Author William R. Forstchen’s bestselling novel “One Second After” – which imagines the devastating effects of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) strike on the United States – is being adapted into a feature film. 

The screenplay will be written by renowned sci-fi writer J. Michael Straczynski, with Forstchen himself serving as an executive producer.

Fox News Digital spoke with Forstchen about the real-world inspiration behind his work and why he warns that an EMP attack is a looming threat, not just science fiction.

“I wanted to write an accurate, a very accurate story of what would happen in a small town in North Carolina if the power went off, and it never came back on,” he said.

Forstchen, citing Congressional reports from 2002 and 2008, said that 80% to 90% of Americans would be dead a year later if an EMP strike were to happen.

“The threat of an EMP was first realized during the 1962 Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test. What happened was that it blew about 500 miles away from Hawaii and 200 miles up,” he said. “They were able to bring the system back within a matter of days, but what would it be like if it took a month, six months, a year, or five years to fix?”

A geomagnetic disturbance is a temporary disturbance of the Earth’s magnetosphere caused by a solar wind shock wave and/or cloud of magnetic field that interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field. (Department of Homeland Security)

The late Peter Pry, a nuclear weapons expert and former staff director at the Congressional EMP Commission, agreed. Before his death in 2022, Pry warned that Kim Jong Un’s launch of a high-altitude ballistic missile was a test of North Korea’s EMP capabilities against the United States.

“Cars would be paralyzed,” Pry told Fox Business in May 2017. “Airplanes could fall out of the sky. You’d have natural gas pipeline explosions, nuclear reactor overloads. And worst of all, if you had a protracted blackout, it would be a serious threat to the survival of the American people.”