News Clip – Trump: We’re having to fix a problem that four weeks ago, nobody ever thought would be a problem. Something that nobody expected. This came out of nowhere.
Jordan: You may not, in fact, be shocked when I tell you that lots of people predicted this. From scientists to doctors to past presidents who even prepared for it, to billionaire philanthropists who gave Ted talks and science fiction writers who wrote books.
A lot of people predicted a pandemic. But the United States, and if we’re being fair about it, a lot of countries, including us, still weren’t ready. The pandemic we’re living through right now is one of a number of scenarios that worry analysts and scientists. It’s a low probability, high consequence event.
That means it probably won’t happen in any given year, but over years and decades, it gets far more likely. And if we’re not ready, just like we weren’t ready for this one, it can be devastating. So what exactly are the threats that we should be preparing for now as we deal with the pandemic? What worries the giant intelligence apparatus to the south of us and other intelligence agencies around the world?
I mean, look, it’s been a few months of nonstop virus anxiety, so we figured we should maybe find you something new to worry about. You’re welcome.
I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings, and this is the big story. Garrett Graff is a writer with Politico who put together a very interesting list. Hi, Garrett.
Garrett: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Jordan: No problem. We realized it had been a while since we checked in with our neighbours to the south. And as soon as we did, we saw you guys are fretting about a lot of things.
But just first of all. I mean, how are you guys doing these days?
Garrett: I think the mood in the nation is darkening. I think that there is both a sense that this is not going to be a short crisis, either in terms of the public health aspect or the economic aspect and that the government is not rising to the occasion in the way that we are used to as Americans seeing our government rise to the occasion. That such as we have found bright lights and hope in leadership here, it has been largely at the local level and at the state level. And that the federal government still seems dramatically outclassed by the scale of the scandal that’s unfolding right now.
Jordan: I mean, I will tell you there is a ton of discussion amongst our political leaders up here to simply ask the federal government to please keep the border closed because I think that the general populace is frankly worried about you folks.
Garrett: Yeah. Vermont where I live is actually in very good shape, in that we are one of just three States right now that is actually has cases moving in the right direction. And we are beginning to reopen. But when you look at all of the States surrounding us, they are still in the midst of really terrifying outbreaks.
Jordan: And the reason we’re calling you today is because we wanted to kind of get a sense of what’s going on in the States and what you guys are thinking about and what comes next.
And you put together a very interesting and somewhat depressing piece for Politico about something called the domestic threat assessment. So why don’t you tell me first, what is it and how did you make it?
Garrett: Sure. So an annual tradition in the United States for the last dozen or so years, is that each winter, the director of national intelligence here, the person who oversees the 17 different intelligence agencies that make up the us intelligence community, issues what they call basically a collective worldwide threat assessment. It’s a 20 or 30 page document that outlines what they see as the forthcoming risks. Geopolitical, military, strategic, technological, and other. The pandemic risk has been a regular part of that document for many years now.
This winter for reasons that appear having to do with the intelligence community’s fear of provoking president Trump, and angering him, the public release of that document and the congressional hearing that normally accompanies it, has been postponed, or perhaps even canceled entirely. It’s too early to know. And so what we set out to do with this article was put together something that could substitute for it, not look at every possible event that could unfold at the geopolitical level, but to look at the other challenges that the U.S. really faces that fall into the category of a pandemic. That is, low probability, high consequence events.
Because I think one of the challenges that we have seen with the public response to the pandemic is the extent to which humans misunderstand low probability, high consequence events. Which is that they are not, no probability events. What they are, are events that at any given moment are unlikely. But if you begin to measure on a scale of decades or even a half century, they are much more likely to occur.
Yes, a pandemic in any single month is an unlikely occurrence. But they are something that unfold pretty regularly, three to four times a century. And that one of the things that’s really stunning when you begin to look at the situation we find ourselves in right now with the novel coronavirus and COVID 19, is that this exact situation was fortold in official reports and government reports at a high degree of specificity. The U S government was putting out social distancing guidelines in 2012. The need for more hospital ventilators has been an identified problem for more than a decade, that if and when a pandemic occurred, we were not going to have enough ventilators. And that’s been something that people have known, and that the warnings have been out there. So our goal with this piece was effectively to ask the question, what else are experts worried about right now? What else are they worrying about that would still come as a surprise to us if it unfolded tomorrow?
So on that note, let’s start going through the list because I think that I learned a lot from this piece, not necessarily about what’s on it, but about how the experts are thinking about what’s on it. So, for instance, the first one, which is globalization of white supremacy, something I think everybody understands is going on and is a problem.
But tell me a little bit about what the experts said about it and about how close we are to something really disturbing.
