One Second After

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]