Book Review of "Total Blackout" by Alex Shaw

This is a competent action thriller with a more credible Geo-political scenario than most. The key plot device is an apparently non-nuclear Electro-Magnetic-Pulse device which knocks out pretty well all electrical and electronic hardware in the continental United States. As a plot device this is fine: it allows the protagonists to move through Maine and indeed Washington DC as if the authorities are not there, for to all intents and purposes they are not. The hero is an ex-SAS man, Jack Tate, who is believable. However, he's portrayed as working for a direct-action division of MI6, and direct action is something MI6 has never been keen on in real life. Action is largely incompatible with intelligence-gathering, in their view.

The enemy is a partnership between a Chinese electronics company and a Russian private military contractor. (These do exist and one came to grief in a big way in Syria at the hands of American forces a little while back.) However, while Russia is an authoritarian state, Communist China is a totalitarian one and there is no such thing as a Chinese company (with more than 30 employees) outside of direct, daily and detailed Chinese Communist Party control, even though they all claim to be independent when targeted by American sanctions!

So there are many aspects to this tale which are realistic, but the EMP device itself is not.
Non-nuclear EMP devices, or Explosively-Pulsed Microwave Weapons do exist, but being powered by non-nuclear sources they work by focusing the limited energy available onto a small area, a few acres, say. They can be quite efficient at damaging equipment in the small area and even in underground bunkers, because the microwave energy they radiate can be coherent (like a laser) as well as focused and directional. But to affect the whole of the United States they would have to be converting energies on the scale of a largish single-stage nuclear bomb. (Multi-stage thermonuclear devices are less efficient at producing EMP. But they can make up for what they lack in efficiency by sheer power.)

Furthermore, the EMP device is portrayed as killing all modern electronic devices unless they are specially shielded, when in fact many modern devices could escape EMP effects simply by being too small for meaningful energy to be collected from an EMP and discharged in a way that would do permanent harm. So the all-powerful EMP device in the story is a plot device, (or a propaganda threat) not likely hardware.

 

Total Blackout is published by HQ on the 25th of September 2020