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For I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.
BLACK MOUNTAIN, NORTH CAROLINA, 2:30 EDT
I’m living in a damn Norman Rockwell painting, he thought yet again, for the thousandth time. Winding up here … he never imagined it, never planned for it, or even wanted it. Eight years back he was at the Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, teaching military history and lecturing on asymmetrical warfare, and waiting to jump the hoop and finally get his first star.
Mary had returned from the doctor’s several days after the promotion, her face pale, lips pressed tight, and said four words: “I have breast cancer.”
Mary would be gone four years next week.
The village had once been a thriving community, part of the tuberculosis sanitarium business. When the railroad had finally pierced the mountains of western North Carolina in the early 1880s, some of the first to flood in were tuberculosis victims. They came by the thousands to the sanitariums that sprang up on every sunlit mountain slope. By the early twenties there were a dozen such institutions surrounding Asheville, the big city situated a dozen miles to the west of Black Mountain. And then came the Depression. Black Mountain remained frozen in time until antibiotics became available right
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“What do you think is going on?” Jen asked, and he could hear a touch of nervousness in her voice. “What do you mean?” “John, it kind of reminds me of nine-eleven. The silence. But we still had electricity then; we could see the news. All those cars stalled earlier.” He didn’t say anything. There was a thought, but it was too disturbing to contemplate right now. He wanted to believe that it was just a weird combination of coincidences, a power failure that might be regional, and would ground most flights due to air traffic control. Maybe it was some sort of severe solar storm, potent enough to
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He turned on the radio. It really was one of the old ones. With dials to turn, no buttons to push, the slightly yellowed face even had the two small triangles on them marking the frequency of the old Civil Defense broadcast frequencies. Static, nothing but static from one end of the dial to the other. It was getting towards twilight, usually the time the FCC had most AM stations power down, but the big ones, the ones with enough bucks to pay for the license, should be powering up now to fifty thousand watts, and reaching halfway across the country if the atmospherics were right.
Now it was just silence. “You look worried, Colonel.”
“But the cars?” “Most cars today are loaded with computers. It might explain why yours keeps running and others stopped.” “People should have kept those old Fords,” she said with a nervous smile. “Let’s do this, though,” he said quietly, “I’m worried about Elizabeth; let’s drive downtown, see if we can spot her.” “Fine with me.”
“Back in the 1940s, when we started firing off atomic bombs to test them, this pulse wave was first noticed. Not much back then with those primitive weapons, but it was there. And here’s the key thing: there were no solid-state electronics back in the 1940s, everything was still vacuum tubes, so it was rare for the small pulses set off by those first bombs to damage anything. “We finally figured out that when you set off a nuke in space, that’s when the EMP effect really kicks in, as the energy burst hits the upper atmosphere. It becomes like a pebble triggering an avalanche, the electrical
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the Chinese were doing a lot of research on how to boost the EMP from a nuclear blast, making it a helluva lot more powerful.”
One scenario that his group had kicked around was an initial EMP strike to take down communications, then selected ground bursts of nukes at key sites to finish the job … and of course D.C. would be the first hit.
The frightful thing we realized was that some third-rate lunatic, either a terrorist cell member or the ruler of someplace like North Korea or Iran, with only one or two nukes in their possession, could level the playing field against us in spite of our thousands of weapons. That’s what is meant by ‘asymmetrical strike.’ ”
EMP doesn’t really hit unless you blow off the bomb above the atmosphere. Again the ‘Compton Effect,’ and believe me, I’ve read about it, but don’t have a real grasp on it myself; I need a tech head for that. I just know that the burst above the atmosphere sets off an electro-disturbance, kind of like a magnetic storm, which cascades down into the lower atmosphere like a sheet of lightning and, bango, it fries everything with electronics in it.” “Just one bomb?” Kate asked. He nodded.
“So why didn’t we just protect ourselves?” Kate asked.
