Shall We Wake the President?: How America Has Dealt with Disasters—The Good, the Bad, and Advice for the Future
Tevi Troy

Why has the most powerful nation in the world continuously failed to effectively deal with national catastrophes?
The last decade has brought numerous unpredictable crises to American life, including terror attacks, massive storms, and an economic collapse. It is not clear why these problems appear to be worse recently, but there are a number of possibilities at work. First, the world is more complex. We are more dependent on technologies for our daily living than ever before, and system failures would have disastrous consequences. Technology, for all of its benefits, also provides mankind with increasingly powerful ways to wreak destruction, including nuclear explosions, bioterrorism, and cyber warfare. In addition, instantaneous and constant communications technologies send us word of disasters taking place anywhere in the word far more rapidly, giving disasters an immediacy that some may have lacked in the past. Third, Americans are beset these days by a general pessimism, a feeling that America is on the downswing and is no longer capable of overcoming any obstacle as in the past.
Whatever the reason, the frequency of these incidents suggests that the only safe bet is that there are more crises to come. In Shall We Wake the President?, Troy, a former senior White House aide and deputy secretary of health in charge of disaster preparedness, outlines how smart policies can help us avoid the coming crises, and how you can prepare yourself and your family if disaster does strike. Shall We Wake the President? includes chapters on each possible disaster—health crises, food shortages, economic and political collapse, national bankruptcy, bioterrorism and cyber warfare, natural disasters, and civil breakdown—and provides strategies for how to deal with them—for both policy makers and individual citizens.