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“A House Divided…”
Star Trek Non-Federation Timeline Revised
Supranational Defense Organizations and member countries at the outbreak of World War III (2053):
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom of Great Britain, Republic of Ireland, Fifth French Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Romania, Georgia, Republic of Macedonia, Croatia, Albania, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Turkey, Denmark.
Eastern Coalition of Nations (ECON/EC): People’s Republic of China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, People’s Republic of Vietnam, Republic of Cambodia, Republic of Laos, Republic of Myanmar (Burma), Republic of Bangladesh, Republic of Indonesia, Republic of Thailand, Republic of Malaysia, Mongolia, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea.
NATO Allied States in Asia/Pacifica: Republic of Australia, Republic of New Zealand, the Philippines, Republic of Japan, South Korea, Republic of Taiwan, Republic of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, Israel, Singapore.
EC Allies in Asia/Pacifica: Republic of India, Islamic Republic of Iraq, Oman, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Brunei.
February 28, 2050- Earth: The Russian Federation declares neutrality after the Eastern Coalition of Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization declare war after the “Taiwan Straits Incident” when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Missile Cruiser Beijing launched an unwarranted attack against a Taiwanese frigate, bringing the two warring sides to blows. Most citizens felt that the war would only last a few months at the longest, while military planners on both sides began preparations for an extended conflict lasting years perhaps. Hours after the initial declaration of war, advanced forces from the Republic of Malaya enter the city of Singapore and begin the three year long occupation of the banking capital of South-East Asia. Vulcan: The Vulcan Science Council called back the science vessel Surak out of the Sol System after learning of the outbreak of the Third World War on Earth. Those in the science council who had been observing Earth searching for signs that humans were ready for first contact were disappointed when word reached them of the Chinese attack and what appeared to be a war that had the capacity to end human civilization should it turn nuclear.
June 1, 2053- World War III had been raging for three years by this time. Fighting had extended to the Middle East, South-East Asia, Taiwan, and into Siberia, showing no signs of slowing. President Donald M. O’Grady of the United States, who had been elected in the landslide Democratic victory in 2052 on a ‘bring the war to a close now’ platform, had lead his people as best he could. The situation in South-East Asia and on the island of Taiwan was too large for the United States alone to handle, and with the continuing fighting in Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, the EU could spare only token forces to aid the United States garrisons on Taiwan. Fighting between India, a member of the Eastern Coalition of Nations, and Pakistan, an ally of NATO, had gone poorly for both sides. The Iranians had initially declared neutrality, but in 2052 they did decide to declare for the EC, launching military strikes over the Iran-Pakistan border in hopes that their Indian allies would take advantage of the situation and bring Pakistan to its knees. Three years of almost constant stalemate had become too much for some generals in key positions in the Indian Armed Forces.
At 0530 hours New Delhi time, the Indo-Pakistani War, which was considered a side-war in the greater context of the struggle, went nuclear. Over 400 nuclear warheads of varying size were launched between the two nations, devastating the Indian Sub-Continent and bringing both countries to their knees. In both India and Pakistan, there was no longer an effective functioning government to speak of. Fulfilling their treaty obligations, the PRC launched a small phalanx of ten nuclear warheads at entrenched Pakistani positions in the Hindu Kush. Thanks to this shocking development, many NATO commanders began to call for an all out counter-strike against Chinese hardened missile bunkers, ICBM platforms, nuclear weapons storage centers, and any targets that had some military implications.
President O’Grady disagreed. Three hours after the Indo-Pakistani exchange, O’Grady made a series of phone calls to the European allies declaring that the United States would take no part in any counter-strike against the PRC that involved the use of either tactical or strategic nuclear warheads, the end result being an all out nuclear exchange between NATO and the EC. Instead, he supported a plan put forward by commanders in Syria and Turkey, calling for an enlarged offensive against EC positions in the reunited nation-state of Iraq, with possible targets along the Iraq-Iran border should the offensive prove successful.
June-December, 2053- NATO forces, spearheaded by American, British, French, and German armored divisions, launched a successful blitzkrieg-style attack against Eastern Coalition forces stationed in Iraq. Thanks to these attacks, the Iraqi petroleum that many EC countries, especially the PRC, still used to run their nations was cut off completely. For the second time in a century, American forces enter Baghdad.
January-August, 2054- NATO forces plow into Iranian Armored Corps based out of Mandali, just on the other side of the Iraqi border, inflicting severe losses at the Battle of Kirkuk, and at the Battle of Babylon. Thanks to the severe losses, Iranian forces were forced to pull back in early July lest they risk the loss of the entire Iranian Army at the hands of NATO, leaving the Iranian heartland open for invasion.
August 2, 2054- On the exact 109th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the PRC launched a phalanx of 25 nuclear warheads at Japan atop the latest generation Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles. Ten of the twenty-five reached their targets with fifteen loosing guidance lock and falling into the Sea of Japan, or being shot down by Japanese ABM satellites. The cities hit were Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Toyama, Matsui, Sapporo, Hiroshima, Akita, Fukuoka, and Nagasaki. The overall destructive power of the warheads was minimal; however the Chinese nuclear weapons were of a more radioactive sort meant for use on the battlefield, not against civilian targets.
Radioactivity polluted many rivers and waterways for years to come. In response, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces launched retaliatory air strikes against fifty Chinese dams, and twenty Chinese cities, including Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Canton, and the major Chinese port cities of Qingdao and Dalian. When the Japanese counter-strike was completed, the death toll reached above 25 million people, more died in one day, than died in the entire period of active combat during World War One.
August 3-12, 2054- Riots broke out in Central, South and South-East Los Angeles protesting the military draft and the horrific casualty rates of the fight in the Middle East. Some 3,000 businesses were put to the torch, along with 700 tenement apartment buildings; over 10,000 homes and large swaths of Central Los Angeles were burnt to the ground. A state of emergency was declared for the counties of Burbank, Santa Monica, and Los Angeles, allowing the governor to call in the National Guard to quell the rioting. On August 8, the National Guard entered Los Angeles under orders from the governor to bring the rioting to an end, which took an additional four days. Some historians in later years would claim that the Los Angeles riots were as bad as or worse than the Bell Riots in the San Francisco Sanctuary District some 20 years prior.
August 30, 2054- NATO forces, spearheaded by American armored columns capture Tehran, obliterating the remnants of the Iranian National Army and Air Force. With the horrific losses suffered by the Iranian Army in the Iraqi campaign, NATO forces had little trouble in defeating the remnants of the once proud Iranian Army. The Iranian Republic and Iranian Provisional Government was formed by NATO after the fall of Tehran and the flight of most of the Iranian leadership to the mountainous regions of the north of the country. The Iranian Republic would serve as a bulwark against any EC incursions mounted out of Sri Lanka, as well as providing a working model for NATO and the New United Nations during the post-war reconstruction effort in the years to come.
September 3- NATO and allied naval forces launch full scale attacks against the Chinese fleet off Java. In the largest single naval engagement since the Battle of the Philippine Sea a century prior, NATO naval forces obliterate the combined surface and submarine fleet of the EC. From then on, NATO and its allies in the Indian and Pacific Oceans had the kind of naval supremacy necessary to begin to tighten the strangle hold on any and all neutral trade going in and out of EC territories. Plans were put together earlier in the month for a combined air/sea assault against occupied Singapore that would in turn lead to the now infamous “Malay Campaign,” a bitter and arduous crawl up the Malay peninsula.
September 22- NATO forces reach the Pakistani border, now seen as the final stepping-stone to victory in Asia. NATO commanders pressed their columns of troops forward in hopes of securing what few remaining Pakistani air bases were left in tact to use as forward air bases to be used to strike Chinese forces at the largest staging ground in Western China, Yarkand.
September 30- South Korean forces, seeing the NATO victories at Java, Iran, and the successful Japanese air strikes into China, spilled over the 38th parallel in hopes of ending the three-year stalemate, and 100-year-old cold war fought between north and south. All across the border, thousands of South Korean tanks, artillery, and infantry advanced into the north, with the S. Korean Air Force establishing air superiority within hours of the initial invasion.
October 4- NATO forces launched the sea born invasion of the Malay Peninsula, depositing thousands of men and vehicles up and down the eastern side of the Straight of Malacca. The commanders of the invasion were given the task of liberating Singapore, and sweeping north up the heavily forested peninsula into Thailand, Burma, and capturing the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.
October 17- Pyongyang falls to South Korean Army forces after seventeen days of fighting. Kim Sung Il, the President of North Korea, surrenders to South Korean forces in the presidential palace. A group of North Korean Army generals vow to continue the fight and re-capture Pyongyang from the South.
October 19- American naval forces launch air strikes in the Sea of Japan against North Korean supply lines and cut off entire divisions from reinforcements by destroying bridges, blowing up dams, and cutting highways with laser guided munitions. The American aircraft carriers USS Ronald Regan, Nimitz, and Washington would continue their air strikes until the end of hostilities in Korea.
October 20-November 6, 2054- Seventeen days of fighting ended at the Yalu River, the internationally recognized border between North Korea and the PRC, South Korea officially declared victory and the formation of the “United Republic of Korea.”
