This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (36 page)

Washington, New York, and the nation have recovered from 9/11, but the threat of future terrorist attacks remains. Does the history of Washington’s preparations for nuclear war offer any guidance, any “warnings”—yellow and red—to improve the status quo? I believe there are five.

The first is that emergency plans, agencies, and personnel for the capital, city, and region must be aligned. Today’s D.C. Emergency Management Agency (DEMA) can’t suffer the same fate as its predecessor, the DCD, which was ignored by the executive branch, bullied by Congress, and isolated from its suburban counterparts. As Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.’s delegate to Congress) observed on September 17, 2001, the “District cannot protect our neighborhoods or do its part to protect the federal presence unless D.C. is at the table throughout the planning and execution process.” Early signs weren’t encouraging. Less than two weeks after the terrorist attacks, the House Appropriations Committee voted to withhold 50 percent of the fed
eral funding for various D.C. programs until the city devised better emer
gency plans. Considering the troubles experienced by the federal government itself on 9/11, the Committee’s action was unfair and counterproductive. Fortunately, subsequent Congressional and executive action was more posi
tive. In 2002, the District received almost $13 million to improve its emer
gency readiness. DEMA met with representatives from the White House, GSA, and Office of Personnel Management to improve communications and to facilitate a coordinated response to an emergency. New evacuation routes were worked out with federal agencies as well as the Maryland and Virginia transportation departments; furthermore, a plan approved in August 2002 to evacuate all federal workers within 15 minutes includes a “trigger” to notify the District, media, and authorities in Maryland and Virginia.
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In August 2005, however, the inadequate federal, state, and local responses to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans brought renewed scrutiny of post 9/11 emergency preparations for Washington. Katrina spared New Orleans a direct hit, but the water of Lake Pontchartrain
roiled through breached levees, flooding the city. Tens of thousands of resi
dents unable or unwilling to heed the pre-storm evacuation order huddled under highway overpasses, retreated to their attics, or sought refuge at the squalid Superdome, which, though officially designated as a mass shelter, lacked sufficient food, water, and bedding for evacuees. The lack of coordi
nated action was clearly evident four days after the hurricane, when FEMA director Michael Brown admitted during a televised interview that he had just learned thousands of desperate residents had gathered at the city’s con
vention center, which hadn’t been prepared as a shelter. A few weeks later, as Hurricane Rita hurtled toward the Texas Gulf Coast, Houston residents duti
fully obeyed an evacuation order only to find themselves inching along jammed highways, trapped in a maddening procession that belied one of the justifications offered 50 years earlier for the interstate highway system: “quick evacuation of target areas.” Referring to the “Katrina-caused chaos,” David Snyder, a member of the Emergency Preparedness Council of the Washington Metropolitan Council of Governments, asked, “Could it happen here?” Snyder thought it could, primarily because “there’s no one person or agency in this area charged with assuring regional coordination among levels of government and among different functions such as law enforcement, transportation and communication with the public.” Such a deficiency very well could disrupt implementation of Washington’s evacuation or result in conflicting instructions being issued to the public.
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The second warning: “Keep it Simple—Keep it down to rock bottom.” These words of advice from Eisenhower to his emergency planners are just as valid today as they were in 1956, and they apply equally to local, regional, and federal planning. Consider evacuation. As we’ve learned, most Cold War emergency planners indulged wildly unrealistic ideas about rapidly moving the District’s population beyond its borders. Compared to its antecedents, the current D.C. Evacuation Map is a superior plan. Not only does it provide simple, direct instructions about the routes to be used, it’s based on the coor
dination of traffic signals and the deployment of uniformed police officers to 70 key intersections. Even simple plans, however, are useful only when prop
erly executed. On July 4, 2005, a test evacuation of central Washington ran into several obstacles. Following the annual fireworks display on the National Mall, authorities channeled motorists and pedestrians to seven of the city’s planned evacuation routes. There was public confusion, traffic signals failed to synchronize to emergency timing, and uncharged radio batteries impeded communications.
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The third warning is closely related to the first two: avoid the “planning to plan” approach of the National Security Resources Board. The April 2002
District Response Plan
(DRP), a latter-day version of the 1959
District of Columbia Survival Plan
, commits this mistake in a few places, stating, for example: “While the DRP focuses primarily on operational planning, other types of planning such as pre-incident planning, contingency planning, action planning, and strategic planning are equally critical to ensuring effective emergency operations.” The DRP also lists more than a dozen other

area, federal, and even international plans with which it might be used; however, the Emergency Support Functions section, which provides specific instructions for response areas such as mass care and communications, provides few precise links to these plans.
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Without synchronicity, simplicity, and practice, will the Emergency Support Functions work as plotted during an emergency?

Fourth warning: find and fix the weak spots in the chain of continuity preparations. Though obvious, this point requires iteration. The Commission on the Continuity of Government has pinpointed one of the weakest spots, the inability of the House of Representatives to expeditiously replace members killed or incapacitated in a catastrophe. Since 2001, six different proposals to amend Article I, Section 2 have been introduced in the House and Senate, but none have progressed beyond the committee stage. The lack of action recalls the 19 failed attempts to amend the same part of the Constitution during the 1950s. As the Commission observes: “It is surely not pleasant to contemplate the possibility of future catastrophic attacks on our governmental institutions, but the continuity of our government requires us to face this dire danger directly.”
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Finally, emergency planners must be straight with Washingtonians and all Americans. In 1958, the NSC stated that the government should “[p]rovide appropriate and adequate information to the public of the nature and extent of the dangers from nuclear attack on the United States now and in the future, and of the measures being taken or which could be taken to alleviate them.”
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The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t as yet meet that standard, as explained in the introduction. If the DHS is to avoid falling into the yawing credibility gap that plagued its predecessors dating back to the FCDA, then it must neither mollycoddle nor mislead Americans; it must declare, not dissemble; and it must prize honesty over hokum.

As Robert Oppenheimer told Eisenhower in 1953: “Only a wise and informed people could be expected to act wisely.”
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