WASHINGTON – A plan detailing the U.S. military’s reaction in the event of a zombie apocalypse has come under fire for being racist. The recently unclassified Defense Department document, titled “CONOP 8888,” was created by the Pentagon as a training exercise for dealing with unknown, planet-wide disasters and emergencies. However, a number of critics, including the ACLU and the NAACP, claim the response plan values the lives of Caucasians over minorities.
“The Pentagon’s zombie survival plan calls for abandoning our country’s urban centers to the hoards of the walking dead and concentrating on fortifying the suburbs,” explained NAACP Vice Chairman Leon Russell. “That sounds an awful lot like genocide of the African-American to me.”
The Pentagon dismissed the accusations. “The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario,” said Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command. “The dense concentration of human population within urban centers poses a direct threat to containment efforts. If folks have a problem with that, they should talk to the zombies.”
The document includes strategies for dealing with a variety of zombies, from ones “created via some form of occult experimentation in what might otherwise be referred to as ‘evil magic,’ to vegetarian zombies that pose no threat to humans due to their exclusive consumption of vegetation, to zombie life forms created after an organism is infected with a high dose of radiation.”
The method for dealing with the zombies has also raised some red flags for critics. “The only assumed way to effectively cause casualties to the zombie ranks by tactical force is the concentration of all firepower to the head, specifically the brain,” the plan reads. “The only way to ensure a zombie is ‘dead’ is to burn the zombie corpse.”
“Seriously? Burn their corpse?” responded Russell. “I get shooting them in the head but setting fire to them? All it’s missing is the phrase ‘while they hang from a tree limb in front of a burning cross’ and this could have been ripped out of the KKK playbook.”
The Pentagon maintains, however, that any similarities between the U.S. Strategic Command’s template for handling a zombie uprising and the methods historically employed by white supremacists against the African-American population are merely coincidence. “The plan is anti-city, not anti-black,” explained Kunze. “Trust me, plenty of white folk are gonna get eaten if this thing goes down.”