October 21-December 31, 2054- The Malayan Peninsula campaign goes in the favor of NATO, with Kuala Lumpur falling to NATO in November, and the rest of the peninsula falling to NATO as well. With this, the NATO expeditionary forces began to push north to capture airfields in Burma and Thailand and open the southern air front against the PRC and its allies in South-East Asia. With Korea united, Japan preparing for an assault against China in Manchuria, Taiwan as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the East China Sea providing NATO with bases to launch dozens of bomber raids per day, the predicament of the PRC and its remaining EC allies, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, Mongolia and Sri Lanka had grown worse. Many in both EC and NATO High Command feared a prolonged campaign in the Asian hinterland to bring China to its knees. Victory, it seemed, would come at a heavy cost in human suffering, a price few in NATO High Command were willing to pay.
January 1, 2055- The Eastern Coalition offered an armistice to NATO in response to the situation. At first, NATO refused the armistice, but after talks among the political and military leaders of NATO, it was decided that a conditional armistice was better than continuing the fight in Asia and a post-war occupation zone comprised of millions of square miles of territory.
January 3, 2055- The NATO-EC cease-fire went into effect at 0001 hours Beijing time, bringing the global struggle to an end. For the first time in five years, the world was at peace.
March 21, 2055- The Eastern Coalition and NATO sign the “Treaty of Brussels,” bringing an end to the Third World War. In the peace terms, the PRC had to give up its leaders who helped lead the world into the bloodiest conflict in over a century. Along with this, it was forced to aid in the rebuilding of large areas of South-East Asia, excluding the Indian Sub-continent, which was a different matter entirely. India and Pakistan had no representative governments left, leading both sides to agree to a New United Nations peacekeeping force entering the lands of the former Republic of India, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in early June to begin reconstruction efforts. The Middle East, being entirely in NATO hands, was left up to the victorious powers to decide upon as they see fit. At 12:30 Brussels time, the most destructive war in human history was brought to a close. The final death toll was staggering: 350 million lay dead, 500 million wounded in battle or suffering radiation sickness from the large-scale use of nuclear warheads in India and Pakistan. The civilian death toll is still unknown for India, Pakistan, and the PRC, while in Japan; 19 million civilians lost their lives in the August 8 nuclear attacks. The world had much to clean up: nations to rebuild, cities to clean up, and the shattered economies of over half of the nations of Earth.
2055- After the end of the Third World War, the peoples of Earth still had much suffering ahead of them. Thanks to the widespread use of nuclear warheads in India, Pakistan, and Japan, coupled with the use of depleted uranium sabot rounds by NATO forces, global temperatures were pegged at between ¼ to 2 degrees lower than average temperatures. With the drop in global temperatures, famine and disease became massive issues for the survivors in the formerly war torn nations of Asia. The final estimate for clean up in Pakistan was 20 years minimum to repair the damage done by the nuclear warfare and return some of the areas to their pre-war conditions, while others were deemed too irradiated to be touched for centuries. However, with the massive loss of life in the Indian Sub-Continent, estimated at between 300 and 800 million in India alone, the reconstruction effort would take much more time than initially believed.
In Greece, the parliament voted to formally end their nation’s membership in NATO after the after-action reports showed that NATO commanders used the Greek troops as nothing more than shock troops and cannon fodder during the fighting in Iraq and the drive on Tehran. In the New United Nations, the New UN Space Council formed a new sub-committee, called the “International Faster-Than-Light Consortium,” representing all nations on Earth who wished to have some sort of vested interest in the continued exploration of space.
2056-58- While Zephram Cochrane worked at Kennedy Space Center on the first warp drive with the full cooperation of the International Faster-Than-Light Consortium, the peoples of Earth desperately attempted to regain some semblance of normalcy. Warlords sprang up in the former war zones of India, and Pakistan. By 2058, India dissolved into hundreds of factions, infighting spread amongst the survivors like a cancerous tumor, all while UN peacekeepers struggled to get aid out to those who needed it most. In Iran, the remnants of the old Islamic Republic government fled to the northeast corner of the country, setting up their capital-in-exile in the city of Gonbad. The United States began experiments into gene therapy and manipulating the chromosomes of unborn fetuses. The experiments bore fruit, with the manipulation of chromosomes of unborn children, or as it is called in the field, “eugenics,” becoming an accepted procedure of the children of the famous and wealthy. After these breakthroughs, the European Union passed bans stopping the eugenics procedure from spreading to their nations, fearing that eugenics would in turn lead to cloning and distorting the gene pool by artificial means without studying the long-term side effects of the procedures. The US military took note of the eugenics procedures and began planning classified experiments to use the eugenics procedures to breed the perfect soldier. These experiments would not succeed until well into the 22nd Century.
April, 2059- The United States founded its first permanent settlement on Mars, Freedom One. It would be in constant habitation for the next two centuries. Freedom One provided the United States and its allies a valuable stepping-stone in the solar system. Along with the settlements on the moon, Freedom One was the hope of NASA for a bright end to the already chaos ridden 21st Century.
September, 2059- NASA began large scale experimentation with asteroid mining techniques on the Martian moon of Phobos. Mining operations on Phobos would continue until 2084 when the captured asteroid was hollowed out and bought by the Boeing-Lockheed Aerospace Corp, after their 2083 merger, for a new research facility for space based research and development.
2060- Zephram Cochrane’s FTL test bed vessel, the Einstein, was completed half way through the year, allowing Cochrane and his team to begin studying the operational limits of his prototype warp core and the effects of near FTL speeds on a vessel’s computer systems, structural integrity, and other vital ship systems. Cochrane’s prototype warp ship, the Phoenix, would be completed on schedule by January, 2063.
2061- After prior warnings were sent to NATO leaders, the United States began construction of its next generation space-based weapons. These next-generation weapons included orbital ICBM launch platforms, upgraded ABM satellites, USAF-run space stations, and the first generation of military spacecraft designed and built entirely for the purpose of fighting other spacecraft and orbital/surface bombardment. As the United States began construction of the orbital scaffolds for its spacecraft, Japan, Russia, and several EU member nations followed suit shortly thereafter. Some military analysts began predicting the start of a new arms race parallel to the one that preceded the Third World War eleven years prior.
2062- The United States launched its first “space cruiser,” the USS Constitution, which began flight trials in July. In conjunction with the launch of the Constitution, Congress approved the creation of a new branch of the military, the United States Space Command (USSC). Under the founding charter of the USSC, NORAD, the resurrected Strategic Air Command (SAC), and Air Force Space Command (AFSC) were all absorbed into the newly formed USSC. However, the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) remained an independent entity from the USSC, allowing freedom of deployment of theatre, tactical, and strategic nuclear weapons for the rest of the US armed forces.
The first official action of the newly formed USSC was to place an order with the defense industry for an additional five space cruisers to join the Constitution by the end of the decade. The five ships, named the USS Concord, Saratoga, Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Midway, would form the core striking power of the USSC for the next thirty years as humanity began to spread its wings and embrace space flight.
April 2, 2063- After two months of systems checks and preparations, Dr. Cochrane announced the Phoenix ready for her maiden flight, and had the vessel moved to Launch Pad 1A at the Kennedy Space Center. The Vulcan scout ship Surak entered the outer solar system to begin a routine survey, amazed to find that humanity, believed to have obliterated itself in World War III, was not only spreading out into space, but preparing for its first FTL test flight. A message was transmitted to the Vulcan Science Council by the captain of the Surak informing them of the coming human FTL test.
April 3, 2063 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time- Cochrane and his team aboard the Phoenix successfully broke through the light speed barrier, traveling at warp 1.001 for 30 seconds and ending in a high orbit of the moon. The Vulcan crew aboard the Surak observed the warp test and sent another message to the Science Council informing them of the successful human warp flight and the captain’s decision to make first contact with the humans.
April 3, 2063, 2:45PM Eastern Standard Time- Cochrane and his team safely landed at the Kennedy Space Center after the successful flight of the Phoenix and began to celebrate humanity’s greatest scientific achievement, traveling beyond the speed of light. Just as festivities were beginning, however, the Vulcans decided to make their presence known to the people of Earth. The Surak dropped from warp into a Low Earth Orbit and began broadcasting messages of peace and friendship to the population below. The militaries of Earth began to panic, sending their active forces to high alert status, and activated whatever space based weaponry they had. The USSC sent a message to the Constitution and her as-of-yet uncompleted sister ship, the USS Concord, to scramble and prepare for hostile action. The captain of the USS Constitution received the Vulcan message before he could bring his anti-ship missiles to active status, thus avoiding any serious issue.
Before orbital defenses could be brought to bear on the Vulcans, the Surak entered the atmosphere and made its way to the Kennedy Space Center where Cochrane and his team were located.
April 3, 2063, 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time- The Surak landed a few yards away from Launch Pad 1A at the Kennedy Space Center. Celebrations in both the United States and around the world immediately stopped, with Cochrane and his team being the first to drive out to the launch pad to meet the aliens. Humanity stood awestruck, watching their holovids and computer screens in a collective moment of silence as Cochrane extended his hand in a gesture of good will and friendship towards the Vulcan captain.
In what has gone down in human history as one of its defining moments, Cochrane somehow managed to fit some humor into such an historic and timeless event. When the Vulcan captain raised his right hand and split his fingers into a v-shape in the traditional Vulcan greeting, stating to Cochrane, “Live long and prosper,” Cochrane was unable to return the split finger gesture, awkwardly fumbling with the gesture for a moment, choosing instead to extend his hand to the Vulcan captain, smiled, and replied, “Thanks.”
