Annie Jacobsen, in her remarkable book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, vividly describes what happens after a Super-EMP weapon is detonated over the central US.1
“Of America’s 280 million registered vehicles, “10 percent of the vehicles on the road [are] suddenly not running anymore . . . Without power steering or electric brakes, vehicles coast to a stop or crash into other vehicles, into buildings, into walls. Stalled and crashed vehicles block lanes of traffic on roads and bridges everywhere, no longer just in places where people have been fleeing nuclear bombs but in tunnels and on overpasses, on big and small roads, in driveways and in parking lots across the nation . . . Electric pumping of fuel has just come to a permanent and fatal end.
There will be no more fresh water. No more toilets to flush. No sanitation. No streetlights, no tunnel lights, no lights at all, only candles, until there are none left to burn. No gas pumps, no fuel. No ATM, No cash withdrawals. No access to money. No cell phones. No landlines. No calling 911. No calls at all. No emergency communication systems except some high-frequency (HF) radios. No ambulance services. No hospital equipment that works. Sewage spills out everywhere. It takes less than fifteen minutes for disease-carrying insects to swarm. To feed on piles of human waste, on garbage, on the dead.
Billions of gallons of water passing through America’s aqueducts surge uncontrollably. Dams burst. Mass flooding begins sweeping infrastructure and people away. Thousands of subway trains, passenger trains, and freight trains traveling in every direction, many on the same tracks, collide with one another, crash into walls and barriers, or derail. Elevators stop between floors, or speed to the ground and crash. Satellites (including the international space station) shift out of position and begin falling to Earth. America’s fifty-three remaining nuclear power plants, now operating on backup systems, have just begun to collectively run out of time.” (Jacobsen, 2024, pp. 264-267)
- Jacobsen, A. (2024). Nuclear War: A Scenario, Penguin Random House, ISBN 978-0593476093 ↩︎