What’s the American Equivalent of the BBC Going off the Air?

The U.K. has a new prime minister, and The Atlantic ran a fun little piece on Friday about the fun little thing that prime minister first has to do:

Decide whether to unleash nuclear weapons on the perceived aggressor in the event of a nuclear attack.

Evidently, because London is so geographically susceptible to getting the piss bombed out of it, the British solution to the need for a Cold War-era nuclear deterrent was to put a lot of nukes onto four different submarines and send them out to sea. At all times, at least one of these submarines is far away from England, in an undisclosed and constantly changing location. If a nuclear weapon wipes out London, the submarine captain can fire the nukes. In effect? Just like the U.S., Russia, and Kanye West, the U.K. always has a gun pointed at the rest of the world. We live in an eternal Mexican standoff.

(We should say: It’s kind of a small gun. The British nuclear arsenal is only the fifth-largest in the world. If London gets nuked, the U.S. and Russia and China have in all likelihood already unleashed hell on earth on one another. If London gets nuked, what the British do is inconsequential to even their own future, not to mention the future of this planet.)

(But we don’t need to tell them that.)

How does the submarine captain decide to fire the nukes? They don’t, unless the prime minister has told them to. If the submarine captain deduces that London has been annihilated, he or she must unlock a safe on board the submarine. Inside that safe is another safe. Inside that safe is a handwritten note from the prime minister telling the captain what to do.

“The briefings with the prime minister are secret, but four main options are typically presented to the incoming leader: retaliate, don’t retaliate, put the submarine under the control of the United States Navy, or leave it to the commander of the submarine to decide.”

First of all, I like that the British decided a good option for their orphaned nuclear arsenal would be to go live with Uncle Sam. Very Jane Eyre of them.

Second, I like that it’s a handwritten note. And not only because if Stanley Kubrick knew about this, Dr. Strangelove would have featured a long scene in which Major T.J. Kong tries to decipher President Muffley’s handwriting.

Third, I like that the British are so matter-of-fact about their vulnerability. Imagine trying to convince Americans to confront our national mortality this directly. We can’t even confront our individual mortality. Our main presidential candidates are an average of 80 years old! We don’t accept that we’re going to die. The British? They take honor in it.

Four identical letters written by a new prime minister in an office full of dark wood and thick-covered books. The fate of the world’s fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in the balance. A theoretically monumental but practically inconsequential exercise carried out with the utmost seriousness. There’s even a guy who used to provide the paper and pen! His name is the Right Honourable Lord Butler of Brockwell! The whole thing is just so British of them. It’s like seeing a Mormon order decaf coffee. If I were to put the United Kingdom in a zoo, I would make sure the prime minister’s habitat included a nice oak desk where he could write notes to his submarine captains.

Anyway, a funny little thing about this practice is that the submarine captain has to figure out if London’s been destroyed from a distant, undisclosed location deep under the sea. How is the captain supposed to do this?

“One of the cues is said to be that the BBC has stopped broadcasting.”

Well, then. Clearly, we need to figure out the American equivalent to the BBC going off the air.

My first thought was Waffle House, because of the Waffle House Index. But you can’t really check how many Waffle Houses are open from the middle of the Indian Ocean.

My second thought was something media-centric. There really is no main street, though, for American media. CNN is mini golf. The Wall Street Journal’s only read by white people who take nice vacations. NPR is a goofy little art project. ESPN’s trying its best to stop circling the drain, and if Twitter or Facebook went offline, our collective health would improve so quickly we might actually survive the radiation! There is no American equivalent to the BBC. But there is an American equivalent to the BBC going off the air.

The answer is a combination of these two things. It has to be an informational signal submarines can access. And there is nothing more American than chain restaurants.

If an American submarine captain needed to find out if the United States had been destroyed by nuke, I would recommend he or she turn on the submarine’s satellite-connected wifi router. I would then tell them to take out their phone. From there, I would say to open the McDonald’s app and set the location to anywhere in the contiguous 48 U.S. states. Can they order? No? It’s over. Open up that safe.

Some might say that this reflects poorly on the United States. The BBC is so earnest, after all. But I don’t think we should have any shame. It didn’t take us a whole government to build our clearest signal of national survival. And when you really think about it, is British food anything but damp, pricey McDonald’s?