‘One Second After’ sketches an America devastated by a terror attack
Would you survive?
You’re on the freeway, about 10 miles from home, and suddenly the motor dies. As you try to steer to the side of the road, you realize that the engine of every vehicle around you has quit as well. You hear the awful, screeching sound of crashes as traffic suddenly stops.
Climbing out of the car, you exchange puzzled glances with other drivers. You reach for your cell phone, to call someone to come get you or at least send help, but the phone is dead. Around you, other drivers make the same confusing discovery.
Someone notices that the power seems to be out in businesses along the freeway. Traffic signals have stopped working, and the lights are out in the businesses you can see from the freeway.
After waiting beside your car for what seems an eternity, you begin the long trudge home. As your thirst builds, you stop at a convenience store to get something to drink. But the cash registers don’t work, so they aren’t selling. Come back later, they say. Hours later, you stumble, exhausted, in the front door of your home. But the bad times are only beginning.
The power doesn’t come back on. Uncertainty grows, and rumors fly. People start to realize they don’t have much food in the house, so they head to the grocery stores. A trickle of shoppers becomes a stream and then, as shelves thin out, a panicked flood. Others besiege pharmacies, trying to get more of the drugs that help them function, or that ease their suffering, or keep them alive. Within a couple of days, drugstore shelves are emptied. No more food. No more medication — and none on the way, because the trucks that transport America’s food and medicine don’t work.
There are rumors that a nuclear bomb, or more than one, exploded, hundreds of miles above the United States. That it caused some kind of wave that knocked out all the electronics and computers that make modern American life possible. That passenger planes fell out of the sky, killing thousands. That growing tides of hungry people are beginning to leave the cities, hunting for food. That no one seems to be in charge.
The nightmarish possibility that the United States will be attacked by an electromagnetic pulse weapon (EMP) keeps some scientists thrashing in their beds at night. That hellish scenario unfolds in "One Second After," the new novel by historian William F. Forstchen (2009, Forge Books). Warning: After you read this book, you’ll want to haul in a year’s supply of every food item and medication you can think of. And buy a really old car, the noncomputerized kind. And pack heat and learn karate and buy a farm in the Midwest — and pray like crazy.
An electromagnetic pulse weapon, to put it simply, is caused by the detonation of a nuclear weapon at a high altitude. The detonation produces high-energy gamma rays, that, in an EMP, encounter the atmosphere. This interaction, to further simplify, causes an instantaneous electromagnetic pulse. The result — damaging power surges, simultaneous burnout and failure of electrical and electronic systems over a wide area.
In other words, it could knock the United States back into the 19th century, minus the survival skills earlier Americans had — to grow food, to hunt, to live off the land — and most of us don’t have land to live off of, where we can plant gardens and raise animals and survive on our own.
In the book’s afterword, U.S. Navy Capt. Bill Sanders, an authority on the subject, describes EMPs in detail. And, he says, we’ve been warned — in one instance by a commission of American scientists that issued a report on the subject. The report, ironically, came out the same day as the 9/11 Commission report was released, and so went largely unnoticed.
The America Forstchen paints is one none of us would want to live in, and many — maybe most — of us couldn’t. We’d die — from starvation, from untreated disease, or from violence as society as we’ve known it implodes. Forstchen’s point is that America must begin to shield our vital systems from the threat of EMPs. To those who think an EMP attack wouldn’t succeed, we didn’t think airplanes could bring down the twin towers, either. Our enemies made it look easy.
