34 KiB
How will the government plan when they know of a disaster firsthand?
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Author: u/talos1279 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/9ag742/how_will_the_government_plan_when_they_know_of_a/
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Score: 23
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Created: 2018-08-26T15:08:51
Post:
It is popular in fictions that when a disaster strikes (usually what can end the world like global disaster, zombie outbreak, alien invasion, AI berserk...), the government fail to do anything and the whole society collapses. However, I don't think the government is that useless. With their power, they can know some signs of a disaster happening beforehand and prepare some measures for it. What do you think the government have in hand when they know a disaster will strike?
I also want to ask a topic related to it, if the government decides to evacuate the citizen, how will they do it? I'm reffering to specific things like how they will distribute the rations, how they get the supply, where the medicines are taken from.
Comments:
u/Endovior [+37] (an hour later)
Unfortunately for storytelling, a rational response to a disaster often makes it... not a disaster. Take a zombie outbreak, for example. The rational response was best depicted in this xkcd, which doesn't even get to the point of a government needing to do something.
In any such disaster, there will be many more intervention points, at which the crisis could have been averted. In order for you to have a story in which a disaster threatens to end civilization, people need to have made bad decisions over and over and over again, until things have finally gone so wrong that the problem is big enough, or has been ignored for long enough, that it's too late to respond effectively. Basically, disaster stories always start with the government holding the idiot ball.
Given all that, if you'd like to read stories about governmental responses to disasters, there are plenty of real-life examples. Of course, the most rational responses are the ones where there was no actual disaster, because of preparations made ahead of time. Unfortunately, it's a little harder to find information on that sort of scenario, because it's less newsworthy when nothing bad happens.
u/Sarkavonsy [+32] (3 hours later)
The first thing I can think of is the opening of Evangelion (which is not, of course, a rational show by any measure, but anyways...). The military knows than an Angel is coming and are well prepared with armour, aircraft, and a nuke (? some kind of huge bomb at least). The reason these preparations don't trivialize the show is that they all turn out to be insufficient, as the Angel shakes off or regenerates from all the damage it takes from mundane weapons - to the surprise of the military.
We can take some inspiration from this scene in designing a disaster which is known ahead of time and prepared for. I think you only need one element to make a rational large-scale response to a disaster still have tension and stakes: information! If the preparation is made with certain incorrect information in mind - details about the disaster which are reasonably thought to be accurate turn out to be inaccurate, or the scale of the disaster turns out to be more focused or more broad than was reasonably expected - then an interesting story can be built out of both the discovery that the prepared resources aren't appropriate to solve the problem, and the reaction of the first responders needing to find a way to use said resources creatively to either solve the problem anyways or, if you want to be darker, just mitigate the damage/loss of life.
So basically, plans made on incorrect or insufficient information plus competent and interesting characters figuring out where their information is wrong and then using available resources to do the best they can once they have better information. Which is... one of the main ways to make anything go wrong in a rational story, isn't it?
u/k5josh [+5] (4 hours later)
nuke (? some kind of huge bomb at least)
It's an N^2 (Non-Nuclear) mine.
u/Sarkavonsy [+3] (5 hours later)
Ah, I thought so! It's been a while since I watched it.
u/GeeJo [+11] Custom Flair (a day later)
Anime used to have a bit of a nuclear taboo (Japan being unique in having citizens whose families died in a nuclear attack).
Evangelion's N^2 mines are one example. Others include Macross and its 'Reaction Weapons'; Gall Force and its SVE missiles and to a lesser extent Code Geass and its FLEIJA weapon. More recently, Zankyou no Terror (a show with terrorist protagonists threatening a nuclear attack on Tokyo) somehow managed to make it through the entire series without ever actually using the words 'nuke' or 'nuclear weapon', instead euphemistically referring only to 'stolen plutonium' and the like.
In Japan, only villains use nukes. (See: Legend of the Galactic Heroes and its Westerland Massacre, or M'Quve's threat in Mobile Suit Gundam)
The latest generation of anime has more or less moved past it (see No Game No Life's shiritori game, for example), but its a noted writing quirk through to the early '10s.
u/Sarkavonsy [+5] (2 days later)
I figured something exactly like that was going on! Thanks for clarifying.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+7] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (8 hours later)
Of course, the most rational responses are the ones where there was no actual disaster, because of preparations made ahead of time.
