North Korea’s missile tests are just the latest threat of nuclear strike on this country. But it’s a worst-case scenario like others the U.S. government has been studying and planning for since the 1950s. Every administration from Eisenhower’s to Trump’s has put some kind of disaster plan in place. Computer scientists at Virginia Tech, however, have a new take on the old disaster plans.
The updated version of the Cold War-era movie Fail Safe, about a nuclear strike avoidance plan gone awry, features Richard Dreyfuss as president. The original had Henry Fonda in office.
It’s not only the movie getting a makeover. Back then, the safety message in the unlikely event of nuclear strike was to ‘duck and cover.’ After 9/11, it was updated a bit, to ‘shelter in place.'
“The problem is, the idea of sheltering in place and awaiting recovery depends on the idea that you can get someone in there quickly. This is going to take a while,” says Chris Barrett, executive director of the Biocomplexity Institute at Virginia Tech. The U.S. Department of Defense commissioned his team to come up with a new disaster response plan that reflects how people actually behave in crises when information is sketchy.
“First of all, you don’t know if it’s a nuclear detonation for some period of time, you don’t know where the fall out fields are, that evolves over time," Barrett says. "It depends on prevailing winds and many other things. You can’t see at night. All of this makes it hard to bring help in.”
The good news is, a device most people now have with them, pretty much all the time, could be a lifesaver.
“We understand, for example, that they have a cell phone that works," says Barrett, but “the cell phone itself is only part of the system, as we all know. There are things known as base stations and those are going to be damaged, so you probably can’t use them immediately; but your cell phone, itself, will be functional, which is important news because it turns out to not be obvious that that would be true.”
The Biocomplexity team crunched real world data, freely available from social media and other open sources, to track closely, very closely, how individual people behave during crises. But that doesn’t mean ‘big brother is watching you, personally,' in this case anyway.
“Information protection and privacy is a super important the part of this technology."
The researchers worked off of an imaginary scenario of a nuclear attack on downtown Washington D.C. One of the things they discovered after analyzing some 200 terabytes data in countless different scenarios, is that the old survival strategies won’t work well.
Barrett says, “There’s kind of a common sense observation here: You could, with balloons or mobile based stations, reestablish some level of communication. Something like this could be used to push information to people. It could also be used to recover information from people as to their location, condition, to tell them which direction to go or not go.”
So the new thinking is that it’s no longer infrastructure like roads and bridges that disaster plans should focus on.
Instead Barrett suggests, the first response should be ICT: information communication technology. He says that approach could change those affected by a nuclear or other disaster from passive victims waiting for help, into active participants in their own survival, if the unthinkable, were ever to happen here.