Yeah. What my role is, is I cover national security and I’m not a health reporter. I’m a national security journalist. And the thing that is most interesting to me right now when you look at the landscape of terrorist threats, is the thing that most sounds like the warnings that U.S. and Western officials were giving in 2000 about Al Qaeda, is when they talk about the rise of the globalization of white supremacy, which is a threat that has been around literally for centuries. But what is new within the last couple of years that they are warning about, is the way that they are seeing white nationalists and white supremacists begin to unite in a shared global agenda and ideology, that sounds a lot like the way that ISIS was able to inspire adherence in 2014 and 2015 to carry out attacks from afar. What was really terrifying for the West and the U.S. and Canada was the way that ISIS in 2015 was able to encourage people through social media, radicalize people through online recruitment efforts, and let them loose to attack people at home. That you didn’t have them having to travel anymore overseas, like Al Qaeda did, to get that type of terror training. And that is very much what we’re beginning to see now, that the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand, referenced the attacks that took place in Charleston, South Carolina, or on a Norwegian summer camp, over recent years.
And that these types of attacks sort of increasingly look the same and sound the same. And for many Western law enforcement and national security officials, I think that day to day that’s the thing that they are most worried about now, as opposed to the fears of, say, Islamic terrorism five years ago.
Jordan: And that kind of brings us to number two. Maybe it’s not intrinsically tied together, but I feel like it’s related and that is a tax on trust and truth. And as somebody who works in the media, I also don’t like that, but can you explain to me how that’s a disaster threat on par with some of the other stuff that we see on this list?
Garrett: Yeah. And this is what I think many experts say is the almost inevitable next turn of the screw of cyber attacks and disinformation. When you look at the way that, for instance, data breaches have unfolded over the last decade, most of them have focused on theft, getting into a company’s records and then stealing the records.
But what experts are warning about now, both in technology companies and national security and law enforcement is data manipulation. And that could come in two different ways. One, you could see actual records being manipulated. Someone getting into a stock exchange or a financial institution and changing the records so that people could no longer trust that the money that was in their account was the money that was supposed to be in their account, or that they couldn’t trust that the stocks that they thought that they bought, they actually bought. And you can imagine the chaos that could unfold from something like that. Then the second category of this is effectively what people refer to as deep fakes, which is AI powered, manipulated data or audio that could make a business leader sound like he or she was saying something that they had never said or make a political leader sound or look like he or she was saying something that they had never said. And you can imagine the scandals that could unfold on one end of this. And you could imagine geopolitical instability that could unfold from this as well. If there was a leaked video or audio that purported to be, for instance, president Trump announcing that he was going to nuke North Korea in 60 minutes, or launch nuclear weapons at Iran, on Tuesday. You could imagine the instability or countermeasures that could unfold from that, that could be truly catastrophic.
Jordan: And now numbers three and four which go together in my mind because they’re just both horrifying, which are biosecurity and massive tech disruption. Tell me what those worst case scenarios look like.
Garrett: Yeah, so on the biosecurity side, there are all manner of warnings of which pandemics are just one of them.
On the one hand there is actually a much longer and richer and deadlier line of lab accidents than we would like to imagine, from labs that work on the biosecurity and with highly contagious, highly lethal, pathogens. You could also imagine, bio weapons, from a nation state or a terror group.
And again, this is actually an area where there is a longer history of these incidents than many of us remember. In the United States, we suffered, a round of anthrax attacks in 2001 that were sent through the US mail. In the 1990s a doomsday cult in Japan actually created Sarin gas and unleashed it on the Tokyo subway and narrowly averted killing thousands of people.
Then on the tech disruption side you hear a lot of conversation about cybersecurity risks and the dangers to the power grid or utility infrastructure. But cyber isn’t the only thing that could drive a fear of a large scale tech disruption. Actually space weather, solar flares, are a very real threat and one that we are really only beginning to wrestle with.
There is a high probability we will actually face a solar flare event at some point in the next decade or two. And the problem for something like that is that it has the potential to knock out over a very wide scale, electronics and particularly power infrastructure. Power generators.
They have sort of some of the same problems that ventilators have in the current pandemic problem. Which is, they are large and expensive and there aren’t a lot of them. There aren’t a lot of extra power generators lying around. If you were looking at a scenario where you have lost dozens or hundreds of them, you’re talking about a scenario where that power is not coming back in some parts of the effected region for months, or maybe even a year or year and a half.
Jordan: The next one on this list is just simply nukes and I feel like I know that one. Is this just a mainstay on this list every single year when the DNI does it?
Garrett: Effectively yes, with the following twist. For most of the first decade after 9/11, what Western officials worried about was the idea of loose nukes. A terror group possessing a dirty bomb or an improvised nuclear device or a stolen, or purchased on the black market nuclear device. And actually Western governments have done a very good job of lowering the supply of those types of devices and lowering the demand. Crushing groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS that would have once possessed those ambitions. So in some ways, what is terrifyingly new in this threat is that the fear is once again on highly controlled nuclear weapons, that is nation states and their nuclear weapons. The president of the United States is not necessarily the most emotionally stable individual. He possesses sole unchallenged nuclear launch authority at any time for any reason. And there are very plausible scenarios that you could play out between North Korea and the United States, Iran and the United States. Even Russia or China and the United States, where an escalation situation gets out of control and leads to an exchange of nuclear weapons.
