One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

“Wife, three kids, daughter-in-law, and two grandkids lived in Saint Pete. Haven’t heard a word since it happened.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Yeah, we are all sorry now.” John could not speak.

  “Voice of America never said anything about that.” The general shook his head.

  “Did you think we’d actually tell you the truth?” he sighed. John bristled.

  “So what the hell is the truth?”

  “We had our asses handed to us, that’s the truth. Just several bombs, and we had our asses handed to us. With luck there might be thirty million people still alive in what was the United States.”

  “What do you mean, was?”

  The general shook his head.

  “Course you wouldn’t know; we’re not talking about it on Voice of America. You can write off the Southwest, including Texas, unless we can dig up another Sam Houston and Davy Crockett. During the winter, Mexico moved in. Claimed it was a protectorate to counter the Chinese.”

  “What?”

  “China. Oh, they came with aid, plenty of aid for the few survivors after sixty days of anarchy and disease. And now there’s five hundred thousand of them on the West Coast, California to Washington State, clear up to the Rockies.”

  “Who?”

  “Chinese troops. Here to help us of course,” Wright said, his voice bitter. “Oh, they’re giving out aid, even helping with some rebuilding, but there’s no sign they ever plan to leave.”

  “So it was them?”

  The general shrugged.

  “We’ll never know, most likely.”

  “What?”

  “John, three missiles total. One launched from a containership out in the Gulf of Mexico and burst over Kansas, Utah, and Ohio. The cargo ship, typical, had Liberian registry and had docked at half a dozen places, including Oman. We think the weapons might have been loaded aboard there, a medium-range missile capped with a nuke inside an oversized container. That ship, by the way, blew up right after the launch, no one survived, so it fits the terrorist model. Another over Russia, launched from another containership from near Iceland, same scenario, the ship blew up right after the launch. We don’t know why over Russia rather than over Central Europe. Maybe its guidance was screwy, but that did mean England and parts of Spain were spared. Last one burst lower, but still high enough to knock out Japan and Korea.

  “Some say it was China, others North Korea, which by the way is now a glowing slag heap, others the terrorist cells, others Iran, a fair part of that glowing as well. Maybe it was all of them; maybe it was none of them. Maybe it doesn’t matter now; they did it, and they won.”

  “What do you mean, won? Damn it, Voice of America kept saying we were winning.”

  “Sure, there’s a lot of rubble heaps around the world where once there were cities, us lashing out, maybe rightly, maybe just blindly. But did that change things here?

  “I was deployed back here, from Iraq. The entire navy is here as well on the East Coast at least. Nearly all our overseas military is now back here, trying to sort things out, rebuild, and defend what’s left.

  “John, I saw Baltimore and Washington burning in the night, the smoke a pillar visible a hundred miles away,” and he spoke now in almost a monotone.

  “My God, it was like something out of the Bible. It was medieval.” Washington, and for the first time in months John thought of Bob Scales in the Pentagon.

  “Remember General Scales? Commandant of the war college while you were there?”

  Wright nodded his head. “The bastards lucky enough to be assigned the government emergency relocation sites, some of them got out, the rest… Well, Washington like I said turned medieval. I don’t know what happened to your friend. I’m sorry, but he’s most likely gone unless he was assigned to the bunkers out in Maryland and West Virginia.”

  Wright looked off again.

  “There’s a cult that has taken over parts of three states in the Rockies. Their leader claims he’s the Messiah and when the world is saved all the lights will come back on, and tens of thousands now follow him.

  “The Posse you faced ? There’s one like it ten thousand strong that still rules Pittsburgh and raids a hundred miles out in every direction. We’re getting set to stamp it out, but it will be as bad as anything we faced in Iraq several years back… and my God, these were once our own people. I lost eight, killed wiping out a nest of them in the ruins of High Point three days ago.

  “Oh, we might of gotten even, John, but America a world power? They won; we’re finished. We’ve retreated from around the world, trying to save what’s left, and for those that hated us that’s victory even if we flattened their country in retaliation, and John, frankly, we might never know who really did it to start with.

  “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 then were 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.”

  “No, not a hundred and fifty years,” John sighed. “Make it more like five hundred. People alive in 1860, they knew how to live in that time; they had the infrastructure. We don’t. Turn off the lights, stop the toilets from getting water to flush, empty the pharmacy, turn off the television to tell us what to do.”

