Zero Hour: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Fiction Series (The Blackout Series Book 2) (23 page)
Read Zero Hour: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Fiction Series (The Blackout Series Book 2) Online
Authors: Bobby Akart
The last night was uneventful, and Alex woke up her parents from a deep sleep. She used the last of the propane fuel to make a pot of coffee and warm up some blueberry Pop-Tarts. The family was mostly silent as the reality of leaving set in. After they finished off the coffee and used the bathroom, Colton packed up the grill and announced they were ready.
The three of them made one final walk-through as they said goodbye to the home where Alex had lived most of her life. She knew leaving home was a part of growing up and that her time to venture out into the world was coming, but not under these circumstances.
Madison shed several tears as she closed the kitchen door behind them. Colton opened the garage door, revealing the trophy received for the most cleverly negotiated deal in his career—the Jeep Wagoneer. This old truck was their lifeline now. It was their means to a new life far away from the post-apocalyptic madness of the big city.
Colton eased the truck out of the garage and worked his way down the driveway until he had to veer through the front yard to avoid the Suburban. As he wheeled his way around the landscaping, all three of them looked toward the west where fire danced above the tall oak trees. Reminiscent of a scene from
Gone with the Wind
, the magnificent antebellum homes of Belle Meade were in flames.
Madison began to sob now. “Will we ever be able to return?”
“What about our things?” asked Alex.
“Having somewhere to live is home. Having someone to love is family. All we need is right here in this front seat—our family.” With that, Colton drove onto the road and led the Ryman family on a new adventure and to a new home.
They’d reached their turning point—a point of no return.
Thanks for reading Zero Hour, the second book in The Blackout Series! Continue reading for BONUS CONTENT including a 700 item Prepper’s Checklist.
The saga will continue in …
Book three of The Blackout Series
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© 2016 Bobby Akart Inc. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Bobby Akart Inc.
APPENDIX A
Please learn from, and enjoy, a sneak peek of Bobby Akart’s best-selling analysis on the threats we face from an EMP: Electromagnetic Pulse, a part of
The Prepping for Tomorrow Series
by Bobby Akart.
CYBER WARFARE
EMP
ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
AN EXCERPT FROM EMP: ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE
PART TWO
HISTORY OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE
Chapter Four
Significant Events in the History of EMP
1945:
Project Y, Los Alamos, New Mexico
The fact that an electromagnetic pulse is produced by a nuclear explosion was known in the earliest days of nuclear weapons testing. At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, Los Alamos scientists detonated a plutonium bomb at a test site located on the U.S. Air Force base at Alamogordo, New Mexico, approximately 120 miles south of Albuquerque. Project Y was led by famed physicist, Robert Oppenheimer. He chose the name
Trinity
for the test site, inspired by the poetry of John Donne.
When the first atomic bomb finally detonated atop a steel tower, an intense light flash and a sudden wave of heat were followed by a great burst of sound that echoed across the valley. A ball of fire rose into the sky and then was surrounded by a giant mushroom-shaped cloud that stretched approximately thirty-eight thousand feet wide. With the power equivalent to around twenty-one thousand tons of TNT, the bomb completely obliterated the steel tower on which it rested. The nuclear age had begun.
Before the Trinity test, Enrico Fermi, known as the
architect of the nuclear age
, was persuaded by Dr. Oppenheimer to join Project Y at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Part of his responsibilities were to calculate the possible electromagnetic fields produced by the explosion. His calculations led to further testing in the next decade.
1950s: Operation Buffalo, British Testing in Australia
The first in a series of atomic explosions took place at Maralinga, South Australia by a team of British scientists.
Operation Buffalo
commenced on September 27, 1956. Operation Buffalo consisted of the testing of four nuclear devices, codenamed
One Tree, Marcoo, Kite,
and
Breakaway
, respectively.
One Tree
(12.9 kilotons of TNT) and
Breakaway
(10.8 kilotons of TNT) were exploded from steel towers.