Y2K
u/talos1279 [+5] (an hour later)
but it can be quite amazing in the story if people see how much work is put in preventing or dealing with the disasters. Like those shows on National Geographic Channel, simple stuffs but if explained on deep level can be awe inspiring.
u/None [+3] (2 days later)
I think an interesting way to get around this story-telling roadblock, is to simply amp up the severity of the disaster, and, more importantly, make government agents the protagonists.
A zombie outbreak story, only maybe the infection is already airborne and in the water and also has carriers in both animals, insects, and people; and the protagonists effectively are the government, so there are actual stakes. If they fail, then civilization as we know it falls.
Essentially, make the story about the government response to the apocalypse, and write some nice Competence Porn. Like how everybody is really good at their jobs and smart in The Martian, and yet it's still a gripping story. Imagine a story like that, only instead of NASA trying to rescue a guy on Mars, its the CDC trying to hold back the zombie apocalypse. It could be awesome!
u/KilotonDefenestrator [+3] (3 days later)
I think how the plague gets out in Stephen King's The Stand was rather plausible, as far as I remember. There were proper procedures in place, but one guy gets tunnel vision when his family is at risk and forces the gates with his car. Not exactly rational behavior but definitely plausible human behavior.
I do not remember what happened after that, perhaps the reason he got far enough to infect more people was because a lot of bad decisions.
u/wren42 [+2] (3 days later)
I think you are giving governments way too much credit.
Take a look at the handling of hurricanes in south eastern US.
This is an annual event -- these things happen ALL THE TIME. Yet these areas keep getting hit and the response is often dramatically insufficient, resulting in thousands of deaths and billions in property damage.
in terms of an outbreak, governments might step in once things get really bad by closing airports or investing in vaccination research at the extreme, but mostly just put out advisory warnings and maybe do a bit of preventative sanitation or pest extermination controls.
I have a buddy who works in disaster simulation. He builds computer models of what might happen if terrorists poisoned the water supply, or shut down electricity in a metro area, or released a biohazard. It's not good. The incompetence of government response is mostly offset by the disorganization and incompetence of malicious agents. I mean, do you think the TSA is a rational and effective response to 9/11?
When the malicious agent is Nature, the gloves come off, and humanity usually gets clobbered.
u/derefr [+2] (3 days later)
I feel like that's less the fault of the government, and more the fault of the people who live in these regions for 1. living in these regions, and then 2. not voting in candidates who run on platforms about emergency-preparedness (i.e. increasing taxes to fund FEMA, the national guard, etc.) but rather voting in candidates who specifically reduce the budgets of those organizations.
Also, things have to get "really bad" before the government will be supported in closing airports. People would riot if the government closed airports without a good (read: already far past good) reason.
do you think the TSA is a rational and effective response to 9/11?
The TSA is good at catching spies. Terrorism is a cover-story. (If it was really about terrorism, the NEXUS program wouldn't exist.)
u/wren42 [+2] (3 days later)
Yeah, blame dumb puerto ricans for living in puerto rico and voting for Trump. /s
u/derefr [+1] (3 days later)
blame dumb puerto ricans for living in puerto rico
I'm totally willing to bite this bullet. Unlike most people in bad climactic environments in the world (where they're stuck with that environment because that's their whole country), Puerto Ricans are US citizens and can freely move and live anywhere else in the US—most of which does not have natural disasters striking it every eight years. An entirely-rational Puerto Rican population (or, say, an entirely-rational population of New Orleans) would pack up and emigrate en masse to any random safe part of the continental US.
If a population that was constantly being struck by natural disasters decided that it wanted to migrate like that, I don't think that the government—whether through organizations like FEMA, or perhaps other departments—would be at-all against helping them to do so. For the government to reject the idea would be like an insurance company deciding not to pay for statins for a client with a heart condition! A prophylactic is much cheaper than a rescue, and government agencies know that. People just don't want the help, usually.
u/wren42 [+5] (3 days later)
People just don't want the help, usually.
I somehow doubt the problem is this simplistic.
you are also hand waving the costs of such a migration, both to an individual and as a society.
more to the point, none of this is excusing the original criticism: that the federal government isn't good at handling large-scale disasters. It's not at ALL implausible that a government would be slow to react and inefficient in its response even with foreknowledge of an impending event.
u/wren42 [+2] (3 days later)
Or, let's use a different culturally relevant scenario:
We've had clear evidence and warning from the intelligence community for two years that Russia is actively influencing US (and other) elections, and has the ability to hack and tamper with electronic voting systems and voter data.
