their likelihood in
a given place demands a condition of readiness, rather than a long-term work of
sustained attention to the welfare of the population. The object to be known and
managed differs, as well: for preparedness, the key site of vulnerability is not the
health of a population but rather the critical infrastructure that guarantees the
continuity of political and economic order. If population security builds infra-
structure, preparedness catalogs it and monitors its vulnerabilities. And while
preparedness may emphasize saving the lives of “victims” in moments of duress,
it does not seek to intervene in the living conditions of human beings as members
of a social collectivity.
To consider Katrina and its aftermath a problem of preparedness rather than
one of population security is to focus political questions about the failure around
a fairly circumscribed set of issues. For the purposes of disaster planning, whose
key question is “are we prepared?” the poverty rate and the percentage of people
without health insurance are not salient indicators of readiness or of the efficacy
of response. Rather, preparedness emphasizes questions such as hospital surge
capacity, the coherence of evacuation plans, the resilience of the electrical grid,
or ways of detecting the presence of E. coli in the water supply. From the vantage
of preparedness, the conditions of existence of members of the population are not
a political problem.

59. Craig Calhoun, “A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan
Order,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41 (2004): 373  –  95.

271