The book "One Second After"
 

Just finished it about 1am this morning.

My review:

Lays out a case which matches my worst nightmares. It should scare the bejeezus out of anyone. Plan to be in a serious funk after the last page if you have any sense at all.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

No summary of the book on the authors website but I believe it might be similar to Lights Out ! by HalfFast.

Either scenario could be plausible in today's world.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Great recommendation!

So much evil has taken over this planet, so much greed. It would seem a fitting end to this putred corrupt mess we call society.
A slow crash involves a lot of long term suffering, and affecting the working class the most, while the elite live like kings and gain even more power until their own demise.
A fast crash like this scenario, will take us all together.
Good governments could have steered our world to a higher plain of enlightenment...but they have choosen not to. Evil rules today.
I hope to see real fear in the eyes of the evil elite, as the population shreds their bodies.
I'll get the book! :yes:

Guide Review - 'One Second After' by William Forstchen - Book Review
William R. Forstchen is accustomed to asking "what if" questions. In One Second After, Forstchen asks not what could have been, but what will be the results of an EMP attack.
Electromagnetic pulses result from natural phenomena and in much greater strength from nuclear blasts. EMPs fry unprotected electronics. A nuclear bomb set off at a high altitude could cause electronics over a large swathe of the planet to fail. Little has been done to protect the US from this threat. This novel depicts what life might be like in the case of an EMP attack.

With no electronics vehicles won't run. How do we move necessities without modern transportation? Without electronics, we have no phones, computers, radios, or televisions. How do we communicate? How do we grow food or run our factories without vehicles or electricity? In One Second After, a lack of food and medicine leads to mass death. Society crumbles. Cities turn against the countryside and friends and neighbors turn against each other in a desperate struggle to survive. Criminals take advantage. Forstchen humanizes it by giving a detailed look at how events unfold around Montreat College in North Carolina. He uses convincing detail to make the events real.

One Second After is a masterpiece of distopian literature that ranks with 1984 and Brave New World. More important though than its role in our literature is what we do about the grave threat it portrays. Because, one second after the attack, it'll be too late.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Ya know, it never ceases to amaze me how so many fear death so much.
I'm not talking about suffering, just death itself.
Why do so many Christians fear it?
If you have a strong faith, why would you not welcome death knowing you are going to the promised land?
Our time on earth is not even a speck in the grand scheme of things.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Local radio interview (Mike Rosen KOA Denver) with the author, a few days ago.

http://a1135.g.akamai.net/f/1135/182...ike_Rosen_Show

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I'm not afraid of waking up...

"Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream..." :s1:

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Thanks for the recommendation! I just logged onto my local library's website and put a hold on it. The book is popular, I am #12 in the hold line.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Exactly.

"...there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imaginations of ourselves*."

*meaning we are each responsible for 'steering' our boat

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Some us are not religious. And there are religions that do not promise an afterlife. Having said that, I'm 64 years old. I've had a wonderful life full of the love of friends and family, a successful career, financial success--a life full of good things. No one can take that wonderful experience away from me because I've already lived it. And, I am too old to die young. I'm not sure for what more I should ask. If I die today, don't feel sorry for me.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I'm in the long slow multi-generational agonizingly apathetic ossified catatonic decline camp. So books like this where there is an immediate shock to the system never seem likely to me. But it might be a good read.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

It is an OK book. Get it from the library, don't buy it.

A few technical errors, strained credibility on a few plot details, and please be aware it was written as propaganda against "rogue nations" like North Korea & Iran. That's why Newt Gingrich endorses it.

It is still worth reading nonetheless.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Reading as we speak. So far so good. Also originally from State of Franklin, Andy. The most upper eastern part, but now actually live not far from where this book takes place.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I read it a few weeks ago. It's a shame they didn't have that physicist from Lucifer's Hammer with them. What with a college campus full of labs, a medical library that went back 100 years, and all those pancreases from butchered livestock...

