The Coming Dark Age

“It can all begin with the simple coincidence of two traffic standstills, one on the roads and the other on the railways: a simultaneous paralysis of automobiles and trains. As a result, the next shift of air traffic controllers for two large airports are held up, and they fail to arrive. The previous shift, therefore, must stay on duty.... After being at work continuously for nineteen hours in the control tower of O’Hare Airport in Chicago, one controller’s ability to concentrate is much reduced; but as he is dead tired, he does not realize this.

“At length he makes a grave error, and a 707 about to land collides with a DC-9 that has just taken off. The two planes, tangled together, hit a high-voltage line and break it. The electric load on the broken line is instantly distributed over the other lines, but they are already overloaded. The automatic protection devices go into operation... and with a chain reaction the entire electric network of Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts loses the synchronism and goes out of service. But this time the blackout is a long one; it will last for many days.

“The time is January. The temperature is below zero. It is beginning to snow again, and snow plows cannot function because the streets are blocked by cars. Many cars use up all their gasoline, keeping the engine running uselessly. Refueling is impossible because the electric motors of the gasoline pumps cannot function. Many drivers abandon their cars and thereby add to the traffic jungle.

“Since the trains are not running, many city workers are forced to camp in their offices, where they try to keep warm by lighting fires. Many of these will get out of control, setting buildings ablaze. The fires cannot be extinguished because the fire engines cannot reach them through streets solidly encumbered with cars. A few thousand people die as scenes of panic ensue...

“Many people try to reach their homes or friends on foot, setting off on marches of some dozen miles or so which they do not succeed in completing. Many of them die in the snow. Others ask for shelter where there is none to give, and either meet with violence or resort to it. Firearms are used.

“During the second day a state of emergency is proclaimed, and the armed forces assume all civil powers....

“On the third day the looting of supermarkets begins, and troops try to stop it. There are riots and a few hundred people are killed. . . .

“The number of such deaths from violence, however, will be far exceeded by deaths from cold and hunger.... Some millions of people will die in the two weeks during which the crisis will last....”

These passages from Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age are intended not as fictional speculation but as serious prediction. As such, they sound like irresponsible ravings—until one reads them in the context of the entire book and the evidence it presents. Then they take on an entirely different quality, a chilling realism.

Reading this book can be a profoundly sobering experience. For those who assume that today’s shortages, blackouts and breakdowns are only temporary aberrations—that, by and large, modern industry is going to continue functioning tolerably well for the forseeable future—or that collapse, if it comes, will be slow, gradual and with plenty of warning—Vacca offers page after page of hard evidence that a general technological-industrial “knockout,” on a scale sufficient to result in millions of deaths, could occur almost at any moment.

Vacca is an engineer, with an engineer’s understanding of how “large systems” such as communications, transportation, traffic control and electricity and water supply work. He is not a philosopher and certainly not a libertarian. If anything, his sympathies seem to be in the anti-capitalist direction. Consequently, one is given no understanding here of underlying causes. A libertarian, reading Vacca’s grim analysis, might very justifiably observe, “None of these dislocations could have assumed such proportions if profitseeking entrepreneurs, rather than bureaucrats, had been in charge of overall planning.” But Vacca draws no such lesson.

In a sense, however, Vacca’s lack of philosophical grounding makes his book even more impressive. He has no ideology, no axe to grind; there is no suspicion that he is tailoring facts to fit preconceptions. And his facts stand alone. After reading The Coming Dark Age, you will probably agree with Isaac Asimov’s assessment: “I have never read a book that was at the same time so convincing and so frightening.”

Reviewed by ROBERT MASTERS / Politics (221 pages) / BFL Price $6.95