Book Description

Americans are not being told by the news media about the biggest story of their lifetimes. Every night every television news channel is desperately worried about the global economic crisis, looming recession, protracted unemployment, Wall Street and the housing market, government spending and taxation, and "going over the "fiscal cliff." But there is a much bigger untold story about a threat to the global economy--and to the very existence of global civilization--yet so rarely mentioned anywhere that, as described by the title of this book, it is an "Apocalypse Unknown." The biggest story is this. December 2012 commenced the solar maximum, and significantly increased the possibility of a geomagnetic super-storm, something like a space hurricane, that could collapse electric grids and all the critical infrastructures that support modern civilization, and the lives of billions worldwide. The Sun is a gigantic ongoing thermonuclear explosion, equivalent to billions of nuclear warheads detonating every second, contained by gravity. During the solar maximum the Sun hurls into space more solar flares and coronal mass ejections--basically enormous chunks of itself, many times larger than the Earth. If one of these solar torpedoes hits the Earth, it could generate a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would collapse electric power grids everywhere, plunging every modern nation into a protracted blackout. Perhaps permanently. Worldwide, billions could die. The Earth is overdue for a solar super-storm that could inflict a global catastrophe. The last such super-storm, called the Carrington Event, happened in 1859. It caused fires in telegraph stations and destroyed the newly laid trans-Atlantic cable. But in those horse and buggy days civilization did not depend upon electricity. The Congressional EMP Commission estimated that a Carrington class geomagnetic super-storm probably occurs every century. Arithmetic suggests that, as of this writing in December 2012, as we enter another solar maximum, we are 53 years overdue for another Carrngton Event. There is another part of this biggest story never told by the major media. Nightly news shows, to the extent they discuss foreign affairs, sometimes mention Iran's nuclear weapons program, and how it poses a threat to Israel and could provoke a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. The untold story is that a nuclear Iran--or nuclear terrorists, or North Korea, China, Russia or any state or non-state actor armed with a single nuclear missile--could make an EMP attack on the United States that would collapse the life-sustaining critical infrastructures, and threaten the existence of American civilization. The damage from a nuclear EMP attack would be deeper and harder to repair than the damage from a natural EMP catastrophe caused by a Carrington class geomagnetic super-storm. Making a nuclear EMP attack is relatively easy to do. Iran openly writes about making a nuclear EMP attack to eliminate the United States as an actor on the world stage. Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina have given America a slight foreshadowing of what life without electricity would be like, in the aftermath of an EMP inflicted by terrorists or the Sun. This book is the story of a handful of political leaders, scientists, strategists, and grassroots activists who have struggled against gargantuan bureaucracies in government and industry to protect the nation from an EMP catastrophe. It tells where we are winning--and why we may lose. Perhaps the most important message of this book is that Washington is so blind and so broken that The People need to intervene, need to ride to the rescue like the U.S. cavalry of old, to make the ignorant, stubborn and negligent bureaucrats in government and industry do the right thing. National EMP preparedness needs to happen--now. You need to read this book as it is fundamentally about saving your life. Just by knowing, you become part of the solution.