Have we seen any sweeping security overhauls? Perhaps a frantic adoption of paper-validated voting systems? Audits of voter registration data for tampering? How many states have changed their voting systems in response to this dramatic and well publicized cyber attack?
People, as a general rule, are stupid, and slow to respond to anything that doesn't directly impact their immediate comfort, social status, and employment.
u/derefr [+2] (3 days later)
Basically, disaster stories always start with the government holding the idiot ball.
I wonder if this could be not-true, given a sufficiently large idiot ball somewhere else.
Like, say, if there was first an environmental equivalent of The Purge: a 24-hour period where a randomly-distributed 1/3rd of the population just went crazy, reverting to [enraged] animal behaviour, and then just stopping without any memory of what they did 24 hours later.
...and then a zombie-virus outbreak occurred in the middle of it.
It'd take a fairly clever government to handle both.
u/MilesSand [+2] (5 days later)
So basically in order to have a disaster they need to handle it like climate change is being handled in the US
u/boomfarmer [+21] Trying to be helpful (2 hours later)
The US federal agency called the Center for Disease Control regularly uses zombie outbreak scenarios for medical emergency disaster response drills. You should be able to find at least media coverage woth a quick Internet search. Because these drills are multi-agency, if you want the real nitty-gritty details you should be able to get a lot of paperwork from FOIA requests and from agency-published afteraction reports.
Beyond that specific example, you'd want to refer to published plans and historical records for hurricane, fire, earthquake, flood, and terrorism-driven evacuations of cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Particular places to start would include the graphic novel edition of the 9/11 Report, the one-year retrospectives of Hurricane Harvey, any historical study of Hurricane Katrina, of the Fukishima nuclear disaster, of the Haitian earthquake, of any Pacific tsunami in the last 20 years, of the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe, or of Puerto Rico after the 2017 hurricane season. That should cover a lot of the good and bad responses. Also read any of ProPublica's reporting on Red Cross failures.
u/vimefer [+4] (a day later)
So Government response to disasters appears, historically, to be marred by efforts to make Government look not-bad, to the point where (Chernobyl, Fukushima) it hinders international coordination, and these efforts tend to engender conspirationism of all kinds. Efforts spent during or after the fact for evacuation, reestablishing control and rebuilding are diverted by widespread corruption fueled by the lessened scrutiny perceived by the actors (Katrina, Harvey, Haiti especially). This latter aspect would be the most narratively useful.
u/boomfarmer [+3] Trying to be helpful (2 days later)
Efforts to make Government look not-bad,
But what makes government look bad? Ineffective responses do. So they're incentivized to respond effectively.
(The Red Cross's issues are a long story that are unique to non-government responders.)
Yes, corruption, confusion, and lack of established coordination are narratively useful for writing a disaster story. But don't forget the operators who have plans ahead of time, and are proceeding according to plan.
u/Solonarv [+3] Chaos Legion (3 days later)
effort to make government look not-bad
Sometimes this is accomplished by covering up the incident (or diminishing its extent), because a govt that doesn't let disasters happen in the first place is viewed as more competent than one where they do happen.
Nevermind that this impedes rescue and disaster relief, and when the truth inevitably gets out it's a much larger loss of face.
u/Fresh_C [+16] (3 hours later)
Ender's Game somewhat works with this premise. The first invasion that happened prior to the beginning of the story likely caught Earth off guard.
But the government restructures society and put several programs in place in order to be prepared for a second invasion if it ever were to come. Though the story only really focuses on one aspect of their planning, so it might not be what you're looking for.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+16] Godric Gryffindor (an hour later)
If the disaster is weird, they do nothing. Maybe make it a bit worse. Speaking from experience here.
u/davidmanheim [+6] (2 hours later)
That's true regarding how they precipitate the disaster, not how they respond to it. Or are you referring to something other than the obvious impending AI threat? (Because yes, obviously that's a case where they are making it worse, and response to a foom is largely an irrelevant question.)
u/None [+14] (3 hours later)
Our reaction to global warming is definitely applicable.
