Worst Case Scenario

“The reverend watches Steve sprint through the door and across the parking lot to his truck. While everyone else cowered in the fear and confusion of the moment, Steve was already in action.”

In this scene, Steve is introduced for the first time through the silently sympathetic eyes of Reverend Michaels, who is aware of the depths of the man’s suppressed grief. In this moment, however, the reverend also notes Steve’s willingness to leap into action at the first sign of a crisis, and these initial details foreshadow the fact that Steve will eventually make the ultimate sacrifice for his son and his community.

“So when the unthinkable does occur, when something does go wrong, the fear returns, swift and unrelenting—as Joss assumed everyone inside the plant was just finding out. But her hand was steady, her heart rate low. Because Joss had always known a day like this was not a matter of if but when. […] For her, controlling the fear was easy. Because it never left. Joss was always scared.”

This characterization of Joss—that she is motivated by her ever-present fear—is another facet of the novel’s focus on Heroism and Leadership in Times of Crisis. Joss is fully immersed in her detailed understanding of the nuclear field, and, ironically, this very expertise is what fuels her constant fear. That fear stands as her central motivator, compelling her to take decisive action to prevent the crises that she is so adept at spotting.

“The ‘tests’ that the government had run in the wake of September 11 that allegedly proved that American nuclear reactors were impervious to attacks on nuclear-power-containment structures were at best incomplete and at worst suspect. […] The point of the tests wasn’t to learn the truth. It was to calm a worried public.”

Ethan’s immediate thoughts are that the plane crash is part of a terrorist attack. He knows what the majority of the public does not: that the government “allegedly proved” that such attacks could not happen, while, in reality, these tests were faulty and incomplete. This scene therefore reveals a deeper message of the novel as a whole: that the government is more focused on maintaining the appearance of safety than on taking actions to help small communities like Waketa when disaster strikes.