Department of Homeland Security

The Day After[1] is a 1983 docudrama staring Jason Robards, Jobeth Williams, Steven Guttenberg, John Cullum, and John Lithgow.

It is the story of surviving a full-scale nuclear attack against the United States by the Soviet Union during the heightened Cold War hostility of the Reagan era. It takes you from the everyday life of a small university hospital in Lawrence, Kansas to the chaotic nightmare following World War III. The movie addresses all the basic topics of survival in a nuclear war:

·      Sanitation

·      Lighting

·      Heating

·      Medical response

·      The destruction of the social fabric.

This movie first aired on ABC’s Sunday Night Movie in 1983.[2] It was designed as a contemporary version of the 1959 book by Pat Franks, Alas Babylon.[3] It was specifically designed for its shock value to alert the people of the United States to the dangers of the arms race in what turned out to be the last days of the Cold War. When first aired, it was followed by a panel discussion by scientific experts which included the late Carl Sagan.[4] His analogy is that the world is like a room full of gasoline and one careless match could set it all off. The panel discussion is now part of history, existing only in ABC’s archives (if it exists at all), and the memory of those who saw it.

The movie has once again popped up on local supermarket shelves (it is interesting to note that the jacket on the current DVD release refers to the nuclear arms of the United States as “WMDs,” a term that, for the most part, did not exist in the common vocabulary in 1983.) This movie is just one of the few titles that address the threat of the last Cold War, and the cataclysmic clash that was barely averted, time and again, from 1945 to 1989.

While there are some technical flaws in The Day After (not the least of which is the sudden, miraculous appearance of live horses after survivors emerge from shelters), it still remains a chilling reminder of the total devastation which threatened the nation during the Cold War era.

What should never be forgotten is that the government of the United States, as far back as the Kennedy Administration, concluded that the people of the United States, you and I, were disposable should the Cold War turn hot. That is not a whole lot different from Rumsfeld’s proclamation that the citizens were more vulnerable than the military in the current “War on Terror.”

From the mid-1960s to the end of the Cold War and the eventual dismantling of SAC[5] (the Strategic Air Command), the United States government slowly but steadily dismantled the civilian population protection systems. First to go were the various stocked, public fallout shelters. This was followed some time later by the dismantling of the Nike Zeus, and Nike Ajax sites which protected most metropolitan areas around the nation (Nike Park in Chicago was once one such installation – and you thought it was named after the athletic shoe.) The final move was the dismantling of the old, regionally controlled, Civil Defense network and its replacement by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).[6]

With the creation of FEMA, the citizens of the United States were promised a swift and timely response should any region of the nation suffer a natural disaster or an attack against the U.S. Understand that FEMA’s original charter was to respond to an attack against the U.S., just as Homeland Security does now. Since FEMA did exist to respond to an attack against the United States, one has to wonder why DHS (Department of Homeland Security) was created in the first place.

FEMA, as it morphed into a peacetime disaster relief agency, has worked questionably in the best of times. Under the current administration, its record has been dismal. This past week (ending April 29, 2006)[7] there have been calls from Congress to dismantle FEMA. Rather than disband FEMA, I’d suggest that the whole DHS fiasco be scrapped. Rather than continuing to federalize the emergency response structure, the money would be better spent to train the local response teams.

Under the local plan, should a disaster strike, a political hack in Washington, D.C. would not have to be brought up to speed as to exactly what his responsibilities were. I always thought that the Conservatives were supporters of smaller government, not larger government agencies leading to an incompetent Police State. I guess that was true of the pre World War II conservatives; I’ve not seen it in the history of the nation since then.

The Day After is fiction, addressing the issue of a full scale war. The story was envisioned by Edward Hume and directed by Nicholas Meyer. What we have seen from FEMA, in the week after Katrina, was conceived by Brown and directed by Bush. Even though it was reality; it was more chilling than the fiction of The Day After. We are, in this era of more security, less secure and definitely on our own. I sure hope you can afford it. I can’t.

In the United States of America today, I can be on some watch list for just posting these questions.

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[1] Wikipedia: The Day After, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After

[2] Wikipedia: The Day After: Reaction, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Reaction

[3] Wikipedia: Alas, Babylon, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alas_Babylon

[4] Wikipedia: FEMA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEMA

[5] Wikipedia: Strategic Air Command, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command

[6] Wikipedia: United States Department of Homeland Security, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security

[7] Cox News Service, Friday, April 28, 2006, Julia Malone, Ken Herman, Senators want to shut down 'dysfunctional' FEMA; ABC News, Apr 27, 2006, Lara Jakes Jordan, Senate Panel

Says FEMA Is Beyond Repair; Los Angeles Times, Friday, Apr. 28, 2006, Johanna Neuman,

Congress, White House clash over FEMA's future