We can't all get off the grid, growing our own food, digging our own wells and going solar. On a personal level, Forstchen says the preppers are onto something. 'The federal government has done nothing, underline nothing, to push the utility companies toward hardening the grids to survive such an event. So how can governments prepare for these types of events, and how can we as individuals hedge our bets to become a ten percenter? Forstchen says Texas is better positioned than most states, but we need to shore up our systems. The chilling part - and this is a congressional report - the casualty rate would be 90 percent of all Americans would perish within the year.' '.we could lose the next war in one second, start to finish, if an opponent popped three nukes over the United States.' tweet this An electromagnetic disturbance overloads the power grid, the power grid is gone. The congressional report stated we could lose the next war in one second, start to finish, if an opponent popped three nukes over the United States, about 300 miles up. 'I started working on the whole issue of our electrical infrastructure in 2004 when the government put out the report of an EMP attack on the electrical infrastructure. We might all die within two days,' warns Forstchen. That’s game ender, an extinction level event. 'We get hit by a CME, that pulls back the magnetosphere, then the CPE strikes the earth’s surface. In Forstchen's book, a catastrophic solar storm peels back our planet's protective magnetosphere and, when it's followed by a second storm, it destroys the world's electrical infrastructure.

Had it occurred a week earlier we would have suffered widespread power blackouts and urban populations wouldn't even have been able to flush toilets because of water suppliers' dependence on electric pumps. We had a near miss in July 2012 when a coronal mass ejection, or solar superstorm, tore through Earth's orbit. But it had only been around for 15 or 20 years and the wires were burning off poles, telegraph batteries were bursting into flames, even railroad ties were on fire because the metal rails were taking the charge,' says Forstchen. 'The internet technology of the day went down: telegraphy. A solar storm in 1859 - now referred to as the Carrington Event - induced one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record. In recorded history we've already had a few close calls.

What are the odds that it’s going to hit the BB?,' asks Forstchen. 24 Magnum bullet gets fired off that grapefruit and there’s an explosion. 'Picture a little BB orbiting around a grapefruit. Author photo by Mindy Clinard 'You don’t want the readers sitting there, cross-eyed, saying, 'This is boring, this is worse than junior high,'' says Forstchen, who uses a BB (Earth) and grapefruit (the sun) to demonstrate the probability.

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