John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Part of the fun was that Wilson wasn’t entirely sure what would happen. That is to say, he couldn’t be sure of everything that would happen. There would be a cascade of consequences whose end might be observed – but not predicted.

Culpeper itself would be paralyzed, yes. Its cars and tractors would be inoperable, its microwaves and television sets dead. There would be no light, no water, no working sewage system. ATMs, gas stations, bank vaults, security alarms – these would all go down. And they would not come back up.

He wondered how long it would take before anyone would realize the extent of the damage. People were used to power outages and computer crashes. But this would be different, the damage structural, pervasive, and permanent.

It occurred to him that the effect of the pulse would be the opposite of a neutron bomb. A neutron bomb would kill the living things and leave the infrastructure viable. His pulse would destroy the infrastructure without directly impacting anything that lived and breathed.

The local impact would be ironic in at least one way: A small town that just happened to process more than two trillion dollars in transactions per day, would be without access to any cash.

Not that there would be any way to spend it. Cash registers, credit card machines – none of these would work.

Doors would not open, except by hand and key. Those controlled by chips would have to be taken off their hinges. He wondered about the county jail. If the cell doors were locked by computer, would they stay locked when the systems crashed? Or would the inmates simply be able to stroll out.

Gasoline pumps would not work either, although, for a while at least, there would be little need for gasoline. Vehicles would simply come to a stop as their computer-driven systems stopped firing the fuel injectors. Power brakes and steering would shut down, much as if the drivers had turned off their ignitions. Strong drivers with good reactions ought to be able to bring their vehicles safely to a stop, but it was inevitable that many would lose control.

Trucks? He didn’t think they’d fare so well, despite the skill of their drivers and their hydraulic braking systems. Trucks would be in the grip of Newtonian forces aligned against them. The greater mass of the vehicles – and hence their velocity – coupled with the failure of the steering and braking systems, would probably send them out of control.

They’d become unguided missiles.

There would be fires from the exploding fuel tanks and possible HazMat spills. It all depended on which trucks, hauling which loads, were where when the EMP – the electromagnetic pulse – hit.

There would be a number of immediate fatalities – and not just from car crashes. Aircraft unlucky enough to be traversing the affected area would drop from the sky. Pacemakers would go down. Hospitals would become… inhospitable. Their generators – backups that automatically cut in during power failures – were hooked up to the building’s electrical system, so they would be destroyed by the pulse. Intubated patients in the midst of surgery would die. Monitors and electronically controlled breathing apparatus and drug delivery systems would fail. Locked pharmacies would not open to electronic codes. Elevators would stall between floors.

The most prolonged effect would be caused by damage to the basic infrastructure, especially the roads. Before anyone could address the replacement of the power grid or the restoration of water and sewer, Culpeper’s streets would have to be cleared. And they would be choked with inoperable cars. Cars that would never work again.

As for the banking facilities themselves, Wilson was less sure of what would happen. Of course, they would be hardened against EMP. But they would not be able to withstand the pulse he’d be unleashing – a scalar pulse far more potent than the EMP from a nuclear detonation at high altitude. The only defense would be a Tesla shield – and no one had that.

And how would the world financial community react to an attack of this sort? He didn’t know. The big systems – Fedwire and CHIPS and SWIFT – were undoubtedly fail-safe. They had to be. The trillions of gigabytes flowing between banks represented real money, with electronic tracking the only records of the transactions.

But Culpeper was a big cog. Even if it was only down for a minute, it would rattle the world’s financial markets. Because, of course, if Culpeper could be hit, so could the backups.

Wilson would bet that the stock exchanges and central banks would have to close. Would people panic? He didn’t know. He’d be listening to the radio as he drove west.

Study of the effects of EMP dated back to the days of nuclear tests in the atmosphere. When the Los Alamos boys began to get too much flack for detonating devices close to the ground in Nevada, the tests were moved to isolated islands in the Pacific.

People still squawked. The thermal and blast damage might not be important in these out-of-the-way locales, but the radiation, and its persistence in the soil, was still a problem. The areas would be closed to humanity for decades. Maybe forever.

And there was another problem: Fishermen or nomads had a way of stumbling into harm’s way, then to become public relations nightmares, living (or dying) examples of the effects of radiation on the human body.

So the scientists took to the skies.

The way they figured it, tests at high altitude would inflict little blast or thermal damage, and the radioactive fallout would be dispersed over a large area. In this diluted state, the radiation would cause relatively little harm. What they hadn’t counted on was a side effect of high-altitude detonation: the electromagnetic pulse.

What happens during a nuclear detonation at altitude is that gamma rays released by the explosion crash into molecules in the atmosphere – oxygen and nitrogen – causing a discharge of high-energy electromagnetic radiation.

When such a pulse hits any conductive material – wires, power lines, antennas, cables, radio towers, railroad tracks, pipes, metal fencing – it is carried along. If the EMP hits an antenna leading to a radio, the radio is fried by the ensuing surge. If the antenna leads to the interior of a reconnaissance airplane, the EMP will destroy the aircraft’s instruments. If the railroad track leads to a switching mechanism – or a train – it will burn out the controls. If the pulse hits a building, all its electrical circuits will melt.

Los Alamos physicists found out about EMP’s destructive potential in 1962 when they detonated a 1.4 megaton device called Starfish Prime over Johnston Island in the Pacific. On Hawaii, more than seven hundred fifty miles away, electronic systems collapsed. Streetlights flickered out in Oahu, telephones went down in Kauai. Airplanes in the vicinity lost instrumentation. Radio communications were disrupted more than eighteen hundred miles from the blast.

The Russians had similar experiences: power lines blown out of commission, communications systems destroyed, villages darkened.

There were fears that a single high-altitude blast detonated over Kansas would generate an EMP that would destroy all electronics in the lower forty-eight.

Scientists were already so worried about EMP damage in the sixties – when computers were few and digital technology was in its infancy – that nuclear testing went underground after the Johnston Island blast.

Now, computers were ubiquitous and digital technology was behind everything from missile guidance systems to espresso machines.

As a result, the effects of a high-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse would be so profound as to be irreversible. Wilson believed that the pulse he intended to launch from the Nevada fire lookout tower would destroy the entire infrastructure of the continental United States. In one second, the world’s only remaining superpower would be a third-world country on par with… Angola.