A late second to this - please tell your friend Mr. Forstchen I found his book to be chilling as you say, and really an eye-opener. I’m honestly not sure this is not the #1 threat, when you do an objective analysis (and ignore the ignorant comments here and elsewhere). It’s a case of bang for the buck, and all an enemy has to go is detonate one nuclear EMP weapon successfully to basically sent us back to the 1850s “one second after”. Not only is the gov’t not preparing for this, but I’m afraid there is not much that they COULD do to prepare. It would quickly come down to survival, not based on how much stuff you’ve accumulated, but on how much knowledge a person possesses.
Bill has given briefings to the NSA on this. The truly chilling thing is that you do not have to launch a nuke that “hits” anything. It only has to explode over KS-—say, fired from a rustbucket ship off our coasts. This is why Iran doesn’t need ICBM quality missiles, nor do they need a lot, nor do they need accuracy. They only need to be able to fire something from our coast that will explode over mid-America and could set us back 400 years.