I just finished William Forstchen's book, One Second After.  The premise of the novel is that an EMP weapon is inflicted upon the U.S., bringing our civilization to its knees.  Without electricity or the use of anything with electronics, our fragile way of life collapses quickly.  Unlike James Wesley Rawles's fanciful novel, Patriots, which centers on survivalist ideas and that preparedness for the SHTF scenario is all-important, Forstchen draws attention to the fragility of both human bonds and human bodies.  Without fresh medication, the chronically ill will perish within a matter of months.  Without distribution systems to get food from the producers to the consumers, famine is inevitable, and people can turn on one another.  Lacking sanitation and means for basic hygiene, disease would cull the population.  Combat scenarios wouldn't be the glorious victories us gun-toting types like to fancifully imagine; the cost in blood to maintain against desperate, merciless opponents would be higher than we care to imagine.  Perhaps Rawles's somewhat optimistic estimation of how loose bands of people would come together is possible.  Yet as long as one's considering the worst-case scenario for the sake of planning, why mince notions?  Most likely, Patriots was meant to be inspirational, as opposed to the message of warning of One Second After.

In the end, people survive as a community, not as individuals or even as family-sized groups.  And well, since my specialty is computers, after an EMP I suppose those skills wouldn't be useful at all.  While I might be able to earn my keep as an armorer or a sentry, those aren't as useful as things like medical expertise or automotive repair skills.  My wife's expertise with baking from scratch and cooking using a variety of ingredients makes her already more valuable than me to a group, not to mention some mechanical skills.  I'd better do a serious personal inventory....

I surmise that the reason for the zeitgeist of the "Tea Party" folk is they've done the math regarding likelihood of survival should things break down, politically or otherwise, and realize that while it might feel good for a while to be the well-prepared ant of the fable obtaining karmic justice against the lazy grasshopper, society isn't going to crawl out of that dark place for a long while.  The objective is to be focused and fix things before they go there.  Real politics is what happens between the last breakdown of society to the next one, because all sides know how bad it can get and do the dance to avoid it.  The Tea Partiers I know are the kind of people who would want to prepare for the EMP scenario: after all, as Louis Pasteur put it, "...chance favors the prepared mind."  The challenge for me is going against my lone wolf tendencies to become more of a community-oriented person.

One technical question I had after reading the book is regarding how the EMP effects electronics; I presume the pulse induces high currents in sensitive circuits, thus causing permanent damage.  So the way around this is to shield the electronics by means of a Faraday cage.  What would the parameters of such shielding be, i.e. the thickness of the metal and the nature of the earth ground?  For example, one might devise an off-grid setup by which an array of solar panels charge a bank of 12V lead-acid batteries, which in turn feed an inverter switched into an alternate low-load circuit in the house (for lights, cooking, and perhaps running a small fridge).  To harden that, do the wires have to be shielded from the panel to the batteries, with all equipment residing in a grounded metal box?  What about the house wiring, will that eat itself (breakdown via excessive current) in an EMP, or will it survive to switch over to the solar setup?  I ought to read the EMP Commission's report in case they reference details.

Ever since I read George Stewart's Earth Abides in (junior high?) honors English, I've been intrigued with post-apocalyptic scenarios.  There was another book I read, After the Bomb, which imagined how life would change if a nuclear device were detonated in the U.S., but that didn't eliminate the framework of our society completely.  The truly depressing scenarios are the ones where society collapses and there's no going back to the way we were.  Thinking about it certainly makes one appreciate more what one has.