April 6, 2063- The Surak sent word home that they had verified humanity’s breaking of the light speed barrier, but that Earth was still a patchwork of nation-states recovering from World War III, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads, and very much paranoid of the intentions of not only Vulcans, but other species in general. In short, humanity was not yet ready for normalized relations with the rest of the galaxy and still had a lot of “growing up to do” before they could be ready to join the galaxy at large.
April 8- The Vulcan Science Council dispatched Ambassador Varel as a liaison between the Vulcan Confederation and the peoples of Earth aboard the science vessel T’plana-hath, which had been originally assigned to do the survey of the Sol system rather than the Surak but last minute complications with a warp relay forced the T’plana-hath to remain in the Vulcan home system with the Surak taking her place.
April 26- Two days after arriving in New York, Ambassador Varel made his famous “Galactic consequences” speech to the UN Assembly. Varel’s speech has been seen by many historians to be Earth’s formal recognition as a galactic power, touting his famous quote, “Earth conflicts and rivalries must remain confined to Earth and not spread into the galaxy. To do so would result in galactic consequences stemming from Earth bound politics, and possibly could undermine modern galactic politics as they exist in their present state. Until Earth has resolved to solve all its diplomatic squabbles by diplomacy and the patchwork of nation-states have united under a single flag, it is the belief of the Vulcan Science Council, High Command, and myself, that Earth be confined to the Sol System until it is matured enough to enter galactic politics.”
Varel’s statements enraged many representatives, many of whom refused to stand and acknowledge the ambassador after he stepped down from the speaking podium. The actions undertaken by Ambassador Varel in his speech, and the Vulcan Science Council in sending Varel to speak to the UN Assembly and threaten to stop Earth nations from sending out exploration missions and establishing formal relations with other FTL capable powers in the galaxy, were seen by the majority of the population of Earth in an entirely negative light. The negative view of Varel’s statements would be made apparent the next day during the UN Security Council meeting.
April 27- After initial deliberations, eight of the nine permanent Security Council members: the USA, UK, France, Russian Federation, China, Brazil, Germany, and Japan, (India no longer had a functioning government to speak of) along with the 10 elected representatives from the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to condone the statements of Ambassador Varel and the Vulcan Science Council. In the resolution the UNSC voted on, the language used in reference to the ambassador and his people was quite harsh.
“The Security Council…Having Considered the statements made by Ambassador Varel in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations…Taking Into Account the status of reconstruction in the areas comprising the ‘Greater Asian Conflict Zone’ as defined by the Security Council in Resolution 3417…Being Strengthened in its conviction that no government, military, or galactic policy should bar the human race from the exploitation of, claiming of, and settlement of extra-solar territories by Earth governments…Condemns the Vulcan Confederation’s stated policy of restraining Earth governments from claiming extra-solar territories, settling aforementioned extra-solar territories, dispatching armed forces of the claimant nations to defend their extra-solar territories, and extending diplomatic relations to other galactic powers outside the Vulcan Confederation…Solemnly Calls Upon all nations to join in the vocal condemnation of the stated Vulcan Confederation policy towards Earth and her nations…Requests the Vulcan Confederation rescind its stated policy and work with the nations and peoples of Earth to prepare them for joining the larger galactic civilization…Further Requests that the Secretary-General of the United Nations work with leading members of the United Nations General Assembly to draft a resolution for the Security Council and the General Assembly to vote on concerning the legal claiming of, and settling of, extra-solar territories, and matters concerning the contacting of, recognition of, establishment of, and maintenance of formal diplomatic relations with other galactic nations and peoples no later than the first week of the coming month…”
May 9- The United Nations General Assembly and the UN Security Council vote unanimously to both condemn the statements of policy made by Ambassador Varel, and passed a resolution known in the files of the General Assembly as “GA Resolution 63/83,” formally referred to as the “International Extra-Solar Claims and Diplomatic Recognition Resolution.” The resolution was two parts; one was the extension of the right of extra-solar claims by any nation on Earth as long as they could enforce said claim, essentially revoking Resolution 1962, and the Outer Space Treaty as it was when ratified in 1963. The other part of the resolution, the “Diplomatic Recognition Resolution,” extended the definition of diplomatic recognition to allow non-earth based powers to be diplomatically recognized and allowed an observer to the UN General Assembly should they choose to send one by sending an ambassador to meet with the Secretary-General, the Security Council, and speak to the UN General Assembly and provide evidence to prove territorial integrity, and governmental functioning, having to prove the existence of a functioning government.
With these declarations, the UN single handedly overturned 100 years of international policy concerning the development of space for “peaceful means.”
July 7- The USSC suspends all space cruiser construction for the time being until Cochrane warp cores can be fully integrated into the ship designs. Construction on the other two partially completed cruisers, the Concord and the Saratoga, however, was too far along to be stopped. Both ships had launch dates fast approaching and with the revelations brought about by the Vulcan Science Council’s decisions as described by Ambassador Varel concerning Earth’s future, the USSC Admiralty thought it prudent to launch and complete the outfitting of the other two space cruisers should any additional problems with the Vulcans or Earth nations arise. It was decided that once the Concord and Saratoga finished their shakedown cruises the Constitution would enter dry dock to be outfitted with a Cochrane warp core while the other two remained on active status.
2064-66 Diplomatic relations with the Vulcan Confederation continued to be frigid for the most part with few official meetings between heads of state and Vulcan ambassador Varel, dispatched to Earth as official liaison between Earth and Vulcan. In the two years from 2064-66, the USSC completed construction and shakedowns of the cruisers Concord and Saratoga which allowed the Constitution to enter dry dock to be outfitted with a Cochrane warp drive. The remaining seven cruisers had their designs altered to allow their use of Cochrane’s warp drive and were resubmitted to the USSC for construction beginning in 2066 and continuing until 2076 when the final vessel of the 10-ship run would be completed.
The socio-economic situation on Earth was fragile at best. While the economies of the world had recovered in the decade following the end of the Third World War, the economies of the nations of the Near and Far East continued to struggle to recover. In Japan, reconstruction of the cities affected by the Chinese nuclear attack continued on schedule for a 100% recovery of the cities to pre-war infrastructure and economic outlook by 2080, if not sooner. However, in stark contrast lay the economies of South-East Asia, China, and the Indo-Pakistani Conflict Zone.
The destruction caused by the Japanese air strikes to Chinese infrastructure was immeasurable and while recovery was occurring, it was slow to start and was estimated that recovery efforts for the PRC would take 20-30 years longer than other Far East nations, placing a completing date somewhere around the turn of the 22nd Century, a sobering prospect for many in the Politburo and the Party Congress. Worse yet were the economies of the South-East Asian nations who joined the EC and fought in active combat during the Third World War. Bangladesh and Myanmar suffered the worst of the radioactive fallout from the Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange, along with a substantial portion of Sri Lanka’s main food sources located in the ocean, fish and other ocean-dwelling plants and animals.
The nation most affected in its long term international and political output compared with pre-war was the United Kingdom. While the UK was a signatory member of the European Union, it had yet to make the currency changeover from the Pound Sterling to the Euro and was not integrated into the political body of the EU Assembly. In the wake of the war, many in the EU began to move much more closely together than they had in the pre-war years while the UK found itself reviving its close working relationship with the United States.
However, the most important change post-war was the greater role that the UK began to take within the framework of the Commonwealth of Nations, the successor body to the old British Empire. With the devastation wrought by the Indo-Pakistani conflict along with the damage caused due to conventional combat, many British relief efforts were undertaken under the auspices of the Commonwealth Offices, not the EU or the United Nations. Also, the British began to work much more closely with the Commonwealth Realms, most important of which were the ANZAC nations, to help manage relief expeditions and perform peacekeeping tasks in the Indo-Pakistani Conflict Zone.
By 2066 many lawmakers in the parliament, along with their constituencies at home, began to see the Commonwealth not as a remnant of their colonial past but as a way to help shape the future through common efforts and beliefs held among the Commonwealth Realms and the less directly tied Commonwealth Republics. With this in mind, many citizens by the end of the decade began to question the continuance of political and economic ties to the European Union.
The areas least affected by the Third World War, Africa and Latin America, were still trying to figure out their places in the world following the end of the war a decade prior. While many Latin American countries economically benefited directly from the war, the Brazilian and Argentine defense industries both signed lucrative production contracts with member nations of NATO (Brazil) and the EC (Argentina), the continent was still too raw and undeveloped in places to take advantage of the vacuum in international politics left by the withdrawal of India and Pakistan and the loss of prestige the Chinese and their EC allies suffered under the terms of the Treaty of Brussels.
Africa was also another area where the internal political and economic development hampered their entrance into more active rolls in international politics post-war. While South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt were all uncommitted members of the NATO alliance in the last two years of the war, no nation from the continent of Africa was directly involved in the Third World War. Economic and infrastructure development both helped play a role in the declared neutrality of many African nations in the conflict. However, by the time of Cochrane’s warp flight some of the major power brokers within the African Union were petitioning the AU to take on a greater role in international politics. These petitions picked up momentum and by 2065 had reached the floor of the Pan-African Parliament.
Support for a move towards a unified African continent was divided. Many in West and Central Africa supported the petitions to unify Africa before the end of the 21st Century. But, some of the most vocal resistance against unification was heard from representatives of Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa, the four uncommitted NATO allies. While the other AU member states had spent the war selling war material overseas and using the profits to build up their nations’ economies and infrastructures, the “Big Four of Africa” had grown much closer to their European and American allies rather than to their African neighbors.