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+6] (23 hours later)
Third world countries also comes to mind - namely, AFAICT solving world poverty would boost the economy of first-world countries (as well as everyone else) in the long term, because having more R&D generally means more efficiency faster, and more economically-developed countries means more R&D. Plus, larger economies for first-world sorts of goods, which means better economies of scale which means cheaper.
Point is, this is a sort of inverse-disaster (losing out on potential $$$), yet the governments don't do shit about it. Although there are almost certainly major principal-agent problems and whatnot, so they're not necessarily acting "irrationally".
u/lillarty [+2] (2 days later)
That comes down to loss aversion though, which is a different issue.
With classical disaster scenarios, people are taking (sometimes drastic) actions to prevent a large loss form occurring, but in the scenario you're talking about, it's essentially investing in a stock that there is significant reason to believe will rise in value.
Sure, both vaguely seek to have the situation in the future not get worse, but they're not really directly comparable.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+15] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (37 minutes later)
What do you think the government have in hand when they know a disaster will strike?
We're about to find out in England, next year.
u/VirtueOrderDignity [+12] (an hour later)
Do self-inflicted disasters by irrational governments count?
u/ArgentStonecutter [+10] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (an hour later)
Absolutely.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (12 hours later)
Well, America is screwed.
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+1] (23 hours later)
Only somewhat. The US's screwed-ness comes down to three factors:
- Can existing democratic mechanisms impeach Trump? (i.e. blue midterms)
- Assuming #1 succeeds, can the US make meaningful patches to the problems with democracy (e.g. FPTP), so that other countries can expect this problem to reasonably not happen in the future?
- How much long-term damage will Trump do to the credibility of the USA? (note: this actually depends quite heavily on #1 - worst-case scenario would be if Trump was not only not impeached, but was re-elected come 2020 - I basically expect the USA's overseas influence and mythos to basically die for good if that happens.)
u/eaglejarl [+1] (4 days later)
Good questions all. I'd say that the answers are:
Can existing democratic mechanisms impeach Trump? (i.e. blue midterms)
No, Trump cannot be impeached. It is literally impossible (not enough seats coming open) for the Democrats to get a 2/3 majority in the Senate, which means they cannot impeach him without assistance from a sizable number of Republicans. That is not going to happen; the Republicans have clearly demonstrated that they will stand with Trump even if he beats a puppy to death with the corpse of a nun. The one POSSIBLE exception to this is if Mueller comes back with clear evidence that Trump committed treason, but I wouldn't count on it; the definition of treason is very narrow, so it's unlikely that Trump committed that precise crime. Even then, I'm not sure it would be enough. He's done such a good job of poisoning the well that most Republican-leaning people would just assume that news coverage of such a crime was fake news.
Assuming #1 succeeds, can the US make meaningful patches to the problems with democracy
There is some hope on this front. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a movement among the states to say "From now on, we're going to give all our electors to whomever wins the popular vote". It doesn't go into effect until enough states have signed up that they control 270 electoral votes, but they're halfway there already. It would be a way to effectively eliminate the electoral college and stop letting the Republicans scuttle into office when the populace didn't want them. (No, that is not my bias. There have been 5 EC-only presidents, and all of them were Republicans aside from JQA, who was a Democratic Republican because the modern Republican party didn't exist yet.) If the Compact goes into effect, the Republicans will have a very hard time getting another President into office: "As of October 2017, Gallup polling found that 31% of Americans identified as Democrat, 24% identified as Republican, and 42% as Independent."
Also, Maine and a handful of cities are currently using instant-runoff voting, so there's a chance we can move away from the FPTP. There's no Constitutional mandate for it, so all that's necessary is to convince people at the local level.
How much long-term damage will Trump do to the credibility of the USA?
All of it. He will almost certainly make it to the end of his term -- Mueller still needs to finish the investigation and then the Republicans can probably slow-walk the trial long enough to stall until 2020.
As to him getting re-elected...it's not just possible, I think it's actually likely unless something changes. His approval ratings have been going up steadily this whole year and he's currently running in the >40% range -- shoot, the WSJ had him at 46% a couple weeks ago. (Ignore Rasmussen. They've been a significant outlier since Trump first announced his candidacy.)
Nearly everyone who is slightly conservative is probably going to vote for Trump if they get the chance, since:
- The stock market keeps going up. (Who cares that ~70% of Americans have no stake in the stock market and that it's looking like a bubble anyway?)