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I thought the same thing about the animal pancreases.....I don't know how they make insulin today, whether it's an artificial process or still animal based.....but before I'd have let my kid die, I'd have been finding out how they did it originally.

Also, I couldn't help thinking what an idiot the main character was for not being more prepped.....heck, they make tiny solar powered fridge units JUST for insulin storage, and again, if I had a kid with Type 1, I'd have a backup to the backup...

Or in the part where two guys break in to their house....which had apparently happened the previous nights at neighbor's houses....a simple battery powered alarm, or a bunch of string and tin cans even, or pulling guard duty ( they had enough people in the house ) would have saved the dog, and possibly themselves....

I know it was just a book, but I found a lot of it wanting.....

But the overall effect was about what I would expect.....huge reduction in population.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Propane and natural gas refrigeration is pretty common. Especially among the Amish who won't use electricity. Completely impervious to EMP.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Fast and Slow only in relation to each other. Captain Trips would be faster still, and a Coronal Mass Expulsion even more so. Only the last would be "fast enough"--besides, most of us are preparing for "slow", since a wave of charged plasma blowing away our atmosphere is beyond even Ponce's preps.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I haven't read the book but this guy was on coast to coast a couple weeks ago and his description of how/when an EMP attack happens was scary.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2009/07/13

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

AUDIO DOWNLOAD

175 mg


http://www.zshare.net/download/697156339342d768/


my computer says 31 min download time / 84.5 KB/sec

i'll save it later for tonight

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I think the book is an absolutely worst case scenario but I could certainly see an enemy setting off one bomb in the upper atmosphere and frying the electronics over a large part of the US. I doubt that they would be successful and take out all of the electronics from coast to coast. Of course even if they set it off 100 miles over NYC they would still cause the deaths of tens of millions of people, ruin our economy and cost us years of rebuilding. It's very likely that one bomb could send America back to being a 2nd class power.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Or one really big solar flare........

Google: Carrington flare

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

And for the lazy, just click here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I read "Lucifer's Hammer" thousands of years ago, don't recall much about it, except that I enjoyed reading it.

As for "One Second After," if I can't read it free on the net, I won't be reading it at all.

Doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out the implications of an EMF attack.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

YIKES!!! In that case, what year did GM start using electronic ignitions???

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Just bought a copy of the book from Amazon. Thanks for posting this thread.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Bump for the weekenders.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Alas, these poor people had no brain surgeons. It even took their resident retired military officer far too long to figure out what was going on. It seemed rather unlikely that the military officer wouldn't have a clue when all the cars on the highway stopped running at the same time.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I remember reading somewhere - I think it was in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons that it would take only five 1MT nukes at 200 miles altitude, properly spaced, to take out most of the US electric/electronic infrastructure via EMP. And you wouldn't see, hear or feel a thing.

R.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Andy, what would an EMP do to your solar system?

The thing I would want to protect the most would be the tractor, any thoughts on the effects to my Kubota?

No more questions for now.

Thanks!

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

[QUOTE=Tn...Andy;1849292]I thought the same thing about the animal pancreases.....I don't know how they make insulin today, whether it's an artificial process or still animal based.....but before I'd have let my kid die, I'd have been finding out how they did it originally.

Also, I couldn't help thinking what an idiot the main character was for not being more prepped.....heck, they make tiny solar powered fridge units JUST for insulin storage, and again, if I had a kid with Type 1, I'd have a backup to the backup...

Making insulin in not an easy process.

