Imagine. It’s Sunday. The election is over. You are either anxious to watch the inauguration, dreading it, or escaping by watching Netflix instead.

You raked leaves in the morning, then watched your favorite football team win. You had dinner, and as the long day is winding down, you are watching a coveted DVD with your family. The lights flicker, then everything goes black. You head to the electric junction box in your basement. Your flashlight shines on all of the circuits. They’re all tripped, but trying to switch them back on doesn’t work.

Back upstairs, you check your watch, but the light won’t go on when you press the button and the face is blank. You move to your bay window and look outside. No light anywhere for as far as you can see.

You pick up your cell phone, press 911 and, nothing. You pick up your electronic land line and there’s no dial tone. You check your laptop to try to get the local news station on the web. It won’t boot up. You decide to drive to your friend’s house across town to see if he’s all right. You hop in your car and turn the key and, nothing. It won’t even turn over.

Suddenly, an airliner flies unusually low overhead. It’s flying so low you can see that the passenger windows are blacked out, and all you hear is the whooshing of air. The engines are off. No lights. A minute later you hear an enormous crash and then an ear-splitting explosion, a fire ball rising high above your neighbors’ roofs. You’d like to go and help, but your car isn’t working, and you can’t call 911.

You don’t know it, but your life, your world, all that’s familiar to you has changed—forever. The United States of America has been hit by an electromagnetic pulse or EMP, and unless you kept a ham radio in an old microwave oven or a Faraday cage, you may never know what’s caused the blackout.

How could this happen? I can’t predict if or when it could happen, but this book was written to make you aware of the threats we face. “The Long Sunday: Election Day 2016 - Inauguration Day 2017 - Nuclear EMP Attack Scenarios” puts forth potential scenarios that, given the current geopolitical climate, could occur. The book has been written to:

1) Introduce you to an EMP, especially if you are not familiar with this threat and its role in the military doctrines of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran as they deploy with it the "ultimate cyber weapon." EMP and cyberwarfare comprise a Revolution in Military Affairs, perhaps the most decisive and consequential in history. The threats from it cast a larger and darker shadow over Western Civilization than did Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg.

2) Warn you that the weak foreign and defense policies of the United States have so eroded U.S. military capabilities and the credibility of U.S. security guarantees that a nuclear EMP attack against U.S. allies--or against the United States itself--could be the next unpleasant surprise, and perhaps soon.

3) Administer some necessary shock therapy to my fellow Americans who still have it in their power to change the course of U.S. foreign and defense policies toward safety, and away from catastrophe. Few if any readers of the Center for Security Policy require shock therapy. Alas, it is also symptomatic of our troubles, the source of which is in part a tendency toward unrealistic wishful thinking, that I could not publish this in Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy, or a short version in the New York Times or Washington Post, and reach a more needful audience.

Should it happen, you would now be in a very real “Twilight Zone,” and if you’re not prepared for it…well, the consequences are too frightening to consider. The first step toward being prepared is to read this book to fully understand what is at stake. The threats, as laid out in it, are out there and aimed at us right now.