Vulnerabilities of Social Structures - The Black Vault

ecause they are a group of complex judgments about what are the crucial domainsof possible post-attack events with which planners must contend if they are to preservethe valued characteristics of American society.These essays outline withinthe limits of available knowledge avd informed speculation the critical classes,ranges, and limits of behavioral events governed by specific. social institutions.These critical classes, ranges, and limits are the criteria within which and againstwhich vulnerability and recovery of society must be described. Chapters II throughV in Part II deal with specific institutional domains and either possible or probablepatterns of post-attack behavior.Throughout these chapters, the reader will notemany specific conclusions and recommendations about policies and systems forgoverning specific categories of attack effects. Chapter VI in Part II is primarilymethodological in emphasis. It is a return to specific issues raised by the attemptin Chapter II to establish the general "social dimensions of nuclear attack". Whileof much interest for further studies of the problems in making inferences aboutpossible social effects of attack, it is not oriented toward providing officials withmany concrete policy and systems recommendations.Part III, the final section of the book, consists of one relatively shortchapter which applies the findings and tools of the book to some problems of civildefense and civil defense-related planning.After providing a general review ofbasic findings in propositional form, the author of Chapter VII traces how importantcategories of social determinants emerge and recede as determinants ifevents and problems after attack.These categories of determinants are the fourprincipal domains of behavioral ordering in society: the individual system, thesocial system, the ecological system, and the cultural system. These domainshave variable and differential salience as determinants of social effects and socialdecision points about countermeasure systems and policies, as time lengthens afterattack. To show these patterns of differences, two devices are employed.First,a metaphor to describe the sequential appearance and ordering of determinants isintroduced. This is the "metaphor of the stepped progression" Then, the analystconsiders the possible social effects and social constraints on events resulting fromthe principal civil defense system to date ---the shelter system.V