One Second After
by William R. Forstchen
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Book Reviews of One Second After
Book Review: Sobering, yet flawed
Summary: 3 Stars
I purchased this book because I have been flogging the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack scenario to friends and relatives since early 2008, when it became apparent to me that the U.S. had lost the will to halt nuclear proliferation among terror-sponsoring states. I reasoned that a stateless actor or an apocalyptic regime might calculate that an EMP attack would actually create more casualties and more economic damage than a direct strike on any one city. An EMP attack also has the advantage of being the equivalent of hitting the broad side of a barn. Just get the nuke up a couple hundred klicks and go "boom," rather than trust your missile's guidance to hit an urban center from offshore or (alternatively) risk detection of a smuggled warhead. Lastly, the straightforward atomic bomb designs a nascent nuclear state is likely to deploy don't make as big a crater as a sophisticated "hydrogen" (fusion) bomb does, but they're already very effective at creating EMP.
Given the above, one would imagine I'd be among the vanguard in extolling this novel. For reasons great and small though, I was ultimately disappointed. In my opinion the story's biggest flaw is its implicit assumption that EMP would render irrevocably inoperable any integrated-circuit based device -- i.e., anything more advanced than wires, coils, and vacuum tubes -- and by extension anything that depended upon such devices (your modern automobile, for example). My readings so far of the findings of the ongoing EMP Commission (in particular April 2008, see empcommission.org) suggest that this is a gross exaggeration. True, while the near-certain collapse of the electrical grid would immediately harm the transportation infrastructure (imagine no subways, no commuter rail, no street or traffic lights), the vast majority of automobiles would still be mobile. Similarly, while the cellular phone and land-line telephone systems will be severely crippled (at onset) or entirely nonfunctional (after 72 hours) due to their ultimate dependence on the electrical grid and sophisticated switching technologies, there is little reason to believe that battery-operated two-way radios and (especially) simple AM and shortwave receivers would be harmed at all. The author's belief that only antique autos would run and only tube radios will turn on following EMP is key to creating the conditions of immobilization and isolation on which the rest of his story arc depends. And when I couldn't buy into the author's core assumptions, the plot lost much of its punch.
From that point onward, the book's other shortcomings became more grating. Some old-school editing, say from my bespectacled junior-year English teacher, would have helped a great deal. Mrs. K would certainly have caught the "horde" used mistakenly instead of "hoard", the "striped" for stripped, the "breech" which was supposed to be a breach and the "than" / "that" typos which mangle a sentence. Adverbs in dialogue were recycled to the point of distraction. There's only so many times a character can respond "sharply" to another in a single conversation before the reader wants to attack the book with a sharply instrument.
It would be a terrible shame if this book's vision convinced readers that an actual EMP attack would be unavoidably catastrophic, and survivable only by a select few who empty their bank accounts and utterly abandon their former lifestyles in preparation. I sincerely believe that this is not the case, and that the most-likely EMP attack scenarios can be survived by nearly everyone who can plan for three months without the grocery store, ATM, and utility services. Yes it takes some forethought and a little planning, but think of it as a life insurance policy for your entire family that actually pays off when you wind up living instead of the other way around.
I would've loved an EMP disaster novel to be a smash hit that would later become the movie that would galvanize an irresistible push for robust missile defense and an uncompromising policy of nonproliferation. I desperately want a concerted government program to harden the protections on high-value electrical infrastructure and build increased EMP resistance into our evolving telecommunications system. Maybe these things will still happen, but I don't see this book being the trigger for them.
Book Review: An emotional and gut-wrenching story of survival after an EMP attack...
Summary: 5 Stars
Imagine that one day, just like any other day, you're driving down the highway and your car dies for no reason... as do the thousands of other cars around you. Electricity? Out. Radio broadcast? Nothing there but static (provided the radio even works). Cell phones? No signal, same as the landlines. It doesn't *look* like a storm took out power, but how do you explain the utter failure of everything that you depend on in your life? It could be an EMP... an electromagnetic pulse generated by a nuclear detonation high in the atmosphere that creates an electrical surge that destroys electrical devices as it races along. This is the premise of William R. Forstchen's book One Second After. The book can easily be thrown into the apocalyptic genre, but not so deeply that it loses its touch to people like you and me. I found myself emotionally spent after reading this book, having experienced a few "wet eye" moments along the way due to some similarities between the lead character's situation and my own should that ever happen to me. I really couldn't put the book down.
