This essay describes the emergence and extension of "preparedness" as a form of rationality for approaching questions of domestic security in the United States. Preparedness provides security experts with a way of grasping uncertain future events and bringing them into a space of present intervention. An analysis of this form of rationality helps to address a puzzling aspect of statebased security practices in the contemporary United States: how a series of seemingly disparate types of events -ranging from terrorist attacks, to hurricanes and earthquakes, to epidemics -have been brought into the same framework of "security threats." More broadly, such an analysis allows us to address the question, what is the logic through which potential dangers to collective life are being taken up as political problems?In order to show what is distinctive about preparedness, this essay begins by comparing it to a different form of security rationality: insurance. Preparedness becomes an especially salient approach to perceived threats when they reach the limits of a rationality of insurance. These are threats that are not manageable through techniques of probabilistic calculation: preparedness typically approaches events whose probability is not calculable but whose consequences could be catastrophic. The essay then traces the history of preparedness as a rationality of domestic security, beginning in the early period of the Cold War and following it to its current articulation in the

This essay concerns the current intersection of national security and public health in the United States. It argues that over the course of the past three decades, a new way of thinking about and acting on the threat of infectious disease has coalesced: for public health and national security officials, the problem of infectious disease is no longer only one of prevention, but also—and perhaps even more—one of preparedness. The essay describes the process through which a norm of preparedness came to structure thought about threats to public health, and how a certain set of responses to these threats became possible. The story is a complex one, involving the migration of techniques initially developed in the military and civil defense to other areas of governmental intervention. The analysis is centered not on widespread public discussion of biological threats but, rather, on particular sites of expertise where a novel way of understanding and intervening in threats was developed and deployed. It focuses in particular on one technique, the scenario‐based exercise, arguing that this technique served two important functions: first, to generate an affect of urgency in the absence of the event itself; and second, to generate knowledge about vulnerabilities in response capability that could then guide intervention. More broadly, the scenario‐based exercise is exemplary of the rationality underlying the contemporary articulation of national security and public health.

This article describes the historical emergence of vital systems security, analyzing it as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. The story begins in the early 20th century, when planners and policy-makers recognized the increasing dependence of collective life on interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. Over the following decades, new security mechanisms were invented to mitigate the vulnerability of these vital systems. While these techniques were initially developed as part of Cold War preparedness for nuclear war, they eventually migrated to domains beyond national security to address a range of anticipated emergencies, such as large-scale natural disasters, pandemic disease outbreaks, and disruptions of critical infrastructure. In these various contexts, vital systems security operates as a form of reflexive biopolitics, managing risks that have arisen as the result of modernization processes. This analysis sheds new light on current discussions of the government of emergency and ‘states of exception’. Vital systems security does not require recourse to extraordinary executive powers. Rather, as an anticipatory technology for mitigating vulnerabilities and closing gaps in preparedness, it provides a ready-to-hand toolkit for administering emergencies as a normal part of constitutional government.

This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call ‘distributed preparedness’. Distributed preparedness was initially articulated in civil defense programs in the early stages of the Cold War, when US government planners began to conceptualize the nation as a possible target of nuclear attack. These planners assumed that the enemy would focus its attacks on urban and industrial centers that were essential to US war-fighting capability. Distributed preparedness provided techniques for mapping national space as a field of potential targets, and grafted this map of vulnerabilities onto the structure of territorial administration in the United States. It presented a new model of coordinated planning for catastrophic threats, one that sought to limit federal intervention in local life and to preserve the characteristic features of American federalism. Over the course of the Cold War, distributed preparedness extended to new domains, and following 9/11 it has moved to the center of security discussions in the US.