South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria had also grown closer in the decade since the end of the war to the UK and took on greater roles in the Commonwealth of Nations than they previously had undertaken. The promise of greater economic stability and access to advanced technologies lay with Britain and the Commonwealth, while the promise of helping found a united African state with the potential to become the number one economic and political force in the world lay with their African neighbors. The only thing that was certain was the promise of a difficult decision and an uncertain future.
Finally, the Russian Federation had come to a crossroads in its political and economic history. While originally a founding member of the Eastern Coalition of Nations, Russia had declared neutrality at the outset of World War III due to political issues centered on the reform of the Duma, the powers of the presidency, and economic hardship due to NATO embargoes. Reforms to the power and scope of the executive and legislative branches of the Russian government were passed by a majority vote in the Duma and signed into law by the president in 2054, and economic recovery from the NATO embargoes had brought the Russian economy back to its pre-2050 state. But, the changes in the Russian economy and political scene had come too late for them to make up their minds on intervention in World War III. By the time the issue had been brought forward in the Duma, the EC was in too weakened of a position to win even with Russian firepower and support for joining the NATO allies was almost nonexistent.
Many in Russia felt that they had lost their chance to strike back for all the injustices and hardships the Russian people had suffered for over a century, stretching back to the days of the Russian Revolution and Civil War when European nations intervened when they should have stayed out of Russian affairs. Thus, the age old debate in Russian political circles was made manifest for all to see: Where should Russia focus her attention, Asia or Europe? Should Russia be involved at all in European politics? What role should the Russian people and government place in Asiatic affairs? Most importantly, what place should Russia take in the new, post-war world? These questions, and so many more, would remain unanswered for the time being.
Sir Thomas Lloyd Andrews, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Oxford University wrote a book in 2113 on this period of time entitled “Pride, Promise, and Peril,” which has become the standard for all history texts focused on this period of time. In his introduction, he describes with curious detail the state of affairs:
“In the whole of human history, few eras hold such a place in our development as this, and few years have such far reaching implications as these. Dr. Cochrane’s first test of his faster-than-light vessel, the Phoenix, was not simply a milestone in the scientific field or a visual symbol of the triumph of human ingenuity and creativity over the laws of nature and the universe, it marked the end of an era, the demarcation line which separated the old world from the new. Before Cochrane lay the history of human endeavors stretching back to the late 19th Century where nation and empire ruled, unchallenged and unquestioned in their supremacy. The shape of the old world, carved out of the agony and suffering of the early 20th Century clashes of arms, lay prostate before the ambitions and dreams of great and small men alike. The bloody conflagration of the Third World War destroyed what little semblance of order remained since the dissolution of empire. Yet, even while nations and leaders trumpeted the return of peace, the war was still being fought. In bombed out cities, humanitarian relief missions, and rebuilding efforts, the war was still being fought in the hearts and minds of the human race.
Few wished to face the reality of the world they now lived in. It was as if the species had collectively entered a period of hibernation, or suffered a bout of amnesia. Cochrane’s flight was humanity’s alarm clock, waking us from our slumber to begin anew with the hope and promise of a new age. Yet, few understand the importance of these two years upon the next century of human development. The whole of civilization, past, present, and future, was in doubt. Many questioned humanity’s place in the universe, some believed it would have been better to destroy Cochrane’s designs and fall inward to isolation out of cowardice or fear. Others still believed humanity had been given a new purpose, the triumph of human civilization over the wild and unknown corners of the galaxy. Finally, some nihilists believed it would have been better to have launched the nuclear missiles and brought an end to the suffering and catastrophe of human existence.
Within these two years lay the hope and promise of a brighter day as well as the bleak despair of darker times. Such was the state of affairs after Cochrane and before the Alpha Centauri mission. They were humanity’s last days of isolation, the last time that our mastery over our domain was nigh unquestionable. Collectively, we slowly awoke from our slumber and prepared to face a new age of uncertainty and doubt. We took in all that was, weighed every option available, gazed upon the remnants of the old order as though they were the long decayed ruins of the Coliseum or the Acropolis, fondly looked back on everything that had been and once was, and prepared to take the final plunge into the unknown.”
2067- Through invoking the International Extra-Solar Claims and Diplomatic Recognition Resolution (IESC), the United States laid its first claim to the Proxima Centauri system. Shortly after its construction was completed and trial runs successful, the USS Concord was dispatched to the system with 200 colonists in suspended animation in late spring. The Concord reached Proxima Centauri in late July and stayed in the system until early 2068 and aided in the construction of the first extra-solar colony, Proxima Colony, on a small moon in the inner Proxima Centauri system. The American use of the IESC preemptively prior to planting the Proxima Colony allowed them to lay a blanket claim to the entire system. However, future claims to other star systems would not go unopposed.
2068- British scientists successfully followed in Zephram Cochrane’s footsteps and broke the light speed barrier in May. By September, the first British extra-solar expedition had been dispatched to Alpha Centauri. The expedition would not reach the system until November and did not have any colonists to begin settlement and legitimize British claims to the system.
In April, the Americans dispatched the USS Concord again to the Proxima Centauri system to drop off supplies and help in the expansion of Proxima Colony. An additional 150 colonists, mostly military families, joined the 200 original colonists, which in future years would allow the American military to expand its scope of operations within the Proxima Centauri system. Along with the dispatch of the USS Concord, the United States Space Command (USSC) announced the completion of the space cruiser USS Saratoga, which allowed the USS Constitution to enter space dock to be outfitted with a Cochrane warp core. The as-of-yet unfinished sister ship to the other USSC space cruisers was officially renamed USS Lexington by an act of Congress to keep with naval tradition.
By the end of the year, civilian corporations in both the United States and Britain began lobbying their respective governments for access to the plans to the Cochrane warp cores to expand their range of operations into the outer solar system, previously considered almost inaccessible with existing rocket technology, and the surrounding systems. While official documents detailing the designs of the Cochrane warp core were not released to civilian contractors until 2099, many corporations began investing heavily in space based technology and, in case their governments refused to release designs for the Cochrane warp core, began funding their own FTL research divisions.
2069- Two key events occurred this year, setting the stage for the remainder of the 21st Century. In March, the USSC expedition to Alpha Centauri, lead by the USS Saratoga, successfully entered orbit of the fourth planet of the Alpha Centauri system, an M-Class planet suitable for human colonization without extensive terraforming or use of pressurized shelters as were used at Proxima Centauri. The 200 colonists were immediately woken from suspended animation and sent to the planet’s surface. While the American colony’s presence in the Alpha Centauri system violated the spirit of the IESC, it did not break the wording of the UN Resolution. Before long, the British government lodged a formal protest with both the United States and the United Nations for American claims to the Alpha Centauri system which had been claimed by the earlier British expedition. The future UN Commission on Extra-Solar Territorial Integrity and Claims would find in favor of the American claim’s legitimacy, while still recognizing the legitimacy of British claims within the Alpha Centauri system, leaving no formal claim by either side on the entire system, only claims on asteroids, moons, and continents on Alpha Centauri 4, the only M-class planet.
The second event occurred in July at the Commonwealth of Nations meeting in Ontario. With their collective experiences in the Third World War at the back of their minds, representatives from the remaining Commonwealth Nations (Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean nations, Belize, Guyana, the United Kingdom, and the Indian remnant) debated, and finally passed, the Commonwealth Defense Act of 2069 which unified the military high commands of all the remaining Commonwealth nations into a single command structure, effectively unifying all of their militaries into a single, cohesive fighting unit. With the passage of the Commonwealth Defense Act, the British were once and for all turning their back on the European Union and embraced a future separate from European affairs. By 2075, the separate space agencies of the Commonwealth nations would be united under the Commonwealth Space Act which formed the Commonwealth Space Agency and later Commonwealth Space Corps.
2070- The first of the new USSC space cruisers, the USS Lexington, built from the keel up as a warp capable starship, set out from space dock on its shakedown cruise, lasting until the end of the year. The cruisers Gettysburg and Midway would soon follow in 2071 and 72 respectively. The British ordered their first three spaceships for military use, the HMS Nelson, Rodney, and Elizabeth I. All three British vessels would be finished before 2075 and would serve the British, and later Commonwealth, well into the 22nd Century.
2072- The European Union Constitution, passed just before the beginning of the Third World War in 2048, came into effect. The EU Constitution came into effect on January 1, abolished all national borders, and made the EU Parliament and Prime Minister the absolute authorities of European affairs. On December 31, 2071, the British Parliament voted to officially dissolve its political and economic ties to the European Union and called its observer at the EU Parliament in Brussels back to London just in time to avoid any legal ramifications from the Constitution’s ascent.
2073- Representatives from the British and American space programs announced plans to launch a joint US/UK mission to the Tau Ceti system in 2074. The EU Space Agency began construction of its first Cochrane warp drive powered vessel, Europa. The Europa would not be completed in time to take part in the farewell celebrations for the Anglo-American expedition the following year, but would complete several test flights before the end of the year.
2074- The joint Anglo-American expedition to Tau Ceti, lead by the USS Saratoga and HMS Nelson, departed the Sol System on January 2 amid many celebrations and festivities worldwide. The 125 man joint venture reached Tau Ceti before the end of March and stayed in the system until mid-September, departing in time to return home before the end of the year. British and American claims to Tau Ceti were recognized by the UN, giving both nations the time to plan follow-up expeditions to the star and gather volunteers to plant colonies. The British expedition to Tau Ceti would be the last time that the British undertook an expedition to a star system independent from their Commonwealth allies.
The EU Space Agency launched its first Cochrane warp core test vessel, the Europa in February, one month shy of the launch of the Anglo-American expedition to Tau Ceti. The Europa would break the light speed barrier four times between its launch and the end of the year.
2075- At the annual Commonwealth Conference, plans were finalized and put in place for the total unification of the separate space agencies into a unified Commonwealth Space Agency by the end of the year.
In Russia the socio-political situation, made worse by a continuing economic downturn that lasted the better part of a decade, reached critical mass. On February 7, the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, the principal stock exchange in the Russian Federation, suffered the single worst sell off in its 80 years of operation with a 420-point drop. The cause was narrowed down to three natural resource trading corporations who dumped thousands of their competitors’ stocks in an effort to force the companies to submit to hostile takeover gestures. The next day the sell-off continued, trigging other large corporations to follow suit against their competition and tens of thousands of additional stocks were dumped onto the already oversaturated market. The Moscow Interbank dropped an additional 400 points.
By the end of the week the sell-off, which was originally centered on a small number of natural resource and industrial corporations, spread out and began affecting other businesses that were non-resource or industrial oriented. In the following weeks, the Moscow Stock Exchange, the Russian Trading System and the Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange all had similar downturns which lasted well into March. By the end of spring the Russian economy had begun to feel the effects of what became referred to as the “Moscow Stock Crash,” with the industrial, agricultural, and natural resource sectors all suffering equally.
The Moscow Stock Crash came at the worst possible time for the Russian economy. Russian neutrality during the Third World War had allowed the economy to recover to its pre-2050 state after the lifting of the NATO trade embargo. However, after the Treaty of Brussels came into effect in 2055, the Russians found it difficult to find markets for their export goods with the US and its NATO allies shouldering the burden of relief and reconstruction efforts in the Middle East and Central Asia. A problem rose soon after; there were not enough consumers of the Russian exports yet resource extraction and industrial production continued at pre-war levels. Over the following two decades Russian companies struggled to adjust to the new world marketplace, with many businesses failing to do so and declaring bankruptcy.
When the Moscow Stock Crash occurred, the Russian economy was already primed to suffer a total collapse. By early summer, unemployment had risen to 9.5% and showed no signs of slowing down. The economic downturn had begun to impact politics as well. The volatility of Russian politics began to play out on the floor of the 450 seat State Duma; physical brawls broke out between members of the leading political parties, political discussions became more absolute and took on militaristic overtones as the year dragged on, and political rallies began to have an increased number of attendees bringing weapons with them.
By November, the government reported unemployment at 11.5% and still rising. Twenty years of the economic disintegration of the Russian state, coupled with lagging frustration over Russian neutrality during the Third World War and 80 years of political corruption in public office had taken their toll. Russia was teetering on the edge of its greatest political crisis since the October Revolution of 1917 and it appeared that there was nothing anyone could do to bring the nation back from the edge.
Waiting in the wings, the four major Russian political parties; the United Russia Party (Centrist), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (Ultranationalist/Neo-Conservative), and Fair Russia: Motherland, pensioners, life (Socialist, populist, nationalist) had begun bringing other, smaller, political parties and organizations into their orbits. By the end of the year, the four largest political parties had begun preparing for an extended period of social unrest and political violence.
While the four parties prepared for open violence, a fifth political organization, what we now refer to as the United Russian Imperialist and Monarchist League, a united front of domestic tsarists, imperialists and strict conservatives, backed by groups of exiled Russian monarchists, (many of whom traced their lineage back to White Russian exiles and monarchists), imperialists, and conservative factions within the Russian Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches, began to coalesce around Nicholas Dimitri Romanov, the pretender to the Russian throne. While not well known domestically, the United Russian Imperialist and Monarchist League began to gather funds and weapons in preparation for what everyone knew was coming next.
The stage was set for all out civil war in the coming months, all that was required was a single spark to light the fires of social unrest.
2076- 2076 has been considered by many one of the turning points of the last half of the 21st Century. Three events occurred that helped shape the course of events well into the 22nd Century: The founding of the United Nations Space Probe Agency, commonly referred to as the UNSPA, the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the subsequent release of the Congressional report on the state of American democracy, and the beginning of the Second Russian Civil War.
(United Nations)- The formation of the UNSPA was the culminating event in the 20 year history of international FTL research. The International Faster-Than-Light Consortium had waned in power over the 2060’s, due in large part to American and British military research into FTL applications to weapons systems, and was nearing the end of its UN charter. While the three nations with FTL capabilities, the United States, European Union and Britain continued to expand funding to their national warp projects, funds for the International FTL Consortium began to dry up by 2070 which drove many international commentators to write opinion pieces for such daily newspapers as USA Today and the London Times which called for renewed funding of the FTL Consortium to allow every nation on Earth equal access to warp technology.
Over the following six years, public outcries for additional funds and manpower for the FTL Consortium continued unabated even after the successes of the Proxima Centauri colony, the Alpha Centauri missions, and the joint Anglo-American Expedition to Tau Ceti. When the charter for the consortium came up for renewal at the beginning of the year, several ideas were put forward for both the renewal of the charter, and successor organizations to the International FTL Consortium.
Heated arguments over the future of the international efforts towards continued FTL research and development began almost as soon as the General Assembly reconvened in early January and went through well into the early spring. Finally, a compromise was reached when the ambassadors of the EU, America, Britain and Japan came up with the idea for the United Nations Space Probe Agency, or the UNSPA for short. The UNSPA would become the successor organization to the International Faster-Than-Light Consortium, inheriting the staff, research facilities and experimental craft currently operated by the FTL Consortium. It would answer directly to the United Nations General Assembly and the UN President. Funding for the UNSPA would come directly from the yearly operating budget of the UN along with a new due owed by all UN members to be paid out at the beginning of the new fiscal year. The UNSPA was to take on the roles of exploration, scientific research, colonization efforts, humanitarian relief, and diplomacy on behalf of the UN and representing, without bias, all nations and peoples of Earth. In effect, the UNSPA was to become humanity’s official presence in the larger Milky Way Galaxy and filled some of the roles that the Vulcan consulate had deemed “appropriate,” which were exploration, scientific research, off-world colonization efforts, and diplomacy to the galaxy at large.
The idea for the UNSPA was well received by the General Assembly and almost as soon as the ambassadors put the UNSPA in front of the General Assembly, a consensus was reached and a committee was formed to flesh out the concepts put forth and to write a founding charter. On April 3, coincidentally on the 13th anniversary of Zephram Cochrane’s, the draft of the UNSPA Charter was finished, which included a preamble that drew heavily from the founding documents of both the UN and several nations, including Great Britain and the United States.
By the end of spring, the UNSPA Charter was finalized and put before the General Assembly for the final vote. While several states, including the People’s Republic of China and several of its Eastern Coalition allies who were barred from participating in the International FTL Consortium due to stipulations written in the Treaty of Brussels, voiced dissent against the dissolution of the FTL Consortium without proper deliberation, there were no “nay” votes against the UNSPA Charter. With 8 abstaining, the core 8 Eastern Coalition nations, the UNSPA Charter passed with 184 yeas, 0 nay, and 8 abstaining from voting.
Coincidentally the General Assembly vote on the UNSPA Charter was the last time that the member states of the European Union would vote as independent political entities. The following year, all of the ambassadors would be recalled to their respective member states within the EU and were to be replaced by a single ambassador representing the European Union.
(United States)- The tri-centennial celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence were considered by many to be the largest 4th of July celebrations any who were alive at that time had ever seen. Across the United States, the insular territories, and the American off-world colonies, there were parades, speeches by prominent civic leaders at the state and national levels, barbecues, fireworks shows and all the other customs associated with 4th of July celebrations in the United States. However, while the celebrations went on as planned, a day earlier the “Franklin Commission,” a bi-partisan congressional group devised and commissioned by former President Kenan in 2071 to investigate the status of democracy and representative government in America, released its findings to the public. While such commissions were common place in the post-World War III years, the Franklin Commission was the last of the so-called “Congressional Reconstruction Narratives,” which gained their unofficial title due to historians and social commentators in later years calling the commissions collectively the, “Official government narrative on the status of the post-war reconstruction efforts at home and abroad.”
The chair and namesake of the Franklin Commission, three-term Senator Henry Thomas Franklin (R-NC), was the first to speak at the press conference. In an uncharacteristically short 10 minute speech, Senator Franklin laid out the findings of the commission in a frank and honest fashion. His opening statement, along with the introduction to the president’s speech at Ft. McHenry in Baltimore the next day, has become indelibly attached to the Franklin Commission’s findings:
“Ladies and gentleman of the press, foreign and off-world dignitaries and citizens of the United States, on this, the eve of the tri-centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the Revolution, I come before you with both sorrowing data. The status of democracy, and of representative government, here in the United States, is dire. Participation in local, regional and national elections is at 37% overall. One in three of us even bother to vote when elections take place. The public sentiment has been, and continues to be, that their votes mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, that the end result of any public election has already been predetermined by the powers that be, and that the government cannot be trusted to carry out the results of the election no matter how the election may go.