After the pulse renders much of modern civilization in the United States inoperable, the small town of Black Mountain, North Carolina starts to come together to try and make sense of it all. John Matherson, a history professor with a military background, quickly figures out that an EMP is the most likely cause of the situation, and people start to look to him for leadership and moral guidance. And the testing starts early... People stranded on the freeway wander into the town looking for food and lodging. Stores begin to run out of food, and people start reverting to looting. Most importantly for Matherson, medical supplies dwindle, and he has a daughter who is a type 1 diabetic, dependent on insulin for her survival. He himself needs to tread a very thin line between playing by the rules or getting the extra insulin by force if necessary. His wife has already died of breast cancer, and he is not going to let another family member die if he can help it.
As the days unfold, the news only continues to get worse. Asheville is demanding that Black Mountain take 5000 refugees. They refuse the request as they don't have enough supplies for their own survival. Food continues to dwindle, and severe rationing is put in place. Martial law is imposed with death penalties for actions that endanger the survival of others. As more and more people die off due to existing medical conditions, disease starts to decimate the community given the lack of sanitary conditions. And the US government, the hope of survival for everyone in the town, is seemingly non-existent. The townspeople start to come up with "old-time" methods for doing things we take for granted, but it still doesn't solve the problems related to no food and no medical supplies, as Matherson soon finds out as his daughter's insulin supply continues to shrink with no chance to obtain any more.
One Second After is definitely not a story with a happy or "feel good" ending. Life has forever changed, sacrifice and duty are hard but necessary, and death is a daily companion, either for yourself or someone close to you. Reading Matherson's frustration and despair when it comes to his daughter's diabetes was especially hard, as I have a son with the same condition. I would end up in the same position as Matherson, with the same outcome in all likelihood. The scenes of battle against superior forces attacking the town were also emotional, knowing that kids who had weeks before been attending college were now spread out on the front line with rifles, ready to die to protect their fellow townspeople. It was hard not to get choked up over the heroic and selflessness displayed.
This is an excellent book on many different levels. It shows our vulnerability to a weapon such as an EMP attack. It exposes the true nature of human beings when societal controls are removed. It also shows how people can come together and sacrifice for the common good if they have a leader who is strong enough to make the hard decisions. This is definitely worth reading.
Disclosure:
Obtained From: Library
Payment: Borrowed
Book Review: One Giant RESET!
Summary: 4 Stars
I picked up "One Second After" after a quick browse caught my interest for a beach read while vacationing in Maui. Here's the challenge - some unhappy with America group manage to launch a few electromagnetic pulse [EMP] nuclear weapons to burst high over the U.S. The resultant high energy electro magnetic pulses overload almost all of our modern electrical equipment and devices so essentially of our making-life-livable (in modern terms) devices and infrastructure are useless. Cars don't run, electricity doesn't flow, food doesn't get to the supermarket, hospitals are blacked out, no TV or iTunes, forget facebook, tweeting, and email. It's over!
So what would you do? What would the country do? And what would our supposedly unaffected neighbors like Mexico, China and Canada do -help out or take advantage? The last question is largely left to almost a footnote at the end of the book, but it seems likely to be more `taking advantage' than `helping out' - but that is not the point of the story.
The real point of the story is to highlight how much we take for granted. Take food for example. Recently a friend of mine mentioned that not long ago that his three pre-teen kids became aware that hamburgers and steaks came from cows. Suddenly hamburgers and steaks were no longer eatable. And I overheard a family member observe, I hope tongue-in-cheek, that we could just go to the store to get milk if the dairy farms went bankrupt. Now that does seem a bit far-fetched.