A human insulin facility employs several sophisticated technologies and equipment used for the first time in India. The human insulin manufacturing process begins by fermenting a methylotrophic yeast wherein expression is controlled by the rate of dosing alcohol. The cells are harvested using a continuous centrifuge and the product-containing liquid is processed by large-scale chromatography, bioconversion and crystallization. The lyophilized bulk product is obtained after multiple purification steps involving high pressure chromatography which can separate closely eluting impurities. The final processing steps are carried out in high quality, electropolished, steam sterilizable equipment in a controlled environment with restricted entry through multiple airlocks. The entire process is largely automated and monitored continuously in a central control room by trained personnel

Stocking up would be the only way to go.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Thanks, Armed Peasant. From what I'd read of their first successful experiments with it, it appeared that the process might be easier, if more hit or miss. Of course, what I read was very general and didn't walk the reader through details or steps. I actually wondered if the author was setting up things in the book to foreshadow an attempt to extract insulin, then realized it wasn't really feasible, as he made a point of mentioning the huge college medical library going back decades (not to mention the livestock), then didn't do anything with it.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I think if you could get it from an animal the dosage would be very hard to manage. It would be very easy to give too much and the end result could be death.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

The issues I have with damage predictions from nuclear EMP, is from fairly limited experience from the 1962 Starfish Prime events in the Pacific testing area (Johnston Island and Hawaii). I would imagine further data has been obtained from underground tests after the Limited Test Ban. and I have seen some of the Soviet EMP test results as well. I'm not saying that EMP damage isn't real, but the extent of damage is not a 100% known quantity.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

AP:

My solar would likely be trashed. I lost an inverter last year to a lightning strike ( I've since added more grounding and arrestors all over the system )

One of the problems is that it is grid tied.....so the power line would act like a great big antennae allowing the pulse to run in on it.....but I suspect even an off grid system would have the same problem, depending on how close and how powerful the pulse. The panels themselves might survive, the problem would be the electronic components in the charge controller and the inverters. I'd like to be able to buy spare components and keep them in a Faraday cage, but that means about 6k worth of insurance for a low possibility event.

Your tractor ( and mine ): My guess is "Probably" they would start....it would take a HECK of a pulse to burn out things like a starter motor. Both being diesels with mechanical fuel injection ( I'm guessing yours is like mine ), EMP would have no effect there.

Problem would be things like the voltage regulator for the charging system....it might very well get zapped, meaning the engine would run, but you wouldn't be recharging the battery.....so you'd have a limited number of times you could start the engine unless you figured out a way to recharge the battery....night be able to come straight off the alternator, and run the engine up to where it was putting out 13-15v and just let it idle there. Main purpose of a voltage regulator is to cut out high side voltage so you don't damage other things, like light bulbs/etc.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Gas soldering iron, and kit to make a spare VRM. I could fashion one up for you. =O

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Definitely, but in a situation like the one in the book, those who were insulin-dependent were dying. A long shot would have been better than no shot at it.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I have signed copies of the book, and my husband and I entertained the author (or he entertained us) on the town for several days when he came to Offutt AFB, Nebraska to speak at a conference and meet with members of the military working in the field of EMP hardening.

Bill Forstchen is a brilliant personality. I enjoyed the book very much, and the potential for damage to the grid is very plausible, either as the result of EMP or from a high-energy solar event.

Many more cars are likely to survive than in his scenario though...

It's one of my worst nightmares, but I heartily recommend that everyone read the book. The military is having difficulty making Congress take the threat seriously.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

You know what!!!!!!!
I think my take-away opinion is ten times stronger than yours.
Have a good day---AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
CC

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Liked the book. I thought the main character was very "un-military" like. To be on the edge of a General... He didn't act like it at all. Would've expected more discipline, weapons, organization. And I didn't buy the "I think I read about an EMP in an old paper I have in the desk."

Don't get me wrong, I really liked the book. Just nit-picking.

The mass starvation and mass migration was minimized in Lights Out. One Second After scared the crap out of me in that aspect.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I don't know anything about tractors, but I know my motorcycle (and all modern ones that I know) have a regulator that is actually a (rectifier/regulator) the juice coming of the stator is AC and the rectifier converts it to DC and the regulator brings it to the desired DC charging voltage, around 14.3V.
If the reg/rec goes out you can't bypass it.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Andy,
I concur your starter might not have any problems.

BUT your solenoid might. I stashed two away. At $60 each RIGHT NOW, it's really cheap insurance.