“Kate, it’s some rather technical stuff, but it meant retrofitting a lot of stuff, at the cost of hundreds of billions perhaps, to do all of it. And besides, a lot of people in high places, well, they just glazed over when the scientists started with the technical jargon. The reports would go into committees, and …” “And now we got this,” Charlie said coldly. John nodded, frustrated.
Besides, all our equipment was hardened against EMP to varying degrees. They spent a lot of money on that back during the Reagan years.” “So our military is still OK here in the States then?” Kate asked. “Doubt it. That’s the gist of the report I just gave you. Every administration since Reagan’s has placed hardening of our electronics on the back shelf. Meanwhile the equipment kept getting more delicate and thus susceptible and the potential power of the burst kept getting one helluva lot stronger.
“Who then?” “For my money … maybe North Korea, maybe Middle East terrorists with some equipment supplied by Iran, Korea, or both. As for the warhead, we all knew there was enough of those left over from the old Soviet Union that sooner or later someone would get their hands on one, if for nothing else than the goodies inside that go bang.
“The enemy will never attack you where you are strongest. … He will attack where you are weakest. If you do not know your weakest point, be certain, your enemy will,” Charlie said.
“How long before the power comes back on?” Kate asked.
“Weeks, months, maybe years,” John said, and he found he could not look into Kate’s eyes as he said it.
DAY 4 The sound of the helicopter, a Black Hawk, after silence for so long, was startling. It came in hot, about five hundred feet up, skimming over the interstate pass, leveling out. He felt an emotional surge at the sight of it, the black star on its side. It roared past his house, which was high enough off the valley floor that he could almost see into the pilot’s side window.
To put it coldly, my friends, all the ones who should have died years ago, would have died years ago without beta-blockers, stents, angioplasties, pacemakers, exotic medications, well, now they’re dying all at once.”
They don’t know how to survive without a society that supports them even as they curse it or rebel against it.”
She’d always talk about how great Gandhi was. I’d tell her the only reason Gandhi survived after his first protest was that he was dealing with the Brits. If Stalin had been running India, he’d have been dead in a second, his name forgotten.”
Scale of social order, he thought. The larger the group, the more likely it was that it would fragment under stress, with a few in power looking out for themselves first.
America is like an exotic hothouse plant. It can only live now in the artificial environment of vaccinations, sterilization, and antibiotics we started creating a hundred or more years ago.
She grimaced slightly. “I’m definitely not a cook.” “It’s great.” “It’s just because you’re hungry. What I wouldn’t give for shrimp, chilled jumbo shrimp, a salad, a nice glass of chardonnay.” He looked up at her. “If you hadn’t saved my life, I think I’d tell you to shut up,” he said with a bit of a grin.
“It’s been bad.” “How so?” “A fight at the gap two nights ago.” “How bad?” “More than two hundred dead on both sides, several hundred injured.” “Jesus, what happened?” “Well, we were letting folks through a hundred at a time, as per your suggestion, good professor. It was going slow, though, and now the refugees from Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro, even some from as far as Durham were piling up on that road. God, John, it’s positively medieval down on that road. Squatters’ camps, people fighting for a scrap of food. Disease breaking out, mostly salmonella, pneumonia, a nasty variant of
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Most are harmless, but a few, the ringleaders, they’re out there and Tom is hunting them down. “That triggered the riot back at the barrier. Charlie ordered it shut down until the mess was straightened out and they just rioted. I mean thousands of them just pushing against the barrier of cars and trucks. Tom did have some tear gas to push them back, but then they rushed in. …” “So we opened fire?” She nodded.
Sounded like a regular war. Tom had a couple of men with automatic weapons posted up on the side of the pass firing down. John, I never dreamed we’d be doing this to each other.”
“Three weeks ago we were all Americans. Hell, if somebody said an offensive word, made a racial or sexist slur, my God, everyone would be up in arms and it’d be front-page news. Turn off the electricity and bang, we’re at each other’s throats in a matter of days.
