Scientific planning, and the layout of the national level reserve base of emergency materials, will help improve the effectiveness of a country’s overall emergency disaster reduction system. Based on the P-center location theory, this paper analyzes the factors affecting site selection at the national and state levels, determines the reasonable number of emergency material reserve bases at national and state levels, and then develops a national macro-level emergency supply reserve location planning model. In this study, the city of 28 states in a country were selected as alternative reserve cities and emergency demand city matrix, to conduct the research. The model is solved using a variable neighborhood search algorithm (VNS). The calculation results obtain the reasonable number of emergency material reserve bases set at the national level in this studied country, and the optimal solution of the base layout can be obtained if the number of emergency reserve bases set at the national level remains unchanged. The experimental results shows that the selected algorithm is reasonable.