Both my CUCV's are 6.2 diesel, TH400 transmission, mechanical IP, mechanical fuel pump (backed up with an electric on - yes I've got a spare for each).

All these parts are readily available NOW. Putting things like this off WILL cause problems. The parts may still be available, but FINDING them, and then finding how to purchase them...

Well, time better spent NOT worrying about it. Just spent the money and covered those bases.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Like most of America's current high brass, he was a politician, not a professional soldier. Very few are professional soldiers, and most, like Admiral Fallon, leave before their time.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I'm not so sure about that. Car electronics burn out without EMP easy enough as it is.


There's not a damn thing they can do to protect against EMP or a Carrington Event repeat. It would cost trillions to harden even the most essential equipment. Almost all of our infrastructure (bridges, electrical grid) is falling apart, and there's hardly any money to maintain that...let alone a threat which could come tomorrow...or in 2153.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

i keep several spare regulators,rectifiers for the alternator which i use in several application just in case. they are cheap and easy to replace.
but for a stationary motor and probably also a tractor which is normally
operated at a steady rpm it is possible to regulate using a resistor
circuit this link has some good imfo on how to do it. similar resistor
circuit could also be used to make your alternator a welder i think

http://homepower.com/files/webextras/mark8.pdf

maybee with the tractor have it set up to only charge very slowly at high rpm
change the resistance to set a higher or lower charge rate.not ideal but might
get you out of some trouble if semicunductors are fried.

some other good alternator imfo


http://oljeep.com/gw/alt/Alternator_Theory.html



edit OOPS was not thinking about rectification that would still be required to charge into DC anybody know a old school rectification method?

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Hardly any money???
That's because the Obamalama and his cronies are more interested in killing this economy by doing a $2 TRILLION DOLLAR GOVERNMENT-CONTROLLED health (DEATH) care bill, and bailing out their banking cronies and union thugs... while saying: "screw the infrastructure... it's STILL not 3rd world enough... but we'll take care of THAT!!!"

Unless something changes SOON (and in days regarding the health-DEATH bill)... we are DOOMED!!! :36_1_28:

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

I'm not quite midway thru chapter 10.

I've found that this is not really the same as some of the typical SHTF fiction that I've read. It seems that some of the stuff that comes out of the "prepper culture" is almost too idealistic... In other words- they always have a fix for any problem that they encounter- Hell they're preppers - there is nothing short of the apocalyptic destruction of the very Earth itself that they can't survive.

This has been quite a bit more realistic in respect to a community's ability to cope.

No cakewalk. Overwhelming problems, obstacles...death death death death.

With regard to those issues - I'd say this is a more realistic representation of problems that will be faced.


As for other elements.... meh.. its aight.

Re: The book "One Second After"
 

Just finished reading it last night, so I didn't get much sleep. It was about as much fun as watching Schindler's List, but it puts the reader in a more realistic mind-set versus reading about what kinds of things to stock up on and how we're gonna just "shoot anyone who comes through the door" when TSHTF.

It was quite depressing and very possibly quite accurate. Our civilization exists because of technology. Try living where it's 20 below zero in the Winter without heat (Depending solely on wood heat won't cut it). And our food is even more dependant.

I almost looked forward to some sort of disaster in the past so I could have fun using all the preps I have and feel like I have an edge over everyone else. But now, I don't think anyone really has much of an edge anymore. If you have preps, others will notice it and will try to break into your house. If you shoot them, then their friends will firebomb your house to flush you out and kill you in revenge. Some things just can't be prepared for.

Also, you could try to evacuate to somewhere safer, but the book shows that everyone else will do the same, and therefore NO place would end up being safe. Also, I think that anyone seen driving a car would be attacked in order to confiscate that car. The book hinted at that several times.

I'll still prepare, but I no longer believe it will allow me to get through the situation unscathed, but would just give me a little more time to sort things out and figure out what would need to be done after that, assuming anything could be done other than hole-up for as long as possible before the invaders came.

Like I said--depressing!