“People are hungry, scared. We were spoiled unlike any generation in history, and we forgot completely just how dependent we were on the juice flowing through the wires, the buttons doing something when we pushed them.
the attack is now believed to have been three missiles, fired from a containership in the Gulf of Mexico.
Responsibility for the attack rests upon an alliance of forces in the Middle East and North Korea. Reports now confirm that a weapon similar to the ones that struck the United States has also been detonated over the western Pacific, creating the same widespread outages in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. A similar missile is also reported to have been detonated over Eastern Europe.
Suppose the old America, so wonderful, the country we so loved, suppose at four fifty p.m. eighteen days ago, it died. It died from complacency, from blindness, from not being willing to face the harsh realities of the world. Died from smug self-centeredness. Suppose America died that day.”
“John, we dream of America. We want America to come to us. But I think it never will. The America we knew died when those warheads burst. If so, then it is up to us to not wait, but instead to rebuild America as we want it to be.”
We have a couple of small churches in this community that are already preaching that this disaster is God’s punishment to a sinful nation, and/or that it is now the end-time. I never thought about what Doc here was saying in regards to mass psychosis, but we might find that some of these deranged people are being seen either as prophets if they have a good gift for gab even though they’re crazy or, on the other side, demonically possessed.”
Food, bulk food, just a fifty-pound bag of rice or flour, shoes, batteries, an additional test kit for Jennifer, damn it, even birth control for Elizabeth, dog food, a water filter so they didn’t have to boil what they now pulled out of the swamp green pool … I should have had those on hand.
We call it the soldier’s psalm, the Ninety-first.” He half-opened the Bible, but it was obvious he knew the prayer by heart. “ ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. …’ “ As he spoke, his voice gained strength. “ ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day. “ ‘Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.’ ”
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people? How is she become as a widow? She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary? BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS 1:1
“There were no red meatballs, swastikas, or red stars on planes dropping bombs this time. Just three missiles launched from freighters out in the ocean, which were then blown up. “My God, there’s maybe two hundred and fifty million dead in America alone, as bad, maybe worse than any Dr. Strangelove nightmares we talked about during the Cold War. We were so damn vulnerable, so damn vulnerable, and no one did the right things to prepare, or prevent it. “We’re back a hundred and fifty years.”
“It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.” GENERAL EUGENE HABIGER, USAF (RET.) FORMER COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, U.S. STRATEGIC COMMAND MAY 20021
I wish my imagination would have allowed me to just sit back and enjoy my friend Bill Forstchen’s novel One Second After as another science fiction story, but I could not. It was an emotional and gut-wrenching read—because it could actually happen. An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) explosion over the continental United States would have devastating consequences for our country.
As former Speaker Newt Gingrich describes the potential catastrophic consequences of an EMP attack over the United States, he notes that “this is not idle speculation but taken from the consensus findings of nine distinguished American scientists who authored the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack.”4 Unfortunately, the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack5 was released the exact same day the 9/11 Commission’s report directed most of America’s immediate
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Fortunately, while there is no clear objective method for analyzing relative risks and costs for comparing large-scale disasters, there is a high value to preventing, preparing for, and being able to recover from large-scale disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and regional power outages. The thorough work of the EMP commission provides a clear look at the nature of the problem, mitigation strategies, and recommendations. The solution “is feasible and well within [our] means and resources to accomplish.”6
When questioned that the technology of a century ago could not support our present population, he unemotionally replied, “Yes, I know. The population will shrink until it [can] be supported by the technology.”7
As EMP weapons do not distinguish between military and civilian targets, it is especially critical that our electrical power infrastructure be hardened against EMP. An EMP attack should not be viewed as a Cold War “bolt from the blue” but prepared for as an anticipated asymmetric “bolt from the gray.” We have been warned that our country is “vulnerable and virtually unprotected against an EMP attack that could damage or destroy civilian and military critical electronic infrastructures triggering catastrophic consequences that could cause the permanent collapse of our society.”8 One second
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Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, Volume I, Executive Report 2004, available at http://empcommission.org.