Jordan: Great. I’m glad that we got to that part of this list. Next up is climate change and I’m going to let you explain why it’s on this list, but can we not go into too much detail? Because I feel like now it’s just,’ it’s bad, it’s awful, there’s no way to stop it’, et cetera.
Garrett: Yes, and I think that that is the fundamental challenge of this, is that climate change is basically a backdrop for everything else. It is making storms worse. It is going to begin affecting sea levels and where humans can live and where humans can eat.
And all of those changes introduce huge geopolitical instability. There are 600 million people in the world who live at sea level. If you have sea levels rise over the coming decades by 10 or 12 feet, that’s a lot of people you’re putting into motion. And remember that the European migrant crisis that has grown out of the Syrian civil war is really only quote unquote, ‘only a couple million people’.
The US border crisis on our US Mexican border, that has led to all of Donald Trump’s talk about the wall. That’s a crisis really only involving a few hundred thousand people. You can sort of imagine the impact that you could begin to see with climate refugees climbing into the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions over the decades ahead.
Jordan: The next one on the list is really fascinating because it’s the next level impact of COVID 19, and how did that end up on the list and what are kind of the ripple effects of this pandemic and the problems that the US and other places have had with it?
Garrett: Yeah, and this was not one that was on my horizon at the start of reporting out this article.
Because I had very intentionally wanted to leave aside the question of the human and economic toll of the pandemic in which we are currently living. Because we just have no idea what it is going to be like over the next few months, the next year or the next 18 months. But in talking to the experts, the scientists, the national security officials, the intelligence officials that I interviewed for this. They said, the real challenge of the pandemic isn’t going to be the next year or two. It’s what happens because of the pandemic over the next five to 10 years. And that, for instance, the United States might just not meet the moment. It might just not successfully manage this crisis, and leaving aside again the human and economic tool of that, there are enormous security benefits that accrue to the United States, and I would say Canada, because the United States is the most powerful nation in the world. And this is where people want to come and innovate. This is where people want to come and learn. And there are incredible implications for the United States and North America more broadly, if the U S actually does manage to beat this virus in two years, and then wakes up and realizes that the world has just moved on. That there are all of these geopolitical events, the rising China, the retrenchment of Europe, the sort of slide from a united democratic front across Europe, that this pandemic is really only going to accelerate.
And the instability in Europe because of Brexit is going to be affected by all of this. And so for the United States, there is a real challenge, and for the West more broadly, of what happens if we just don’t manage this crisis successfully, and give rise either to more authoritarian tendencies around the world in general, or give an opening to China that it wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Jordan: You ended this list with unknown unknowns. And I want to quote you, you said it is, “all manner of unimaginable things that could pose an existential threat to modern society”, which is just very broad and kind of apocalyptically thoughtful of you, I think. Can you explain it?
Garrett: Yeah. One of the challenges that mother nature and science constantly remind us of, is how little we actually understand about the world around us. So what else is out there that we don’t really understand? And I do want to give a little bit of hope here, which is there are some threats that you hear people worry about that you don’t really need to worry that much about in the near term.
Super volcanoes, these massive globe altering explosions, one of which is underneath, as it turns out, Yellowstone national park. They are real, they are a newly discovered catastrophic threat, another thing that we didn’t understand existed not that long ago. But they happen on a scale of hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of years.
And so it would be enormously bad luck for us to face one of those any time soon. And similarly, an extinction level asteroids will hit the United States at some point, but you should probably still save for a happy and healthy retirement, and not count on a comet wiping those out anytime soon.
Although that again falls into the category of things that we don’t necessarily have a great understanding of. Last year we were actually all surprised, astronomers were surprised, by a city-killing sized asteroid, that passed just a fifth of the way between the earth and the moon, without us even noticing it, without us having any awareness that it was coming. So there are things out there that we are not thinking about, that we probably should be worried about. But those are very hard to plan for.
Jordan: Yeah. And I know I’ve had kind of a fatalistic tone in this discussion because it’s kind of a time like that right now. But if anything else, this list should drive home the point that being asked to stay in your house and watch Netflix and endure this, is not the worst thing we could be dealing with right now.
Garrett: Absolutely. And it is an important moment to really think hard, society-wise, about these things, as I said, that are low probability, high consequence events, and how can you be better systemically prepared for them when they happen?
Because the truth of the matter is they will happen again. And we should not be as caught by surprise as we always tend to be.
Jordan: Indeed, and I hope everybody listening, kind of takes that to heart. Thank you so much, Garrett. I appreciate you taking the time.
Garrett: A wonderful conversation. Thank you.
Jordan: Garrett Graff of Politico. That was The Big Story. If you would like more, including plenty more on various disasters, including this one, you can find them at thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can find us on Twitter @thebigstoryfpn. You can get mad at us by email by sending one to thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com and you can get mad at us if you must, by finding us on your favourite podcast app and telling us what you think. We’d much prefer if you gave us a good review, but we take them all, as long as they’re honest. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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