“Red teaming,” in the context of counterterrorism, is the art of thinking up an attack from the perspective of the terrorist operative. It is used extensively in planning and exercising counterterror responses. There are, however, scenarios where the post-incident consequences of a truly devilish terrorist plot are going to present a mission beyond our current imagination.

When I ask government agencies, academics or military planners what they consider the “worst-case scenario,” they generally say a nuclear bomb attack. They admit, though, that they prepare only for scenarios that involve mass effect/mass casualty attacks using conventional and unconventional weapons—one or two suicide car bombs combined with a small chemical or biological attack. It’s no surprise that Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the National Guard and fire and emergency management teams rarely perform poorly in these exercises because none of the attendant social, economic or mental stresses are present. Many exercises devolve into a “procedures check” to see if the desks are in the right place and if the telephones will operate.

In fact, the worst-case terror management scenarios cannot be realistically tested. Imagine the social effects of the terrifying but critical “Dark Winter” smallpox exercise, run in 2001 by Johns Hopkins University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It ended with a projection of 1 million dead and 2 million infected originating from just three infected terrorists. This report generated a groundswell of concern that led to dramatic changes in the national system of identifying and isolating the disease in the event of a terrorist attack. But what happens to the rest of us while 1 million people are dying? How do we plan for martial law, the collapse of the US hospital system and the burial of a million dead while a disease rages through the population? While it’s true that worst-case scenarios cannot be tested, they certainly can be anticipated.

Truth in fiction

Fiction writers and TV shows have been hailed for their efforts to assist in providing government agencies with “way out of the box” conceptualizations of potential terrorist operations. While few resemble reality, one recently canceled TV show in particular stood out from the rest for its terrifying portrayal of the aftermath of a major terrorist event.

“Jericho” was the story of a hypothetical town in central Kansas that struggled to survive the devastation of a terrorist plot that detonated 23 tactical atomic bombs stolen from a government demilitarization program. The attacks were carried out by domestic terrorists and effectively decapitated the government to create a “new America” west of the Mississippi—at the cost of 15 million American lives.

Conspiracy theories aside, the most riveting aspects of the series were the emergency management decisions that the town had to face as it tried to cope with a seemingly endless series of catastrophic events. The actions, decisions and dilemmas presented were frighteningly realistic.

Watching Jericho’s first two episodes should have been enough to make any homeland security professional cringe. What does one do when the police force is decimated by road bandits? How would your community manage dramatically decreasing hospital supplies, drug stockpiles, a loss of electrical power, mass looting of food stores, rampant home invasion and a starving, frightened populace? Now, imagine no relief coming for weeks or months. The worst-case scenario officials must ask us to plan for shouldn’t be a few hundred dead and wounded from a car bomb. We should be planning for a scenario in which large sections of America are shoved forcefully back into the 19th century.

Being prepared

Worse than the direct effects of any actual attack, would be the fact that the nation’s fabric could be stretched to its limits. A nuclear attack of this nature might kill millions, but the follow-on famine, the crash of thousands of airliners, fire storms that consume suburbs, disruption or loss of the national electric grid, not to mention suicide and despair, may kill hundreds of thousands more. This horribly bleak scenario is entirely possible.

Nuclear terror scenarios have been discussed extensively by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (www.nti.org), a bipartisan think-tank that has recognized the devastation that even one small nuclear attack could bring to America. All homeland security practitioners should subscribe to the NTI’s Global Security Newswire.

On a positive note, America’s law enforcement, fire and emergency management agencies are ready to manage the post-incident effects of small-scale attacks, such as suicide bombings and chemical attacks. But our civil defense structure now resides in the Smithsonian. Short of reviving it, there may be no national system capable of bringing disparate surviving emergency response components together.

If “Jericho” revealed anything, it is that we must project, accept and plan for some horrible post-incident dynamics in the aftermath of a massive attack. Otherwise, we may not be able to save the fabric of our nation. That is a serious scenario. HST

Malcolm Nance is author of several books, including The Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner’s Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Attacks, Second Edition (2008, CRC Press) and The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency (2007, BookSurge Publishing). He presently acts as the executive director of the newly forming International Anti-Terrorism Center for Excellence in Hudson, New York.