Glenn Harlan Reynolds

I've just finished reading Bill Quick's new disaster novel, Lightning Fall, and it's got me thinking about national disasters, and what to do about them.

In Quick's novel, the United States is targeted by three nuclear devices, from an unknown enemy. The West Coast gets hit by a high-altitude nuclear blast whose electromagnetic pulse (EMP) wipes out electronics and electrical power, causing millions to die from a lack of food, as transport breaks down, and a lack of water, as the pumps shut down. A nuclear weapon smuggled into the Port Of New Orleans closes down shipping along the Mississippi, causing still more human and economic devastation. And a bomb targeted at Washington, D.C., causes the greatest harm of all, by — well, we'll get to that in a minute.

People are becoming more aware of the risks posed by EMP attacks — and by the similar but stronger natural phenomenon of a Carrington Event, a solar storm that might affect most of the planet. Similar threats to the grid on a smaller scale — a recent attack on power substations has people worried about terrorists' ability to bring down the grid with a handful of rifles, even — have also gotten attention, and utilities are working, if too slowly, to add resilience.

The risk of a smuggled nuclear weapon has been known for a long time, and the obvious way to take out a major American city is to smuggle one in on a freighter. The federal government is supposed to monitor ports with gadgets that look for radiation, but such efforts are sure to be less than 100% effective.

But the telling part of Quick's book is that the most destructive weapon of all is the one that doesn't go off — the bomb targeted at Washington, D.C. While the novel follows people all over the country (the gay survivalist couple in San Francisco is my favorite), most of them are trying to make the best of things in the face of extreme hardship, often choosing to join together with their neighbors for mutual aid.

Not so in Washington, where even as tens of millions of Americans die, most of the action is about political positioning, and most of the government's foreign affairs behavior is astonishingly naive. Both, alas, seem all too believable today.

In Lightning Fall, American diplomats (in a thinly disguised Hillary Clinton administration) seem unable to grasp that other nations might be happy to see the United States destroyed or drastically weakened. Though the book was written months ago, their shocked and ineffectual response seems entirely credible in light of the similarly shocked and ineffectual response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's incursions in Ukraine. The world is not much like the Model U.N., and our adversaries are, in fact, on the other side. Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans: All would have more freedom of action if the U.S. were weak, and they know it. That our leaders have trouble understanding this as a goal is, alas, not fiction.

Neither, I'm sorry to say, is the politicization of the disaster relief efforts in Quick's book. While Quick, a San Francisco tech guy, doesn't always quite capture the idiom of official Washington, he's got a good sense for its actions, as opposed to its words. "Never let a crisis go to waste" is the motto of our ruling class, and Quick's illustrations of how politicians of both parties respond are, unfortunately, all too plausible in general.

And even without such overt disasters, Washington continues to run up debts future generations won't be able to pay, to pass bills that no one has read, and to engage in policy experimentation whose consequences will be borne not by the experimenters, but by the experimented-upon. The results are likely to be poor.

Which raises a question for voters now: We have so far avoided the kind of terrorist-inspired disasters that Quick has striking the West Coast and New Orleans. But what do we do about the slow-motion disaster that's ongoing in Washington, D.C., today?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author ofThe New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

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