3. A random solar flare could knock us all into the 1950s, and there's nothing we could do about it.
If we suffered an EMP from a solar flare and
ONLY got knocked back into the 1950s, I'd be
delighted. In the 1950s we still had AM and FM radio, electromechanical switching in the phone system, engines with no computerized anything in them, and hard-wired phones that were nowhere near as vulnerable to the effects of a solar flare as are cellphones.
But if we got a solar flare powerful enough to cause electromagnetic effects like the Carrington Event of 1859 or better, we'd be more likely to be knocked back into the 1880s. Think it through.
Almost all equipment made in the last 20 years has computer chips in it. The chips get fried. This knocks out phones, cars, modern aircraft - essentially, the entire transportation network ceases to work, except for some ships, probably the older ones that are on their last legs. 18-wheelers? Gone. Trains? Gone. Fly-by-wire air transports? Gone. You now have the problem of how to feed the urbanites when food can't be moved to where they are.
Most cars built after 1985 won't run because they all have onboard computers to get the engine to work efficiently. Anyone here ever see the episode of
Fast 'n Loud where Richard Rawlings took the engine out of a 2015 Dodge Hellcat prototype and put it under the hood of a 1967 Dodge Dart? The Gas Monkeys had one helluva job to get the engine to run at all, because the Dart was analog and the Gen III V8 Hemi was computerized; and they had almost as much trouble getting the instruments in the cockpit to work, for the same reason. Any automobile with an engine control unit (read: computer) and electronic fuel injection ain't gonna run, because the ECU will be an ex-parrot. (One of the reasons I was so fond of my 1990 Mercedes 350SDL was she had an old-style mechanical fuel injection system that would still have worked in a post-EMP world.) The only vehicles that will work are the ones you see at old car shows, and you can't feed a city with those. The only locomotives that will run at first are the few preserved steam engines, and same comment. I predict the yankee gummint, if it can get its head out of its butt quickly, is going to go to the explorers of the abandoned and find out where the old diesel locomotive are moldering away and make it a priority to get them running again. It can be done; there are YouTube videos of old time railroad fans doing it, and with the resources of the yankee gummint it would not be hard. But it would not be waving a magic wand, either; it would take time. So we are back to the problem of feeding the useless mouths in the urban areas.
Modern containerships with slow-stroke marine diesels could still sail, though without radars and radios. So could tankers. The tankers could run their pumps and send the cargo into storage tanks ashore; everything there can be done by hand, no computers required. The containerships would have the problem of being dependent on shoreside cargo cranes, though I expect those could be hot-wired. The real problem would be getting the boxes off the dock and to where the cargo is needed.
In World War II, there were standard gauge railroad tracks on the docks to move the cargo right alongside the ships, which would take it aboard using their own cargo gear. I think some of those tracks still survive, so a switching engine could pull flatcars someplace where they could be either assembled into a consist a real locomotive could move to where they were needed, or into warehouses for unloading and shipment using the few trucks that still run. But the modern container berths built from the ground up after the Container Revolution knocked out the boomships don't have those tracks. They would have to be laid, and they would have to be tied into the existing rail network, and that would take time. Meanwhile, the city-dwellers are rioting, starving to death, and trying to overrun the rural folks who are doubtless shooting most of them dead. Not a pretty picture.
The United States in the 1880s had less than 10% of its population living in cities, and all the cities were immediately adjacent to farmlands. 90% of the population lived on farms. Most production was consumed locally, with the exception of grain and meat animals. Remember Carl Sandberg's poem, "Chicago"?
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.
But if Chicago had magically vanished a century ago, it would have been an annoyance, not a disaster. Cities like Cleveland, St. Louis, South Bend, and Buffalo could have taken up the slack in railroading and shipping wheat and flour; and with the advent of the reefer car cities in the hailstone and sarsaparilla belt could have become the new slaughterhouse city feeding the eastern United States. That is not the case today. 90% of Americans live in the cities. Everything depends on the existing transport systems continuing to run smoothly and continuously.
I remember reading in an economics class that no major city anywhere rarely has more than three or four days-worth of food for its population on hand. The cities depend on a continuous flow of food from outside the city limits. One example is the Berlin Airlift. For 15 months, the Western Allies supported the occupied city of West Berlin entirely by air, and broke the Soviet blockade that made the operation necessary. The daily average was 4,500 tons of cargo, with the record being just under 13,000 tons (a special stunt conceived by "Tonnage" Tunner, the mastermind of the Airlift). The city and its people survived ... with severe rationing of everything, including electricity and heat. I'm not sure how the complacent urbanites of today would react to a situation like that, which would be a distinct possibility in an EMP event. Realistically, I would expect food riots and a breakdown of social order within 10 days.
The world, never mind the United States, is not prepared for a major EMP event, whether caused by the detonation of a hydrogen bomb at high altitude, or a gigantic solar flare. It would be a major catastrophe, and just might kick off the Last World War as nations battled for resources, mostly food resources. Scary stuff.
