U.S. National Security Council

The U.S. National Security Council is the federal crisis forum through which the President and senior officials confront the widening oceanic emergency. Its meetings bring together reports of city-level biological threats and failing military technology with a scientific explanation that could involve continental-slope collapse and catastrophic methane release. The council’s significance lies in that collision: it must consider an unfamiliar danger with incomplete evidence, while its responses increasingly invoke emergency powers, secrecy, and force.

Composition and Emergency Deliberations

After arriving at Offutt Air Force Base, the President convenes a National Security Council meeting over a secure video link connecting Washington, Offutt, and Chateau Whistler. The Vice-President joins from the White House Situation Room alongside the defense secretary and deputy, the secretary of state, the President’s national security adviser, the head of the FBI, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Officials from the Central Intelligence Agency also appear on the conference, while General Judith Li and Jack Vanderbilt take part from Chateau Whistler’s makeshift war room, watching the other participants on monitors.

The meeting reflects both the Council’s reach and the dispersal of government during the crisis. The President has left Washington for Offutt, but insists on chairing plenary meetings himself rather than handing control to an emergency cabinet. His anger and determination to retain the reins shape the gathering’s tone. Li, whose military position ranks below the chairman and deputy of the Joint Chiefs, recognizes that the President values her advice. Her attention to the crisis coexists with ambitions for higher military and political office, making access to the President a source of personal as well as institutional leverage.

Secrecy and the Management of Public Risk

The Council’s deliberations take place within a broader policy of withholding information. At Chateau Whistler, Li explains that the crisis centre is kept away from the media and that officials have publicly described its work as an exercise. She argues that disclosing everything could provoke mass panic, frames the emergency as a war, and requires committee members to sign declarations of silence covering even conversations with friends and family. This is the Allied Emergency Committee’s policy environment rather than a formal rule shown as adopted by the National Security Council, but it informs the Council’s response: public calm and freedom of action are treated as linked priorities.

Li’s account of the domestic emergency turns that approach into immediate measures. She reports that New York has been isolated, that surveillance drones have confirmed crabs near Washington, and that the capital will also need to be quarantined. She says troops with flamethrowers have been ordered around key coastal cities, the White House staff should leave town, and an antitoxin is being developed. In New York, Salomon Peak reaches Li through a secure satellite link from the provisional command centre at Bellevue Hospital Center to demand an antitoxin. The connection shows how the crisis response links a besieged urban command post to the remote conference site, even as bodies, missing-person reports, and blocked roads crowd the hospital’s surroundings.

Scientific Uncertainty and Strategic Choices

The Council’s military posture is sharpened by a practical loss of control over the sea. Li tells officials that remotely operated vehicles are being lowered into the water and recovered as frayed cables: the vehicles detect a blue glow before their connections are cut. The fate of autonomous vehicles is uncertain, and four Russian scientists in MIR submersibles have been rammed and sunk at depth. With deep-sea observation and intervention compromised, Li reports efforts to sweep for worms with dragnets and deploy nets in coastal areas. She also proposes using SURTASS LFA to deafen whales, arguing that if someone controls the animals, the United States should answer in kind. The proposal makes the gap between uncertainty and action stark: the source of the attacks remains unidentified, yet the contemplated response is already coercive.

The scientific warnings presented around the Council offer a different scale of danger. Gerhard Bohrmann cautions that methane fields can disappear and hydrates can dissociate within a year, potentially releasing large quantities of methane over Norway, but says there is not enough evidence to claim a repeat of the event fifty-five million years ago. Elsewhere, Yvonne Mirbach explains that the initial simulations relied on largely linear assumptions, whereas interacting processes could become chaotic or exponential: ice breakup could release gas, further destabilize hydrates, and contribute to seabed collapse. She gives a possible crisis horizon ranging from weeks to days, while emphasizing that the unusual scenario cannot yet be proved.

When the President asks whether the proposed explanation is possible, the defense secretary declines to substitute personal belief for the scientists’ judgment and says their assessment must be taken seriously. Jack Vanderbilt reacts with disbelief at the possibility of intelligent beings beneath the sea. Sigur Johanson counters with a far more consequential warning: methane release could generate tsunamis, warm the Earth, and threaten human survival, while the ongoing attacks on animals, ships, and underwater equipment may have distracted governments from the deeper hazard. The discussion brings competing forms of risk into the same room—an immediate crisis of attacks and infrastructure failure, and a possible planetary catastrophe whose timing and mechanism remain uncertain.

Institutional Significance

The Council’s role is not presented as a simple progression from evidence to settled policy. Its secure conference assembles military, intelligence, and political leaders, but the information available to them is partial: crucial machines disappear or fail, the biological attacks have no confirmed cause, and the scientific models describe a chain reaction that experts cannot yet prove. Li turns uncertainty into a case for quarantine and military measures; the scientists insist on the limits of what can be established; and the President’s questions keep the possibility of an intelligent oceanic opponent within the strategic debate.

That tension defines the National Security Council’s place in the crisis. It can coordinate officials across displaced command centres and consider national responses, but it cannot make the ocean legible simply by declaring an emergency. The Council’s deliberations expose how quickly an ecological threat becomes a question of security, secrecy, and force—and how the drive to regain control risks obscuring the less visible danger the scientists are trying to explain.