# One Second After  ## Metadata - Author: [[William R. Forstchen, Newt Gingrich, and William D. Sanders]] - Full Title: One Second After - Category: #books ## Highlights - “Global warming, sure, spend hundreds of billions on what might have been a threat, though a lot say it wasn’t. This, though, it didn’t have the hype, no big stars or politicians running around shouting about it … and it just never registered on anyone’s screen except for a few.” ([Location 968](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=968)) - “Sun Tzu,” Charlie said. John looked at him and smiled. “The enemy will never attack you where you are strongest. … He will attack where you are weakest. If you do not know your weakest point, be certain, your enemy will,” Charlie said. ([Location 1042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=1042)) - She’d always talk about how great Gandhi was. I’d tell her the only reason Gandhi survived after his first protest was that he was dealing with the Brits. If Stalin had been running India, he’d have been dead in a second, his name forgotten.” ([Location 2087](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=2087)) - In the old days, eating your breeding stock was the final act of desperation.” ([Location 2711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=2711)) - America is like an exotic hothouse plant. It can only live now in the artificial environment of vaccinations, sterilization, and antibiotics we started creating a hundred or more years ago. ([Location 2890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=2890)) - We were spoiled unlike any generation in history, and we forgot completely just how dependent we were on the juice flowing through the wires, the buttons doing something when we pushed them. ([Location 3236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=3236)) - An entire nation going cold turkey on tobacco, alcohol, drugs. No cars, so we have to walk or ride bikes. Might do us some good.” ([Location 3308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=3308)) - Suppose the old America, so wonderful, the country we so loved, suppose at four fifty p.m. eighteen days ago, it died. It died from complacency, from blindness, from not being willing to face the harsh realities of the world. Died from smug self-centeredness. Suppose America died that day.” ([Location 3630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=3630)) - If everyone had been educated about it, the same way Civil Defense had once been in the curriculum of every school back in the 1940s and 1950s, if people had known the simple things to do on Day One and Charlie had already been trained to react to an EMP, mobilize his forces, and react quickly … if they had but a few simple provisions stocked away, the same way anyone who lives in hurricane or tornado country does, would they be in this mess? The crime, the real crime, was those who truly knew the level of threat doing nothing to prepare or prevent it. ([Location 4503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=4503)) - Food, bulk food, just a fifty-pound bag of rice or flour, shoes, batteries, an additional test kit for Jennifer, damn it, even birth control for Elizabeth, dog food, a water filter so they didn’t have to boil what they now pulled out of the swamp green pool … I should have had those on hand. ([Location 4511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=4511)) - They hit us at the worst possible time, early spring. Food ran out before local harvests came in, and a lot of crops, especially farther north, had yet to be put in the ground.” ([Location 5996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=5996)) - were so damn vulnerable, so damn vulnerable, and no one did the right things to prepare, or prevent it. ([Location 6078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=6078)) - People alive in 1860, they knew how to live in that time; they had the infrastructure. We don’t. Turn off the lights, stop the toilets from getting water to flush, empty the pharmacies, turn off the televisions, and we don’t know what to do.” ([Location 6080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=6080)) - A well-designed nuclear weapon detonated at a high altitude over Kansas could have damaging effects over virtually all of the continental United States. ([Location 6159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=6159)) - One of the EMP commissioners, Dr. Lowell Wood, a noted nuclear physicist involved with EMP weapons for three decades, characterizes an EMP event as a “continental time machine that would move us back to the nineteenth century.” When questioned that the technology of a century ago could not support our present population, he unemotionally replied, “Yes, I know. The population will shrink until it [can] be supported by the technology.”7 Farming expertise, horses, and mules would be in short supply. ([Location 6177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002LATV16&location=6177))