Last week I read the scariest book I’ve ever read. It was a novel by William R. Forstchen, called One Second After. The title refers to the event that kicks off the story; an EMP, electro-magnetic pulse, caused by a nuclear detonation in space above the continental US, which fries all our electronics from coast to coast.
One second we’re twenty first century America and the next we have nothing that is dependent on electronics.
We’re not talking a blackout here; the power grid is only a small component of our electrical dependency. An EMP would fry the electronic components of everything, including backup generators. Cars would die, planes and helicopters would fall out of the sky, no more cell phones, land lines, computers, nothing.
The story is set in a small mountain town in the Carolinas.
The novel explores every aspect of life that would be effected by the sudden loss of power. At first, it seems that it’s just no lights, no cars, no phones etc. Very soon, the ramifications of the lifestyle that has been lost begin to set in.
What makes the story so frightening is that none of it is farfetched.
The absolute loss of power would be so devastating that its hard to imagine surviving it.
With no communications, no refrigeration and no timely delivery of drugs, the sick and infirm would begin dying off very quickly. With no transportation, disposing of the dead would be difficult.
With no running water, sanitation would become a problem within days and disease would run wild.
And all that would begin before the food starts to run out.
People who could, would flee the cities, looking for food. Hundreds of thousands of refugees would flood the country side, looting agricultural areas as thoroughly as they’d looted the grocery stores. The food in the farmland would rot long before those starving in the urban areas could get to it.
Every American dependent on Prozac, Zoloft or any other mood altering drug would run out within months. There would be an epidemic of crazy the likes of which the world has never seen.
Societal breakdown would result in chaos, violence and desperation, all to no avail; 80% of the population of the US would die within the first year of such an event, most from starvation.
It’s a horrific tale, very well told and none of it stretches the imagination.
Every awful thing that happens in the story, you read it and think “Oh, of course. The diabetics would all be dead in six months: no more insulin and diet has been reduced to whatever you can find.”
The author doesn’t pull any punches, either. Faced with desperate choices, most of us would resort to actions we’d find unthinkable in the comfort of our warm, well lit houses.
In the book, no one in Florida survives; too many old folks and not enough land for agriculture.
As I read it, I couldn’t help but wonder how many could survive a Minnesota winter with no power.
One character says the event threw the country back 150 years. Another corrects him, saying it was worse because 150 years ago, people knew how to live under those conditions. The vast majority of those alive when the event occurred had no idea how to live without power. Even those who knew how, either couldn’t get to the resources they needed, or had to share with too many others.
That book gave me nightmares.
Then, two days after I finished reading it, the Wall Street Journal runs an article on how the US military is moving back into Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado because NORAD needs to be in a location that is secure from the threat of EMP.
You think North Korea, Russia or Iran need a lot of nukes to take out the US? Just one or two, detonated in space above us would create the EMP that would knock out our entire grid and fry the electronics in everything we have.
Plenty of people in the military and intelligence communities have known for decades how vulnerable we are to this threat and our government, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, has done nothing, absolutely nothing to protect the people, or even warn us so we could protect ourselves.
I grew up during the Cold War. I knew what it was like to live with the fear of a nuclear holocaust. I wasn’t terribly worried about it because the Soviets may have been an evil empire but we had no reason to believe they were crazy or suicidal.
Our current enemies are both.
And now we’re making it easy for IRAN to get this technology.
Perhaps we’re the ones who are crazy and suicidal.