Moreover, it was found that somewhere around 65 to 70% of all citizens do not believe that the government has acted and continues to act in their best interests, that the government is corrupt and untrustworthy, and that most importantly of all, they hold no shred of belief that their government represents them or their beliefs. In short, to the majority of Americans, our government is untrustworthy, corrupt, and drunk with the economic, political, and military power it wields.”
The next day, President Brenden addressed the crowds gathered at Fort McHenry in Baltimore for the traditional Fourth of July celebrations. Prior to the presidential address, tens of thousands of spectators lined the shores of Baltimore harbor in anticipation of the presidential address commemorating the national tri-centennial. In a last minute decision, President Brenden had the podium for the address moved from inside Fort McHenry to outside the sally port (main entrance) to address the Fourth of July crowds who came to hear him speak. The 45 minute long address to the nation would go down as one of the most widely watched presidential addresses in the nation’s history, and would be quoted for years to come. Many political analysts in coming years would cite the president’s speech at Fort McHenry as what single handedly won President Brenden his second term in office:
“My fellow Americans, it gives me great pleasure to address you on this, our nation’s most cherished holiday, and on the celebration of our nation’s tri-centennial. I am standing in front of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor where on September 13, 1814 one thousand American soldiers withstood a 25 hour bombardment by the British Navy. The garrison’s refusal to surrender even under the combined might of the Royal Navy flotilla would go down in history as the inspiration for Francis Scott Key to write what would become our national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner. It was here, on the shores of Baltimore harbor, against all odds, that we looked the most powerful nation in the eye, took all that they could give us, and won the day. At a bleak time in the War of 1812 when our nation’s capital was in ashes, our army unable to fight off the advances of the British army, and public support turning against the war, the 1,000 defenders of Fort McHenry were able in one day to raise the spirits of the public and instill in all Americans a sense of national pride and unity.
Once again, our nation faces challenges of equal stature as those we faced in 1814. Only this time we face not the violence of combat, not the threat of invasion, but the threat that our own long cherished traditions of representative government, and democracy it self, may disappear forever. The threat lies not with invading armies or economic collapse, but with our selves. We have grown a culture of national distrust of the federal government; we no longer believe our government to be representing our own best interests, political corruption is around every corner in Washington, and fiscal responsibility is non-existent. What’s more, because of these beliefs, many of us do not bother to even vote, believing it a pointless exercise in futility, that our voice does not matter, and that even if we did vote, our vote would be ignored and cast off to the side like a piece of scrap paper. We have lost faith in our government, and even in the democracy that we so cherish as the cornerstone of our nation’s foundation.
My fellow Americans, this challenge might be the single largest and most difficult our nation has ever faced. There is no enemy we must fight, no evil to defeat, no nation to vanquish, there is only us. We have become our own worst enemy, the perfect foe to which there is no fight we can wage. Our collective mistrust of all things associated with politics and the national government, built up over the past century since the end of the Second World War and supported by the stark realities of the Cold War, and the government failures of the War on Terror and the Eastern Coalition, has lead to the very challenge we now face.
No other nation, save the Roman Republic in the years leading up to the rise of Julius Caesar in 44BCE, has ever faced the same kind of challenge we now face today. There can be no tactical withdrawal, no retreat, and no surrender to this enemy. For if we surrender, we seal the fate of our democratic heritage and forever doom future generations to a slow but sure descent into absolute despotism. We are in the position today that the citizens of Rome faced in the waning days of the republic. We see tyranny around every street corner, corruption in every day dealings, and fear the very government which was created to serve us. The only thing standing between us today and the Romans before Julius Caesar is the breakdown of the social order and the rise of fraternal, multi-sided civil war among the elite and powerful of society.
What will future generations say of us today and our actions in the coming decades if we choose to do nothing? If we choose to give in, throw our hands up in defeat, and allow the end to come, how will they judge us? Will we be seen as cowards? Self serving profiteers? Criminals who abandoned the ideals central to our national identity? Or, will we be seen as historians today view the citizens of Rome in 44BCE, who valued personal security and their livelihoods over the republican ideals they espoused? Will our children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren be the ones to give into corruption and vice, to surrender all that we hold dear to us as American ideals, and welcome a modern Caesar with open arms? What, if anything, can or should be done to prevent this descent into tyranny?
I can only speak for myself and my family when I say this: As long as I hold breath in my lungs, as long as I can have some impact on what the future may bring, I will do whatever I can to prevent this catastrophe from ever taking place. We have a responsibility both to ourselves and our children, and to the men and women who have fallen in the defense of liberty since the minutemen lined up on the parade grounds in Lexington town square in April, 1775 and took the first stand in the defense of freedom, to do everything in our collective power as citizens of this nation to do what is right.
We must rebuild public trust in the national government, we must eliminate vice and corruption from the halls of power, we must restore public belief in the idea that each and every one of us as citizens of this democracy has the right to voice our dissent at the ballot box, we must revive public involvement in government, and most important, we must teach our children, both at home and school, that the ideals and principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are at the heart of everything that it means to be an American, and that the glory days of our nation are not behind us, but are ahead of us.
My fellow Americans, I come to you on our tri-centennial with this call to action. We must take action now, immediately, to reverse the course on which our nation is following. We must face these challenges head on and with the stalwart determination that we will not allow this country, our country, to succumb to the same fate our republican ancestors did 2,000 years ago. We can, all of us, take part in this effort to restore our government and restore the democracy we value and cherish. When, in the near future, our efforts are found to have succeeded, we will have proven ourselves worthy to call ourselves heirs to the democratic ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the institutions created in the Constitution. We will, moreover, have proven ourselves truly worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the other citizens of the galaxy as equals, ready to take our place in the galactic brotherhood of civilizations, bringing meaning to the old NASA motto, Per Aspera Ad Astra, through hardships to the stars.
In closing, I would like to wish all of you a happy and safe Fourth of July. May God continue to bless America, and may he guide us in the coming months and years. Thank you and good night.”
(Russia)- Finally, in Russia, the disintegration of the remaining authority of the central government and the outbreak of violence and civil disturbances among political supporters took place before the spring thaw had set in. After the first of the year, the economic collapse which had begun the previous summer reached its low point. After the reopening of the stock exchanges and banks on January 2, Russians of all economic and social status showed up in droves to pull what little money they had still invested out of the market.
Fears of total economic collapse became a reality by the end of the week when foreign investors were advised to begin selling their shares in Russian based businesses before the value of the ruble went too low. Coupled with the massive foreign sell off in the second week of January, was a public panic over the issue of bank insolvency, long term mortgages, and credit debt in the now failing Russian economy. Before long, bank runs began after rumors of widespread bank insolvency in several major banks and creditors, including the largest private commercial bank in Russia, the Alfa Bank. Along with the runs on the Alfa Bank, runs commenced on the VTB Bank, the Russia Bank, the International Industrial Bank, and Rosbank.
By the end of the month, the Alfa, Russia, and International Industrial banks had all suffered extended runs and were no longer solvent, leaving millions of Russians without access to their life’s savings and unable to deposit and cash pay checks. Moreover, by the end of the month, official reports from the Central Bank of Russia laid out a very real chance of the central bank loosing solvency as well.
The loss of solvency would come too late to have a real impact on the coming civil war. In March, protests erupted across the nation, many of which turned violent, and proved once and for all the lack of central authority that Moscow held. The March protests would be to the Second Russian Civil War what the October Revolution of 1917 was to the first, the spark that started the proverbial forest fire.
On April 2, protests outside the Kremlin turned violent. The president and many of his advisors were drawn into the protests. Historians still argue over where the shot came from, the protestors or the police, but whoever the shot came from the effect was all the same. While the president attempted to speak to the protestors face to face, a shot rang out and the president fell to the ground with a bullet lodged very close to his heart. He would not last until the ambulance arrived. Spectators at the scene reported later that his final words were, “Don’t let the dream die, don’t let all that we have worked so hard for, die this way.” The president’s hopes would wither in the fires of civil war.
The next day, the State Duma argued over the successor to the presidency. The four-way split in support over who the president should be was split right down party lines. No successor would be chosen, for by the end of the week, all four parties had stormed out of the assembly hall and prepared for the inevitable outbreak of conflict. By the end of the month, open conflict among the major political parties was a reality. International support for the disparate factions in the Second Russian Civil War would be split down ideological lines and the individual factions would take on the names of their ideological predecessors 160 years prior during the First Russian Civil War:
United Russia (White Russians): Limited international aid from the European Union, Japan, and the United States
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Red Russians): Large scale economic and military aid from the Eastern Coalition and the PRC in particular.
Liberal Democrats/Fair Russia Coalition [merger with United Russia by 2079] (Blue Russians): Large scale international aid from the European Union, United States, Great Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations, and the African Union.
Monarchist League (Green Russians): Limited international aid from conservative monarchist factions in the United States, the European Union, Great Britain, and the Commonwealth of Nations.
2077- (United Nations) – Arguments are heard in the UN General Assembly on whether or not the UN Trusteeship Council would become the governing organ of the quickly growing off world colonies in both the Sol System and the extra solar colonies in Alpha and Proxima Centauri and elsewhere. While the arguments would go nowhere for the next few years, the two big stories were the suspension of Russian voting power in all United Nations political organs, and the Vulcan Confederation’s entrance to the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council.
