Vital Systems Security

In our work on preparedness, systems vulnerability thinking, and critical infrastructure protection in the post-WWII US, we became convinced that a crucial moment in the evolution of vital systems security was the migration and redeployment of techniques developed in the contexts of strategic bombing and nuclear war to other kinds of emergencies. Our hypothesis in forming the project on the Office of Emergency Preparedness was that OEP was a critical point of passage in this development. OEP was an important site for the advance of computer modeling of system vulnerability and emergencies. Moreover, it was an important site for the application of existing techniques and styles of reasoning to new problems. Through it, we thought, the concept of vital systems became generalized, and opened up a number of genealogical threads that lead to contemporary sites of inquiry that we have been examining: catastrophe modeling, emergency preparedness, critical infrastructure protection, and others.

Collier and Lakoff initially speculated about the role of the OEP in “The Vulnerability of Vital Systems” (in Myrian Dunn, ed., The Changing Logic of Risk and Security, 2008). In summer 2007, first Lakoff, and then Ozgode and Lindseth, made research trips to the National Archives to look further into the history of OEP. Initial research reports have been written by Ozgode on “The Logistics of National Survival” and by Lindseth on “Energy and Emergency in the Office of Emergency Preparedness.”