One Second After: The Real-World Framework for the Fictional Scenario

William Forstchen’s One Second After showed America what an electromagnetic pulse attack does to a small town. The Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience built the framework to make sure it doesn’t happen that way.

The Book That Changed the EMP Conversation

When William R. Forstchen published One Second After in 2009, it did something no government report had managed: it made the EMP threat real to ordinary Americans. Set in Black Mountain, North Carolina, the novel follows retired Army colonel John Matherson as his community collapses after a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse destroys the national power grid. No phones. No cars. No water pressure. No resupply. Within weeks, the town is rationing food, burying its dead, and fighting off armed gangs from neighboring areas.

The book reached number 11 on the New York Times bestseller list. It was cited in Congressional testimony. It was followed by two sequels — One Year After and The Final Day — that carried the story through the first year of recovery. Forstchen, a history professor at Montreat College in the mountains of western North Carolina, drew on real EMP Commission findings to build his scenario. The novel’s afterword by Captain Bill Sanders, USN, confirmed that the technical premise was sound.

The story resonated because people recognized the fragility Forstchen described. Every detail — the insulin that couldn’t be refrigerated, the nursing home residents who couldn’t be evacuated, the highway refugees who overwhelmed the town’s resources — mapped to infrastructure dependencies that exist in every American community today.

The Movie Adaptation

The One Second After feature film is now in production, directed by Scott Rogers with a screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5 and screenwriter of Changeling). William Forstchen serves as executive producer. The film stars Famke Janssen, Josh Holloway, Hannah John-Kamen, and Mary McDonnell. Filming began in September 2025 in Bulgaria. MPI Original Films is producing in association with Startling Inc., the production company behind Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.

The film will introduce the EMP scenario to a far larger audience than the book ever reached. For many viewers, it will be the first time they’ve considered what happens to their own community when the grid goes down — not for hours, but for weeks or months.

That’s exactly the question the Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience was built to answer.

What Black Mountain Gets Right

Forstchen’s novel is remarkably accurate about the cascade sequence. Energy fails first. Water fails within hours because pumps lose power. Communications go dark. Transportation stops. The medical system collapses as medications expire and hospitals exhaust backup generators. Food distribution ceases entirely. Governance fragments.

This is the same cascade sequence documented in FIR’s 16-sector critical infrastructure model — the six-tier dependency structure where Tier 1 (Energy) drives failure in Tier 2 (Water, Food, Chemical), which drives failure in Tier 3 (Transportation, Communications, Fuel), which drives failure in Tier 4 (Healthcare, Emergency Services). The novel’s timeline matches FIR’s modeling almost exactly.

Forstchen also gets the human dimension right: the community that survives is the one that organizes, rations, assigns roles, and makes hard governance decisions under extreme pressure. Black Mountain’s town council, however imperfectly, becomes the governing authority. Veterans provide security leadership. The college becomes a coordination hub. Neighbors who know each other form the units that hold the community together.

What Black Mountain Gets Wrong — And What Diamond Blue Fixes

The novel’s community is reactive. It has no pre-event plan, no stockpiles, no hardened infrastructure, no mutual aid agreements with the military installation nearby, no training, and no communications capability beyond runners and a single shortwave radio. Every decision is improvised under crisis conditions. The death toll reflects it — Forstchen estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the American population dies within the first year.

The FIR Diamond Blue community model is the pre-event answer to Black Mountain’s post-event improvisation. A Diamond Blue community has:

Energy independence. Distributed generation, battery storage, and microgrid capability — not the national grid, but enough to run water treatment, medical stations, communications, and governance. The grid goes down; essential services don’t.

Water self-sufficiency. Treatment and distribution systems the community controls and can operate without external power or chemical supply chains for 30 or more days. Black Mountain’s water failed because nobody had planned for a grid-down water system. A Diamond Blue community has.

Food security beyond 72 hours. Local agricultural production, community food storage, and supply chain alternatives. The FIR framework includes a three-leg food supply assessment methodology that maps grocery supply chains (fragile, 3 to 7 days), regional agriculture (sustainable, requires procurement contracts), and coastal or aquatic protein sources where applicable.

Governance that survives. Three-tier governance succession, pre-authorized emergency operational authority, and a community governance council that activates automatically when normal government communications fail. Black Mountain spent its first critical days arguing about who had authority to do what. A Diamond Blue community resolved that question before the event.

Trained people who know the plan. FIR’s training and certification pathway runs from BSE 099 (a free orientation course) through Diamond Blue Assessor certification. The difference between Black Mountain’s improvised response and a trained response is the difference between 90 percent mortality and community survival.

Communications that work when the grid doesn’t. Amateur radio networks, mesh communications, and non-grid-dependent coordination. FIR’s Tier 0S (Security, Governance, and Rule of Law) architecture includes a communications doctrine built around ham radio operators, Civil Defense wardens, and multi-node mesh networks.

The Threat Is Real. The Framework Exists.

The EMP scenario in One Second After is not science fiction. The Congressional EMP Commission documented the threat across multiple reports from 2004 through 2017. In 2024, the FBI, CISA, and NSA issued joint public advisories confirming that Chinese cyber actors (Volt Typhoon) have gained persistent access to American power grids, water treatment systems, and communications networks. Iran, Russia, and North Korea maintain complementary capabilities.

FIR’s Four-Party Ecosystem framework documents how these four adversary nations have pre-positioned the capability to execute precisely the scenario Forstchen described — and extends the analysis beyond EMP to include coordinated cyber, physical, and institutional attack vectors that the novel does not address.

The difference between the novel and reality is this: in the novel, nothing was built before the event. In reality, the framework exists. The Fresh Start Initiative provides free, data-driven infrastructure assessments for any municipality in America. The assessment maps your community’s actual infrastructure, identifies your single points of failure, traces your dependency chains, and delivers a complete roadmap from where you are today to Diamond Blue self-sufficiency.

Your Community’s Path Forward

If One Second After made you think about your town’s vulnerability, here’s what you can do right now:

Start with awareness. Enroll in BSE 099, FIR’s free Black Sky Event orientation course. It takes less than an hour and gives you the foundational understanding of what a BSE means for your community.

Request an assessment. The Fresh Start Initiative is free. FIR loads your community’s critical infrastructure from 10 or more federal databases, traces dependency chains, identifies single points of failure, and delivers a 12-document suite tailored to your actual infrastructure. Traditional consulting for this scope runs $75,000 to $175,000 for a mid-size municipality. The Fresh Start package is delivered in minutes.

Bring it to your local government. The assessment includes a BSE Readiness Roadmap, a Grant Navigator that maps federal funding sources to your specific gaps, and a Program Management Guide. These are designed to be presented to city councils, county commissions, and emergency management directors.

Connect with FIR. Volunteer, donate, or contact us to learn more about how your community can begin the path to Diamond Blue certification.

William Forstchen wrote the warning. FIR built the answer.

The Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience is a 501(c)(3) national security nonprofit. FIR is not affiliated with William R. Forstchen, MPI Original Films, or the One Second After film production. We cite the novel and film as the most widely recognized public depictions of the EMP scenario that FIR’s framework is designed to address.