  He shook his head.

  “We were like sheep for the slaughter then.”

  The general reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. They were English, Dunhills.

  Wright offered the pack and John fought hard, then remembered the last one he had smoked.

  “I quit.”

  “I haven’t,” and the general lit up.

  He blew the smoke out, and though it smelled so good to John, he didn’t ask. He thought of Jennifer, who always nagged him about it. No, don’t think of that, he realized.

  “I have to get this column moving, John. Will you come up to Asheville in a few days so we can talk more?”

  “Sure. But will you be confiscating vehicles?”

  Wright looked at him in confusion.

  “Nothing, just a little problem I had a very long time ago. And by the way, once up there, fire the schmuck running the place. I’m willing to bet you won’t find him underfed, nor those around him.”

  Wright nodded.

  “And for God’s sake, get the hospital open to the community again…. I just wish you’d gotten here seven months ago….” He couldn’t speak.

  “Who?”

  “My daughter.”

  “I understand.”

  John looked into Wright’s eyes and could see that indeed this man did understand, torn by a worse agony almost. Jennifer slept in John’s backyard, Wright would most likely never know what happened to his family and therefore could only imagine the worst. Another thing about Americans lost, John realized. We knew, we always knew where those we loved were, and if they were lost in a war we had a nation that would spend millions just to bring a fragment of a body back. There were over two hundred million bodies now… and no one could even spare the time now to name them.

  Wright turned away from him for a moment.

  “I’ll leave a supply of MREs in your town hall so you can get them out to those not here,” he finally said, looking back. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll leave one medic as well with some supplies. We have some antibiotics, the vitamins of course, painkillers. He can set up sick call once the column has left.”

  “Insulin?” John asked coldly.

  “No, why? Diabetics? They’re all dead now anyhow,” and then Wright froze. “I’m sorry, John.” He could only nod.

  They shook hands and Wright started to turn away.

  “General?
”

  He looked back.

  “Is this for real?”

  “What?”

  “I mean this. Today. Or is it nothing more than a flash in the pan? You’ll stay awhile, but things will continue to break down, collapsing in, and then it’s just the end. The old line, ‘this is the way the world will end, not with a bang, but a whimper.’”

  Wright hesitated.

  “My friend, I don’t know. All our elaborate plans… all our dreams? I no longer know.”

  The general turned and went back to the Bradley. Its engine fired up, troopers returning to their vehicles, engines turning over, except for the last of the tractor trailers, where rations were still being passed out.

  The column started to roll forward and John watched as the flag snapping above the Bradley passed by.

  Instinctively he came to attention and saluted, civilians placing their hands over their hearts, his militia presenting arms, again, more than a few crying at the sight of it.

  Fifty stars, he thought. Will we ever be as we once were? And the voice within whispered the terrible truth.

  He took Makala’s hand, looked down at her, and smiled as if to reassure, and she smiled back, as if to reassure, and each could sense the lie in the other.

  “Look at this, Dad!”

  It was Elizabeth, clutching two bottles of vitamins, a canvas bag, military, slung over her shoulder.

  “Some guy kissed Ben, said Ben reminded him of his own son. The poor guy just cried and kept hugging Ben, then gave me a dozen rations! They’re in the bag. They even gave me a five-pound can of formula for Ben. It’s over, Dad; it’s really over!”

  “Of course it is, sweetheart,” he said, smiling. In her joy she looked again to be like a child.

  “Let’s go home.”

  And they walked back to their car, drove home, the girls going inside, Elizabeth laughing with excitement.

  He went into the house, picked up Rabs, then went outside to sit by Jennifer’s grave.

  The world had changed forever, the America they knew… never to return.

  “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 2002

  AFTERWORD

  Electromagnetic Pulse: A Bolt from the Gray

  by Capt. Bill Sanders, USN

  The fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union marked a distinct turning point in my navy career. The Boeing E-6 strategic nuclear command and control aircraft I flew would no longer fly continuous airborne alert postured for a “bolt from the blue” nuclear attack. I continue to hope that if military anthropologists ever decide to study pre—Cold War hunter-gatherer groups, my rather unspectacular career will be noted for only two significant statistics: no aircraft lost and no nuclear holocaust on my watch.

  Growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, I was captivated by the subject of nuclear war and somehow it became my career path. I leapt at the chance to tour the Nevada Test Site as an ensign. As I took in the images of a nuclear ghost town and the enormous crater left by the SEDAN event, measuring nearly a quarter of a mile across and deeper than a football field, the tremendous destructiveness of nuclear weapons became real for me. I would devote much of my life to balancing the day-to-day duties of standing ready to fight a strategic nuclear war with the angst of the anticipated aftermath—devouring all I could on the subject.

  I read Pat Frank’s classic apocalyptic 1959 novel Alas, Babylon and was encouraged by man’s defiance of annihilation and ability to cope in a post-attack nuclear world. The image of Slim Pickens as Major T. J. “King” Kong in Dr. Strangelove provided dark comic relief every time I inventoried a double-locked safe of nuclear codes. After being promoted to captain, I reread Nevil Shute’s classic, On the Beach, and wondered if I had the courage of the submarine captain Dwight Towers to gracefully face the end of civilization.

  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 (EPM)[1] explosion over the continental United States would have devastating consequences for our country. The detonation of a nuclear weapon produces high-energy gamma radiation that travels radially away from the burst center. When the detonation occurs at high altitudes—greater than twenty-five miles—the gamma rays directed towards the earth encounter the atmosphere where they interact with air molecules to produce positive ions and recoil electrons called Compton electrons after the physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his discovery of the Compton Effect. The gamma radiation interacting with the air molecules produces charge separation as the Compton recoil electrons are ejected and leave behind the more massive, positive ions. The earth’s magnetic field’s interaction with the Compton recoil electrons causes charge acceleration, which further radiates an electromagnetic field as an instantaneous electromagnetic pulse.[2]

  Additionally, a high-altitude nuclear burst also produces a relatively slow magnetohydrodynarnic EMP, whose effects are like those from geomagnetic solar storm disturbances causing the flow of very low frequency current into the earth and into long transmission lines. The reality of the damage to electrical and electronic equipment by EMP has been established in various nuclear tests and by the use of EMP simulators.[3]

  The intense and invisible energy pulse cannot be sensed by people and doesn’t damage the human body. Unlike a lightning strike, an EMP explosion is both much faster in producing damaging power surges and much broader and far-reaching in causing simultaneous burnout and failure of electrical and electronic systems over a large area. A well-designed nuclear weapon detonated at a high altitude over Kansas could have damaging effects over virtually all of the continental United States. Our technologically oriented society and its heavy dependence on advanced electronics systems could be brought to its knees with cascading failures of our critical infrastructure. Our vulnerability increases daily as our use and dependence on electronics continues to accelerate.

  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) Attach[5] was released the exact same day the 9/11 Commission’s report directed most of America’s immediate attention to the rearview mirror to find out why we failed to prevent the horrific terrorist attack of 2001. As television commentators pored over the 9/11 report and offered in-depth analysis of the “failure of imagination,” the stark warnings and recommendations of the EMP commission went largely unnoticed into the back-logged pile of congressional failures of implementation.

  So why are we reluctant to realistically address the threat of an EMP attack? Skeptics will continue to regurgitate bureaucratic babble such as “while it is technically feasible, it is highly improbable,” or “we do not have any credible intelligence indications and we must remain focused on near-term concerns” and other canned responses of downplayed threat perceptions prevalent prior to 9/11.

  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]

  One of the EMP c
ommissioners, Dr. Lowell Wood, noted nuclear physicist involved with EMP weapons for three decades, characterizes an EMP event as a “continental time machine that would move us back to the nineteenth century.” 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] Farming expertise, horses, and mules would be in short supply. 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 after an EMP attack, it will be too late to ask two simple questions: what should we have done to prevent the attack and why didn’t we do it.[9]

  Captain Bill Sanders, U.S. Navy

  Copyright

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  New York

  Copyright© 2009 by William R. Fortschen

  Forward Copyright© 2009 by Newt Gingrich

  Afterword Copyright© by William D. Sanders

  First edition March 2009

  ISBN: 0765317583

  ISBN-13: 9780765317582

  Notes

  1

  Bill Keller, “Nuclear Nightmares,” New York Times Magazine, May 26, 2002. From an interview with General Eugene Habiger, USAF (ret.), on nuclear terrorism scenarios.

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  2

  Gary L. Smith, Testimony Statement, U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Military Research and Development, July 16, 1997.