One Second After: It is so frightening you want to stop reading. On the other hand, it is so close to what could really happen in today’s world, you have to keep reading, if only to get tips on what you should do if disaster hits.
It’s a novel, One Second After, written by William R. Forstchen but admittedly, with a lot of help from his friends. It’s Newt Gingrich who wrote the foreword for the book, and Navy Captain Bill Sanders who provided a lot of expert advice on things he could talk about, mum on those he could not. And it was former ten-year Maryland Congressman Roscoe Bartlette, chair of a Congressional committee evaluating the threat of electromagnetic pulse, who gave Forstchen the inspiration for the novel in the first place.
Electro Magnetic Pulse…EMP for short. It’s a weapon. The One Second After tells the story of one man who fights valiantly to save his family, his friends, and the world close to him in small town America at a time no one, including himself, knew what to do. It’s a times when the weapon exploded over the United States and the year that followed.
At the end of One Second After, there is an Afterword by Capt. Sanders, an expert in the field. That’s where you learn how it could happen today.
The novel follows John Matherson and those who knew, met, loved and hated, for a year after the explosion, when the EMP wiped out all the electrical powers sources throughout the continental United States, creating monsters out of some men, heroes out of others, and sorrow, death, disaster and hope in so many others along the way.
A great story, well told, a page turner.
Then you read the Afterword and Capt. Sanders explains pretty much what happens and how it is. That’s when you realize…are we really THAT CLOSE to disaster? We won’t know. Until a second after it happens and we find life has changed forever.
Capt. Sanders explains how when a nuclear weapon is detonated 25 miles or higher in the atmosphere, it produces high-energy gamma radiation directed towards earth. When that hits the atmosphere, the rays interact with air molecules and produce positive ions and recoil electrons. They then interact with the earth’s magnetic field, creating more radiation and in a nanosecond, an electromagnetic pulse. That’s the thing that stops life as we know it, taking out everything that supplies, water, food, temperature, medication, lights, vehicles, …you name it, it’s gone with EMP.
Then the novel shows how people react when they know they’re going to die long painful deaths, be it from disease, starvation, dehydration, thirst, or murder at the hands of others caught in the same grip of fear.
Should everyone read One Second After? Only those with strong stomachs and perhaps a desire to learn more about EMP. Should everyone be concerned that such an event could realistically occur in 2023 in the United States of America. For those who know, or believe, that the know-how and ability might well be in the hands of enemies of the nation today, that’s affirmative.