By the spring, members of the Security Council were growing weary of the Russian issue stemming from the issue of which faction had the right to claim the Russian Federation’s seat at the Security Council and the General Assembly. With all UNSC members sending aid to political factions in the conflict, it was agreed after a very heated debate and close vote in the General Assembly to suspend the Russian Federation seat in the General Assembly and the Security Council until the successful conclusion of the Second Russian Civil War.
The Vulcan Confederation’s agreement to enter the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council under observer status has been the cause of much debate over the intervening decades. Some have pointed to the debates in the General Assembly over extending the powers of the old Trusteeship Council, inactive since the dissolution and reformation of the old United Nations in the early 2020’s, as the reason for the Vulcan entry into Earth politics. Others pointed to the explosion of energy poured into FTL technology by the Earth governments as the reason why the Vulcans entered the UN. Whatever the reason, on April 1, 2077, the Vulcan ambassadors formally entered the UN Assembly Hall in New York with observer status.
(United States)- Aero cars began to make their first appearances in the airspace over New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and other major metropolitan centers. Many have also pointed to this year, 2077, as the year that the BosWash (Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor) megalopolis emerged as a single cohesive, entirely connected, metropolitan center. The urbanization of the last remaining areas between Baltimore and Washington, and New York and Boston was completed. Over the next 50 years, additional megalopolises would emerge in the Pacific Northwest (Greater Seattle-Olympia Metropolitan Complex), Southern California (Greater Los Angeles), and the Great Lakes (Greater Chicago-Pittsburg Complex).
Also, the November 2 San Diego Subway Bombing has been marked as the second rise of Eco-terrorism, the first being from the early 21st Century until the end of the Third World War and the disappearance of Col. Phillip Green, ex-USMC, from public life. Colonel Green’s fanatical eco-terrorists were held responsible for the near destruction of the city of Chicago in 2039 with a suitcase nuclear warhead. However, Green and his cohorts were never caught by law enforcement.
Thus after a 20 year lull in activity, Green’s “Earth Liberation Front,” or “ELF,” named in honor of a late 20th and early 21st Century eco-terrorist front responsible for arsons and vandalism in the Pacific Northwest, became active once more. The ELF would become a thorn in the side of the United States government for the remainder of the century and well into the first quarter of the next.
2078- (former Russian Federation)- After two years of open conflict, the three largest fronts in the Second Russian Civil War, United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and the Liberal Democrats/Fair Russia Coalition had fought each other to a virtual stalemate and had driven most of the civilian population away from supporting any one side. Looting, pillaging, raping, murder, all were common place, which has lead some historians to compare the Second Russian Civil War less to the first and more to the kind of warfare experienced in the Thirty Year’s War in the 1620’s. After the onset of the stalemate in 2077, with no end in sight, many field commanders began ordering the use of small and large yield tactical nuclear warheads.
Over the course of several weeks, two to three dozen tactical warheads were used by the three factions either in hopes of opening holes in one another’s lines to exploit in an offensive action, or in retaliation against the use of tactical warheads. By the second week, several full yield atomic and thermonuclear warheads were detonated. The highest yield, a 1.5 megaton thermonuclear warhead, was launched atop an aging and once decommissioned R-36 ICBBM by the Liberal Democrats/Fair Russia Coalition at the headquarters of the Communist Party front, which also contained the largest arms cache and supply dump for their armed forces. Several additional sub-megaton and megaton warheads were used by the Communist front, as well as the United Russia front, in the last days of the nuclear exchange.
Thankfully, most strategic warheads were used by the combatants in more sparsely populated areas against formations of soldiers, rather than against civilian population centers. However, at least a dozen or more tactical nuclear warheads were used in the heavily populated areas of European Russia, west of the Ural Mountains. Nuclear fallout began to impact large metropolitan centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, the water supply was, in some areas, made unfit for consumption due to radioactivity, perishable food stuffs were contaminated and had to be destroyed. The very fabric of Russian society began to come apart at the seams with mass rioting, looting, hoarding, and the widespread proliferation of small arms amongst the remaining population.
The two week nuclear exchange also managed to decapitate the leadership of all three fronts. With the deaths of most of the political leaders, leading generals began to fight amongst themselves over who would assume political control over the fronts. In short order, the generals began sending the remaining forces still under their control to try and either defeat the competition and assume control through brute strength, or use shock and awe to bring the rival factions back together. In the end, not even the generals could control their armies, which quickly dissolved and began coalescing around charismatic individuals who turned into regional warlords. Within a month of the first tactical nuclear strike, all three fronts had dissolved into regional warlords and had dragged much of Russia down with them.
Control of two of the key cities in the entire nation, Moscow and St. Petersburg, was lost. Most of the civilian population of Moscow either evacuated in the days leading up to the conflict, or had armed themselves and formed competing street gangs vying for control over food distribution centers and the few relief convoys. In St. Petersburg, most of the middle and upper classes fled the city at the outbreak of fighting and made their way across the Karelian Isthmus into Finland, an EU member. Like in Moscow, armed street gangs took control of the streets and regional warlords made receiving food and medical supplies almost impossible. In essence, the unified Russian state ceased to exist, and the chaos of the Second Russian Civil War had become pure anarchy in most urban centers. However, as the cohesiveness of Russian society dissolved and all seemed lost, the fourth and final front in the Second Russian Civil War emerged from the chaos.
With limited financial resources and foreign support, the Monarchist League, also referred to as the “greens,” was never seen as a major threat to any of the three major fronts and was left alone. By a twist of fate, this left both the political and military leadership of the greens relatively in tact after the nuclear exchanges. In the aftermath of the nuclear exchange and the collapse of civil society in urban Russia, the greens made immediate efforts to stem the rising tide of warlordism wherever they could. They used the preexisting frameworks of the pre-war local governments, found city planners; law enforcement heads, mayors, city councilors, or any other civilian government leaders still alive, and put them back to work in relief efforts.
The greens worked from the outside in, they used what limited resources they had at hand and worked from the town down to the village levels. They used Russian Orthodoxy as the key to success; they built their efforts around churches, which were usually located at or near the town centers. By the fourth month after the nuclear exchange, in mid-May, many of the smaller towns and villages surrounding the three key cities of European Russia: Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd, had been secured. Highways and railways were soon secured and the work of disarming and disbanding the smaller, less powerful, warlord armies began.
The goal of securing Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd took into the fall to complete. Several warlord armies outside Moscow put up heavy resistance to the greens. However, as the only remaining political front with any cohesive leadership left, they overcame the resistance and on the morning of August 22, 2078, advance forces for the Russian Monarchist League entered Moscow. By the afternoon, the greens held a small ceremony in Red Square celebrating the victory over the local warlords and began relief efforts to the people of the city. Two weeks later, the cities of Volgograd and St. Petersburg fell to the greens as well.
It would not be until 2079 the final victory was secured over both the warlords, and the remaining organized forces of the other three fronts still fighting in Siberia. However, the way was paved for the eventual green victory and the return of the Romanov exiles to the motherland.
(United States)- During a brief lull in the Congressional debates over possible intervention in the Russian Civil War, a military expenditures bill was passed which freed up $10 billion for the development of mass drivers, which were seen as the logical progression from the small caliber rail guns that had been mounted on the American space cruisers. Several riders were attached to the bill which included a $100 million investment in NASA’s space elevator program, $50 million to go towards ongoing recovery efforts in the Indian Sub-Continent and $15 million to the Space Studies Institute, a non-profit institute founded in 1977 by the late Princeton University professor Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, to fund its ongoing research into O’Neill cylinders and other large space habitats for human colonization.
(Eastern Coalition)- After two decades of recovery efforts, the remaining member states of the Eastern Coalition of Nations emerged once more onto the world state with the People’s Republic of China at its helm. After their humiliating defeat at the hands of the US/EU lead NATO and their Mid East allies, the Chinese and their South-East Asian allies launched “Operation: Smiling Dragon,” the first of a series of air and naval exercises over the South and East China Seas designed to announce to the world the EC’s return after a 20 year recovery. Two PLAN (People’s Liberation Army Navy) task forces entered the South and East China Seas and, in conjunction with forces dispatched from as far away as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, ran a series of war games as close as legally possible to Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean territorial waters.
Along with “Operation: Smiling Dragon,” two Chinese armored corps held military exercises along the Sino-Russian border. PLA representatives responded to the foreign press by stating that it was not against international law to hold exercises in your own nation, even if said exercises are close to, or located on, a foreign border. Western military analysts began dusting off pre-war reports on the possibility of Sino-Russian hostilities.
2079- (Siberia) - With covert Eastern Coalition support, several generals with Communist loyalties were able to rein in several rogue warlord armies and were able to reconstitute the Red front. In response, 10 warlords formally associated with the United Russia and Fair Russia fronts put aside their temporary hostilities to form a united front composed of the United Russia and Fair Russia fronts, now simply referred to as the “White Russians.”
By the end of the year, the White and Red Russians were once more fighting for control of Siberia. However, the situation was changed compared to 2077. The Green Russians were in control of all of European Russia. With European Russia, the Green Russians had a large portion of the Russian nuclear stockpiles, much of the Russian infrastructure, and control of over 60% of the remaining Russian population. The Russian Monarchist Army by 2079 was outfitted with modern aircraft purchased from the Americans and the Europeans, relatively modern American surplus tanks from World War III, and modern pre-war Russian small arms. Both the White and Red Russians were outfitted with pre-2020’s small arms, including millions of AK-47’s left in old Soviet era stockpiles, Cold War era Soviet tanks, and limited aircraft.