Marcoo
(1.4 kilotons of TNT) was exploded at ground level. The last test,
Kite
(2.9 kilotons of TNT), was released by a Royal Air Force Vickers Valiant bomber from a height of thirty-five thousand feet. The
Kite
test was the first reported launching of a nuclear weapon from a British aircraft.
The Operation Buffalo atomic tests were the fourth in a series conducted in Australia. Throughout the 1950s, the British had fired atomic bombs on the deserted Monte Bello Islands, off the coast of Western Australia.
Before Operation Buffalo, instrumentation failures were observed during nuclear weapons testing between 1951 and 1953. Early testing by the UK, revealed a
click
heard on radio receivers when an atomic bomb was detonated. This
click
was often followed by a failure in the equipment. Later, in declassified military literature, the electronic breakdowns were attributed to radiated
radioflash
.
Radioflash
became the term used in early reports on the phenomena, now more widely known as a nuclear electromagnetic pulse. It was later discovered that the phenomena was only one part of the more wide-ranging set of effects resulting from EMPs, after the detonation of nuclear weapons.
1958: Operation Hardtack, Pacific Proving Grounds, United States
Operation Hardtack was a series of thirty-five nuclear tests conducted by the United States in 1958 at the Pacific Proving Grounds, located in the Marshall Islands. Under growing political pressure from the international community to limit nuclear testing, the United States conducted a series of high altitude, multi-megaton tests, to study their usefulness for anti-ballistic missile warheads. In the process, the high-altitude electromagnetic pulse was discovered. After the U.S. had completed six of the high-altitude nuclear tests, the unexpected results that were associated with the EMP effect raised many new questions. The U.S. Government Project Officer's Interim Report on the Starfish Prime project read, in part:
"Previous high-altitude nuclear tests: YUCCA, TEAK, and ORANGE, plus the three ARGUS shots were poorly instrumented and hastily executed. Despite thorough studies of the meager data, present models of these bursts are sketchy and tentative. These models are too uncertain to permit extrapolation to other altitudes and yields with any confidence. Thus, there is a strong need, not only for better instrumentation but for further tests covering a range of altitudes and yields."
The EMP effect observations generated considerable interest within the nuclear science community, leading to additional testing into the 1960’s.
Following the testing by the British and the U.S. in the latter part of the 1950’s, the Soviet Union called for a ban on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and unilaterally halted its nuclear program. The U.S. paused testing for a short time. In late 1961, Nikita Khrushchev, Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was forced to break the moratorium, under internal political pressures. The Soviets began testing once again. The nuclear arms race was on.
1962: Starfish Prime, Operation Fishbowl, United States
Intelligence received from the 1961 Soviet tests raised alarms within U.S. military agencies. Following an analysis of the results, the U.S. became concerned that a Soviet nuclear bomb detonated in space could possibly damage or destroy our advanced weaponry. Consequently, American scientists ratcheted up their nuclear testing program. Although there was some data from the previous high-altitude nuclear tests, the results were inconclusive, in part, due to the surprising results. The newly formed scientific team was determined to be thorough. The result was the implementation of
Operation Fishbowl
.
The
Starfish Prime
test was one of five high-altitude nuclear detonations, conducted as part of
Operation Fishbowl
, a series of tests in 1962 that had begun in direct response to the Soviet announcement on August 30, 1961, that the Soviet Union would end a three-year moratorium on testing. The Starfish Prime test was originally planned as the second in the Operation Fishbowl series, but the first launch, known as
Bluegill
, was lost by the radar-tracking equipment and had to be destroyed in flight.
On July 8, 1962, Honolulu time, at nine seconds after 11 p.m., the Starfish Prime test was successfully detonated at an altitude of two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth's surface. The actual weapon yield came very close to the design yield, approximately 1.4 megatons—equivalent to 1.4 million tons of TNT. The nuclear warhead detonated 13 minutes and 41 seconds after liftoff of the Thor missile from Johnston Island, in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean.