Like a Bolt Out of the Black

Chapter 10: Red Moon Rising Serialization

Over the next few months, I will be sharing insights from my new book, with Peter Navarro, Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier on this Substack. Today, I’m offering you a few sneak peeks into the chapter on space weaponry. You can find the full book on Amazon.

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The blue-black tropical night suddenly turned into a hot lime green. It was brighter than noon. The green changed into a lemonade pink and finally, terribly, blood red. It was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood on the sky.

— Thomas Thompson, LIFE

Unless you happen to be outside at night, you won’t have a clue that anything dramatic has occurred hundreds of miles above your home. You will notice the instantaneous deactivation of everything in your digital world. The failure of the tablet that you’re reading this book on or the noise-canceling headphones you’re using to listen to this audiobook might be your first clue. You’ll soon realize your lights are out, the AC is off, and your precious mobile phone is a brick. No cable TV, no old-school radio, no landline, you’ll have absolutely no way to figure out what just happened. Being unable to get onto X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook to check with your friends and family is going to turn out to be the least of your problems…. Chinese space weaponry has just transported your butt into the Stone Age.

We Know It Works…Because We Tried It

On the night of Sunday, July 8, 1962, the residents of Honolulu stayed up late. They gathered on the beaches of the North Shore, on hotel roofs in Waikiki, and on Oahu’s dramatic mountain ridges. Kailua resident Alan Lloyd was on a hill above Salt Lake, not far from the international airport. It was a warm tropical evening filled with clouds drifting in the trade winds. Suddenly, there was a brilliant flash, and as Lloyd recalled, “The whole world lit up right away and then the whole sky turned red and stayed that way for about 20 minutes.” Photos taken that night show Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head illuminated as though it were midday. The awe-inspiring flare was reported by observers on ships and islands more than 1,000 miles away.3 After their eyes readjusted, viewers beheld a tropical aurora spreading far across the South Pacific sky.

The people of Hawaii had stayed up to watch the “rainbow bomb,” a 1.4 megaton thermonuclear warhead known to the US military as Starfish Prime. Built at the Los Alamos Laboratory, it had been lofted into space aboard a Thor rocket, from Johnston Atoll, nine hundred miles west-southwest of Hawaii. The nuke was detonated 250 miles up, at the same altitude where the International Space Station (ISS) now peacefully circles Earth.

Starfish Prime was part of a broader operation run by the US Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Atomic Support Agency, known as Operation Fishbowl. Fishbowl was America’s response to a resumption of active nuclear testing by the Soviet Union, which had broken a three-year mutual testing moratorium. In the next few months, as the Cuban Missile Crisis heated up, the two countries would blow up several more A-bombs in space. The stakes were a lot higher than the aerial light shows suggested.

More important than the dramatic space fireworks were reports that radio stations in Honolulu were suddenly silenced by the blast and that the streets of Manoa Valley and Kailua went dark as Hawaiian Electric’s grid suffered multiple failures. Hundreds of streetlights on thirty circuits remained down for some time because their transformers had suffered permanent damage. These disturbances were generated by a phenomenon known as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, a result of the massive ionization that occurs in a nuclear explosion as electrons are ripped from the nuclei of atoms in the blast zone. Starfish Prime’s EMP exceeded the expectations of the US brass and in some cases, pegged the dials on the measurement devices American scientists were using to monitor the effects of the blast. The electrical hardware of the time was crude by today’s standards. If Starfish Prime blew today, the sensitive semiconductors inside just about everything we depend on could be permanently toasted.

If some hostile country, say China, detonated an EMP space bomb over a city like Taipei, Tokyo, or Tampa, the results would be catastrophic. Life as you know it would come to a halt, perhaps very literally. Anyone with a pacemaker would drop dead in front of your eyes. Hospital life-support equipment, including their emergency backup power systems, will be as fried as your phone. Automobile and aircraft electronics, including autonomous driving computers, will instantly lose control. Electrical transformers will explode, and the electric car in your garage could turn into a raging fireball. Roads and highways will be permanently clogged with dead cars, the microprocessors regulating their modern internal combustion engines wrecked.

And none of your stuff is coming back online anytime soon, if ever. Repair crews are not on their way because they are as disabled as anyone. None of the emergency vehicles, tow trucks, or construction equipment required for the job are moving. There aren’t enough replacement transformers, generators, microchips, or anything else on hand to fix this. Worse, the supply chain for those critical items runs through the port of Shanghai, where you can bet they are not busy loading relief ships for America. Without power or transportation, food and water will not last more than a week. Everyone will quickly realize they need to grab what is available for themselves. Things will turn ugly and fast. It’s time for Gen Z to crawl out of their safe spaces and learn how to make a fire and sharpen a spear, all without the guidance of a mansplaining YouTube video from some crazy prepper.

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Greg Autry, is Director of the Thunderbird Initiative for Space Leadership Policy and Business at Arizona State University. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Institute for Security Science and Technology at Imperial College London. Dr. Autry served on the 2016 Presidential Transition Team at NASA. President Trump appointed him White House Liaison at NASA in 2017 and nominated to be NASA’s Chief Financial Officer in 2020. He chaired the Safety Working group for the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee at the FAA.