Recently I did a short research paper on the future of sustainable agriculture in the American Midwest. I came away with a dismal conclusion - the talk of locovores and year round Farmers' Markets like that pioneered in Newbury County, Ohio, by Rob Marqusee, will run into the problems of labor shortage, incentive shortage, and the focus of local politicians on what they see as faster ways to grow both blue and white collar jobs in their community. So, in brief, it's not so easy to go `back to the future' and build resiliency in our social infrastructure should its brittleness be attacked by those who don't like us or we simply run into a tipping point of our own making.
"In One Second After" Mr. Forstchen covers the main questions of how one fictional family deals with the instant unraveling of society, the lack of effective national and state government responses, the coalescing of the local communities to ration limited resources, fend off migrating citizens in search of a temporary home, and defending against outright raids to take anything the community might have of use.
Sometimes brutal, fatalistic, and harsh the story does cause one to reflect during this economic downturn of 2008-2009 where our real strengths are and what does it take to survive economic and social collapse. What I miss in our national discourse today is in our spirit of offering a helping hand, where is the recipient's clarity of reciprocal responsibility to add to the strength of the community? And will we, in the pursuit of entitlements for everyone except the rich (who must pay their fair share of course), know when we have killed the golden goose? Such questions are not casual in "One Second After."
Mr. Forstchen caused me to think about these issues and how little we appreciate the intertwined complexity of the systems that cocoon our daily lives. I've thought more than a bit about such a collapse catastrophe but not to the point of stocking a year's food supply and adding an AR15 in a gun locker. You should take a look at "Patriots - A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse" by James Wesley Rawles for that. I suspect we are more exposed to collapses of the type described by Jared Diamond in "Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" where we will foolishly just allow ourselves to clutch our lifestyles so tightly that we drive our resources use beyond the tipping point. Then we go the way of the Rapanui people of Easter Island (See Collapse, pp107-111).
How would you respond to the giant "RESET!" challenges raised by Mr. Forstchen? You will be forced to think about it - if only a bit.
Book Review: Based on a story about to become true
Summary: 4 Stars
A sobering, frightening and deeply sad look at what will likely happen to the USA beginning one second after the detonation of an EM Pulse. An EM Pulse is what is generated by the detonation of a nuclear device in the upper atmosphere. The effect sends something akin to an electric shock wave through the lower atmosphere, creating currents on earth in anything that can conduct electricity at levels that easily overload and destroy sensitive electronics. The danger in this kind of nuclear incident isn't from the blast - which actually doesn't do much below. The danger is from the overload of millions of components of microprocessor technology and anything dependent on them (i.e., just about anything these days), all of them stopping simultaneously, and likely, permanently. Modern communications (TV, radio, phones, including cell phones), controls running airliners and power plants, all gone. Repair components too are ruined, along with the means to manufacture more. The result is like a massive power failure except battery-powered components are destroyed too, and recovery, if it happens, is measured by months or years, not days. Two or three well-positioned blasts would do this to all of North America.
Forstchen skillfully outlines those effects through a story depicted in the (real) town of Black Mountain, NC, following an EM Pulse attack on the USA. One afternoon, communications, electricity and transportation stop. It seems like a power failure, except that cars, radios, cell phones and jets stop too, along with backup batteries and generators. Town resident, history professor and retired army colonel, John Matherson, suspects the worst but waits out the first few hours hoping he's wrong. It soon becomes apparent that he's not, and that help won't be forthcoming. Matherson, with his understanding of history, becomes a critical advisor to the town's unprepared administration. He unearths a document on EMP saved from his earlier military career, and convinces the town's administration to effect martial law, even while maintaining the principles of constitutional government. The ensuing days and weeks unfold grimly as the town, like any in today's world, invisibly dependent on a constant flow of supplies, must stretch what was left on hand, while foraging for food among local wild animals, roots and berries. However a town of 10,000 people cannot live on an agrarian economy, and they don't. Those needing medical care perish first, then those not able to last in starvation conditions don't. Martial law must deal with looters and invaders from outside, including a drug gang already well-armed in the days of law and order, but the soldiers are the town's youth -- the cavalry isn't coming. Disease begins claiming those starvation does not, as available medical supplies are consumed.
