Victor and I listened to the audiobook version of "World War Z" today for about eight hours of driving through New Mexico on our way to El Paso, again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z
(Compared to last Tuesday, the weather today was much better - sunny - and the temperature was 75 degrees warmer - 60 degrees instead of -15.)
I'm not much of a Zombie fan, but this story goes well beyond the "Night of the Living Dead" stories. It's a future account of a recently completed world-wide decade-long war against Zombies who over a number of years had wiped out about 90% of the human population (or more accurately, had converted 90% of the world population into Zombies).
The story was written by Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, creator of such classic movies as "Young Frankenstein", "Blazing Saddles" and my personal favorite (not) "Space Balls" (one of the only movies I ever felt compelled to walk out on). What's most interesting about Max's story is the depth of research he went through on how an actual war like this would be best conducted, including the reconstruction of civilization afterwards. What primarily caught my attention was the initial collapse of society due to wide-spread panic when people realized what was actually happening.
It got me wondering about how quickly American society really COULD collapse with the right pressure points attacked. Shutting off electricity to the entire country - most likely not possible - would be pretty effective. Another method would be to simply stop the supply of diesel fuel to American truckers.
Victor recounted how he's occasionally run into winter storm areas in which thousands of truckers have been stranded for a day or more. When they finally leave, they literally drain every gallon of diesel from the area which then takes a few more days of tanker truck arrivals to replenish. His recommendation for me was to never drive into a storm area with anything less than a full tank (which would allow us to drive another 1000 miles or more). The bigger lesson is that most regions of the country have at best only a couple days supply of diesel.
Consider what is reliant on that diesel fuel, starting with J.C.Penney, Home Depot, WalMart, grocery stores, drug stores, gas stations, home heating fuel and propane suppliers, etc. Most retailers have at-most a week's supply of merchandise. In an emergency and the ensuing panic, grocery store shelves will be cleaned off in only hours.
If I were Al Qaeda and wanted to bring America to it's knees, I'd hit the fewer than one hundred refineries producing diesel fuel - more than half of them in Texas and Lousiana (and easily identified http://www.energysupplylogistics.com/map/. Which makes me think Al-Qaeda is considerably stupider than we give them credit for (or the refineries are considerably better protected than I think).
Bottom line, if you want to get a very realistic and well thought-out vision of how America and the world might react to a catastrophic halt of the economy, and get some hints on how to best survive such an event, I highly recommend World War Z.
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