- Unemployment keeps going down. (Who cares that that's provably momentum from Obama, since Trump's policies have generally not helped?)
- He's "making NATO pay their fair share." (And also destroying our relations with our allies and giving power to Russia and China.)
- Most importantly: Trump's already put one conservative on the SCOTUS, and if Trump is in office for another 6 years then there's a decent chance that Ginsberg will retire and Trump will get to put another justice in. That would give the conservatives a 6-3 majority on the SCOTUS and reshape the country for a generation.
u/best_cat [+8] (6 hours later)
They'd take the threat, break it into facets, and then reach for the combination of relevant plans that match the pattern.
Take zombies. That's a communicable disease, plus low level revolt, plus a long term insurgency that uses ambush tactics, but not guns.
We almost certainly have run war games like, "ebola outbreak, in Connecticut, and locals violently resist quarantine.". You'd dust those notes off and have one guy run that mission. Some other guy would start prep on the plan for fighting door to door in France.
Turn this into a crisis by having the government get blinded by their own pattern matching. They have a plan. It looks to be working. So they stop thinking about how zombies aren't like riots until....
Add to this by realizing that the government could use Sci Fi tropes as euphemism.
Instead of doing a war game, "how do we invade France?" you could write "how do we liberate France from (rolls dice) mind controlling space bats.". The latter let's the planner sidestep a long intro about why the US is drawing up plans to attack an ally. We're not shooting French soldiers! We're shooting cloned copies of French soldiers.
This means that, when the space bats land, some Lt will dutifully do a search, "find" the answer and stop looking
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+3] (a day later)
This means that, when the space bats land, some Lt will dutifully do a search, "find" the answer and stop looking
To be fair, the entire point of pattern-matching is that it's a shortcut, and the point of pre-made plans (presumably massively inaccurate on all sorts of assumptions) is to have somewhere to start.
u/best_cat [+5] (a day later)
There are a couple kinds of pattern-match problems. One is 'sincere' where the generals write guides on how to fight the last war. This creates friction when the new war is different.
A more comedic problem comes when plans use fantastic names in a very non-literal way. The CDC 'Zombie Guide' wasn't really about Zombies. They're just using 'zombies' to introduce the general idea of disaster preparedness. Since the plan isn't actually intended to be about zombies (but about real-world threats) it omits stuff like 'motorcycle armor.'
I can see this coming up if the US wants to write plans about invading an allied or politically sensitive country.
You don't want to write "what if [Ally]'s religious minority grows in population, gets radicalized, and starts a low-grade insurgent warfare targeting major infrastructure projects?" because that document would be subject to FOIA, and is just not-impossible-enough that people would take real-world offense. At the same time, you want people thinking through real-world scenarios.
So, you'd do a find/replace, and put a fantasy gloss on the whole thing. Don't say "radicalized" we say "controlled by alien space bats." You don't say "internment camp" you say "space-bat decontamination facility." And then have a plan where people controlled by the alien-space-bats have exactly the combat capabilities, logistic and morale problems that would be faced by a partially-identifiable civilian insurgency in France.
This lets your staff think through a 'realistic' scenario, but means that you don't get hauled in front on congress to explain why you're invading an ally. And, the fantasy gloss -- insurgents have big space-bat hats, and not clothes identified with real-world culture -- means that whole operations would be less offensive to the participants.
The funny part comes when literal Space Bats invade. And then some Lt does the find, and gets reams of detailed counter-space-bat insurgency instructions, none of which are actually intended to be about Space Bats.
u/None [+18] (an hour later)
I recommend reading the book World War Z. It narrates the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse, and humanity's response, all told like a documentary book compiled ten years after the "victory".
It dedicates several chapters to how and why governments acted or failed to act.
u/None [+9] (4 hours later)
[deleted]
u/None [+16] (5 hours later)
Parts of it are definitely unrealistic, but in general the responses from humanity ran the full gamut I'd expect: Denial, profiteering, governments trying simple, proved solutions first, people just breaking under pressure, sociopaths put in positions of power as a desperate gambit, communities forming on a smaller scale...
u/EthanCC [+6] (10 hours later)
Ahahahaha! Ah. No. No, it is not even slightly realistic. The idea that zombies could be a threat to any modern army is laughable at best. It's a good anthology of people responding to the apocalypse, but it's not at all useful in rational worldbuilding, which is what is being asked for.