Forstchen's purpose is to instruct more than to engage, so while his characters are real enough, they principally exist to support the story. Their predicaments are arguably worse than what Anytown USA might endure post-EMP (even the extent of the EMP damage may be overstated), but that hardly matters. Some cities and some towns will experience some portion of the disaster Forstchen outlines. The underlying message is that it's all so preventable now. Electronics can shielded (or "hardened") against the effects of EMP, and Forstchen's afterword points to a document released by the EMP Commission (created by Congress) that describes how such protection is possible and what an EM Pulse will do against today's unprotected environment.
In a world where ideologies drive airplanes into populated buildings, and where Iran's and North Korea's nuclear ambitions run unchecked while the world that promises security instead just talks about it, it is inconceivable to me that someone won't at least try an EM Pulse in the US in the next few years. What an irresistable objective for those who celebrated the death of over 3,000 people in two Manhattan towers. The talkers are ignoring this. I wonder how many of them will manage in the new agrarian economy.
Book Review: EMP - perhaps the single greatest threat to America
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a post-apocalyptic tale of small town Americans trying to survive after a devastating EMP attack on the US. If you don't know what EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse), it is one of the nasty side effects of a nuclear detonation that will fry most/all electronics within line-of-sight to the blast. Several nuclear weapons detonated high above the US could destroy virtually every electronic device currently in use. Just imaging what would happen if every computer, every car, every cell phone, anything with any electronic circuits suddenly stopped working. We would be thrown back to the 19th century in a microsecond. As Forschen states in his intro, he wrote this book to help spread awareness of this potentially devastating attack that the vast majority of Americans are blissfully unaware of. There has been a heightened awareness of terrorism, airliner hijackings, etc. after 9-11, but those threats pale to the potential damage an EMP attack could do - and it would require a large country with the resources of China or Russia to carry out such an attack. As the recent government commission on EMP states (linked off Wikipedia if you are interested), such an attack is one of the few threats to the US that would/could end our way of life.
This story is the fictional tale of a small town college history professor in North Carolina (based, I believe, on the author himself) who must struggle to survive after the America that we know has been destroyed in an instant. No cities are destroyed in nuclear fireballs, the bombs themselves do little damage. The day after the attack, little has changed in the small NC town. Nothing electronic works, but people think it is a power failure, a weird Solar occurrence, and that power will quickly be restore by the authorities. It rapidly becomes clear that the power isn't coming back soon, if at all, as it slowly dawns on the residents of this small town that they are own their own.
If you like Alas Babylon and Earth Abides (and similar post-apocalypse tales), I think that you'll find this one particularly compelling. One aspect of this genre that I find particularly enjoyable is how the author examines the effects of the removal of things/services/functionalities of everyday life once Doomsday has arrived. In this book, the author examines the effect of the termination of electricity and regular deliveries of food and medicine on the sick (the main character's daughter is diabetic) and the elderly. There is a scene in which the main character visits a nursing home several days after the power is gone that I don't think you'll forget quickly. As time passes, the survivor overcome one difficulty after another - the most significant is hunger though. For all those survivalists types, the author makes it pretty clear that there aren't enough deer, bear, squirrels, wild hogs, racoons, etc. in the woods to feed more than a small fraction of the current US population. Living in a relatively rural area would only give such survivors a bit of breathing space, nothing more, until the local food was exhausted and large numbers of refugees from the large cities descended upon the small towns like locusts.
One thing that I (really) didn't like was that the author kept trying to subtly insert new-con politics and ideology into the text. There is an intro by Newt Gingrich (and it is clear that Forschen and Gingrich are friendly - having I believe written several other books together). The message in the text is pretty clear that if you aren't a Gingrich conservative in world view, you aren't `prepared' for such an apocalyptic disaster. Additionally, the story never states who actually attacked the US, just that the vague members of the Axis of Evil (North Korea, Iran, etc.) are singled out for retribution - more Gingrichian/neo-con boogey man politics. Forschen obviously has his political axe to grind, but don't let this stop you from reading this book. I think this is destined to be linked with classics such as Alas Babylon and Earth Abides, definitely worth reading.