u/None [+5] (14 hours later)
The battles and such wouldn't happen, of course, but the collapse of civilization would soon ground the military. What good is a tank without gas? Where do you get your gas when the wells, distilleries and raffineries are all abandoned? The national stockpile lasts for some 90 days, right?
u/EthanCC [+5] (a day later)
It lasts for 90 days at the maximum withdrawal capacity, meaning if you're going through the stockpile as fast as you can. I don't know how fast you'd go through rationing, but the stockpile is Ω(90 days). I'm not too familiar with the specifics, if they're even declassified, but I do know that there are plans in place to rebuild from everything up to a nuclear war (under the optimistic assumption there are even any people left alive). It might require adopting 1911 era weapons and giving up on vehicles for a while, but it's possible. The general idea, as I understand it, isn't to treat it as a military operation in the usual sense but to prevent the breakdown of social order at all costs while trying to rebuild the supply chains necessary to keep people alive.
From the perspective of what characters see, depending on how close you are to a military base I'd expect them to show up at most a few weeks after the event, institute martial law, and start handing out food rations.
u/bloodfist [+7] (6 hours later)
The place to start would be the National Incident Management System.
This is how the US government organizes teams for response to wildland fires, military action, and natural disasters.
It's an excellent system. The basis is to get people who have an understanding of what resources are needed and how to get them on site as soon as possible and then get them ordering resources as smoothly as possible. It puts a lot of weight on logistics and operations in order to make sure everyone gets fed and has a place to sleep. On top of that things like daily briefings and after action reports keep things improving.
If there were any major crisis in the US, you can guarantee that is the system that ground teams would be working from.
EDIT: Better link (FEMA)
u/Justausername1234 [+3] (6 hours later)
This was a USSTRATCOM plan written up as a training exercise, however, it did manage to become a numbered CONOP.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/images/05/16/dod.zombie.apocalypse.plan.pdf
In this vein, someone from West Point wrote this up
https://www.usma.edu/scusa/SiteAssets/SitePages/Round%20Tables/SCUSA%2066%20-%20Zombies.pdf
u/EthanCC [+3] (10 hours later)
Look at how the government plans for current disasters. What is publicly available of the disaster response to a nuclear war is a good place to start. Also look into first hand accounts from areas that have been hit with large hurricanes, that's how they would deal with rations and so on. The short version is martial law->food and water->temporary shelter->rebuilding, all of this until the last one being handled by the military. I believe people are given ration cards and rations are airlifted in if the roads are inaccessible, but don't quote me on that.
The plans for a nuclear war would probably be closer to what you're looking for, because they assume all other institutions have broken down. Hurricane and other real life examples of disaster response rely on having a large amount of industry and food to bring into the area, with the only limit being logistics.
There are a lot of smart people who are very good with logistics who have planned for major disasters, you would need to somehow render the military ineffective for this sort of collapse to work. In other words, the most believable thing that could cause a major collapse like this is a massive war, nothing else can really cripple every disaster relief option simultaneously. If you have a rational alien invasion or berserk AI you're screwed anyway, there won't be people around to relieve for very long.
u/Amonwilde [+4] (42 minutes later)
This question is quite general. Governments have a wide variety of contingency plans, from battling epidemics to safeguarding VIPs to responding with military intervention to civil unrest or disasters. Not all of these plans have been, or can be, fully vetted. Most are not known to us. And, of course, disasters can happen that the government is utterly unprepared for. I'd come up with a more concrete scenario and then research that one specifically.
u/talos1279 [+2] (an hour later)
If possible, I'd like to hear about zombie outbreak. It's a bit on fiction side but more tangible than an AI berserk or alien invasion .
u/davidmanheim [+6] (2 hours later)
You're in Luck!
https://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse/
u/Amonwilde [+1] (a day later)
If you enjoy this kind of thinking, you might also enjoy the Zombie Survival Guide.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FBJAOG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (4 hours later)
The Nightmare Stacks by charles stross is how UK would deal with an ELF invasion.
He for once did a lot of reasearch and portrayed in what I believe a pretty realistic way (in universe, which features lovecraftian monsters).
Main point of that book is that military have contigency plans for EVERYTHING. alien invasion included.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (2 days later)
Look at global warming. What have governments been doing about it? Jack shit basically. :D