The Russian Monarchist Army began its first military operation in November which pacified the warlord controlled just east of the Ural Mountain passes. By the end of the month, a half-dozen smaller, unaffiliated, warlord armies had been disbanded and Green Russian control was extended almost to the borders of White and Red Russian control which began at the city of Omsk. In December, monarchist forces secured control of the city of Omsk, a White Russian stronghold, and began the long drive east to Vladivostok.
(Commonwealth of Nations)- Months of tense deliberations among the Commonwealth members lead to the announcement of the formation of the “Commonwealth Space Administration” and the “Commonwealth Space Corps,” the successor organizations to the individual space programs of the separate nations of the Commonwealth.
In September, the HMS Nelson left Earth orbit with a full crew and with 300 colonists in suspended animation to formally begin the settlement of the Alpha Centauri system. With over half of the total colonists being from the African “Big Three,” Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, the first steps towards human colonization outside of the solar system were to be of a more inclusive nature than the colonization efforts on Earth in centuries past.
(Worldwide)- Fusion reactors began coming online in the more developed regions of the world. Beginning in the European Union, United States, the Commonwealth, and Japan, several large fusion reactors came online by the end of the year. The power needs of large portions of the populations of these nations would from then on be dealt with in a much more environmentally friendly way. However, as fusion power and fusion reactors spread in the following decade, Helium-3 deposits on the moon became a much sought after commodity on the world market and would lead to several conflicts in the 2090s and early 2100s.
2080- (South America)- The Union of South American Nations, USAN, formally began assigning passports to all citizens of South America, save French Guyana. Over the preceding three decades, customs unions, a common currency, and the lowering of all internal trade tariffs had brought the nations of South America closer together and had prepared them for the final steps towards unification which would come by the end of the 2080s.
(Vulcan)- The Second Andorian War broke out over the sacred Vulcan P’Jem Monastery. The First Andorian War in the 2020’s had been considered a stalemate, with much of the fighting limited to space combat in and around the P’Jem system, while fighting in the Second Andorian War was spread out over both Vulcan and Andorian controlled space. Some of the most brutal fighting was isolated to the Dessica System, where Vulcan and Andorian troops would engage in jungle fighting operations that were eerily similar to the American experiences in the South Pacific and Vietnam War during the 20th Century. In coming decades, both the Dessica and Deneva systems would be abandoned as human settlers moved in and in greater numbers
In one of the greatest individual rights violations of the 21st Century, agents dispatched from the Vulcan High Command ruthlessly exterminated the population of several Andorian colonies captured during the main offensive, including settlements in the Dessica system. Many historians point to this instance as the first time when human developed strategies for conquest were applied to alien conflicts. Andorian stories about the Dessica massacre would become the basis for the famous Hollywood movie “Dessica,” released in 2095 and the winner of the Academy Award for best motion picture that year.
The Second Andorian War was also the first interstellar conflict where human reporters, dispatched from all major news organizations, were witnesses. Reports from the frontlines on the newest Vulcan phasers and shield technologies would drive most Earth nations to begin investments into both technologies in an effort to close the tech gap between Earth and its interstellar neighbors.
(Russia)- The Green Russians declare victory in Siberia after the destruction of the last Red and White Russian holdouts in the Russian Far East. The offensive into Siberia has been hailed by many historians as the last of the so-called “textbook” armored column advances. As the Green Russian upgraded T-90 and T-105 tanks swept aside the Red and White Russian Cold War era T-56’s and T-60’s, already plans were developed abroad for the deployment of rail guns to heavy armored divisions. Plans for rail gun armed tanks would reach fruition by the early 22nd Century, just in time for the
After the final defeat of the Red and White field armies, the moment over a century in development finally came to Moscow. On September 1, 2080, the official heir to the Romanov Dynasty, Alexander Romanov, an American born Russian who grew up and lived most of his life in New York City, was presented to the world in a coronation ceremony broadcast across Earth and the off-world colonies. In his first speech to the Russian people, in perfect Russian, Alexander IV called on the remaining pockets of Red and White Russian resistance to throw down their arms and join the rest of Russia in the reconstruction of their nation. Scattered guerilla forces, mostly Red front troops, continued resistance into the 2100’s.
2082- (Eastern Coalition)- The Republic of Sri Lanka officially rescinded all ties to the Eastern Coalition after 20 years of increasing relations between the island nation and the Commonwealth. Threats from China and its other EC allies to launch a full blockade against the island went unfulfilled as the Commonwealth and NATO moved to protect their new ally in the Far East.
(Commonwealth of Nations)- Commonwealth colonies on Alpha Centauri reach 1000 people as asteroid mining operations reached their peak efficiency for the 21st Century. From here on until the late 2090’s, mining operations would become largely isolated to the private sector. The DeBeers Corporation, world renowned for their diamond and gold mining operations in South Africa, would reach out into outer space and before long had opened mining operations in the Asteroid Belt, Mars, and the moon.
(United States)- Construction on the first space elevator began on Aguijan, an island several hundred miles north of Tinian in the Northern Marianas Islands. Initial investment in the LEO space elevator ranged in the billions of dollars and was managed mainly by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Management of the finished space elevator would be a joint NASA-USSC affair.
2083- (Vulcan Home World)- The BBC, CNN, New York Times, London Times, and Reuters all opened news bureaus on Embassy Row down the street from the Vulcan High Command to allow for ‘round the clock news coverage of off-world news events. The first major story that broke: The reopening of the P’Jem Monastery. News reports on the reopening of the P’Jem Monastery helped spark protests on Earth outside Vulcan embassies due to the now infamous reports about the Dessica massacre.
(East China Sea)- People’s Liberation Army-Air Force (PLAAF) J-12 fighters engage in aerial maneuvers with US Navy F-39 interceptors based off the USS Ronald Regan. The Regan was a veteran of combat in the East China Sea, having served with the 2nd Carrier Fleet based out of Tokyo Bay and Taipei during the Third World War. While no shots were fired between the two J-12’s and the four F-39’s, the aerial dog fighting maneuvers were a reminder to military planners in the west that the Eastern Coalition was once again a major player on the world stage.
2085- (Russian Empire)- The former Soviet break away republic of Belarus rejoined the reformed Russian Empire after nearly a century of a failing economy, environmental fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, and a disintegrating political scene which had devolved to party infighting and street violence during elections.
(Solar System)- The off-world population reached 25,000, with the largest settlements on the moon and Mars. Several asteroid colonies had reached nearly 1,000 settlers. Settlements in Alpha and Proxima Centauri were not included in the figures, but had reached into the thousands themselves.
(Eastern Coalition)- The PLAAF announced its first successful launch of a military space craft into LEO since the outbreak of World War III in 2051. The Chinese military vessel, named “Dragon’s Breath,” was simple in design, consisting only of a few older space capsules connected via docking tubes to one another and armed with only the simplest of rail guns and lasers, but showed its self to be enough of a threat to NATO and its far east allies that the USS Constitution was dispatched to LEO to watch the Dragon’s Breath’s every move.
By the end of the year, the Dragon’s Breath would be converted into the first of many orbiting space habitats for the PRC and its Eastern Coalition allies. Shipyards would soon follow.
2088- (African Union)- Representatives from all but five African nations, save the African Big Three, Egypt, and Libya, signed the African Union charter in Kinshasa, bringing an end to the individual nation-states of the African continent and giving birth to one of the major players on the world stage. Some of the first objectives of the AU were to begin laying the ground work for a unified transportation network, and the expansion of mining and oil drilling operations. Unfortunately for the AU, most profits from oil drilling would be short lived as fusion power and battery cell technology became more developed as the 22nd Century loomed.
(Saudi Arabia)- Representatives from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Libya met in Riyadh to sign the United Arab League Charter, which formed a united trade bloc, a common currency, and laid the groundwork for the greater Arab state to be founded in under a decade’s time.
2090- (Iran) - Representatives from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan (recently released from allied control), Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan met in Tehran to discuss the formation of a trade bloc to rival the newly formed United Arab League. The representatives decided on forming the Persian League, a trade and political bloc to prevent the spread of the United Arab League beyond its borders and to encourage the economic rehabilitation of the area.
2091- (Vulcan Home World) – The CIA opened a field office out of the US Embassy, just down the street from the Vulcan High Command and other alien embassies, including the Andorian and Tellarite Embassies. Within weeks, the field office had contacted the Andorian Embassy and had begun talks with the Andorians and others to purchase star maps and technologies, including the designs for warp 3 engines, energy shielding, and designs for basic phasers and anti-matter warheads. By the end of the decade, the designs for all technologies had been either sold to other NATO powers, or stolen by foreign intelligence organizations. The dissemination of these designs would prove to be the key to the rise of humanity as a major galactic power during the first half of the 22nd Century.
2092- (United States) – Analysts at the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia began looking into several archeological field reports translated and filed out of the field offices at the US Embassy on Vulcan that discussed a creature so violent that “not even a Klingon would dare battle it, for it is nay indestructible.” CIA Director Shannon Mallory ordered the field offices on Vulcan to begin sending out information gathering missions to the Zeta I Reticuli system where the archeological field report had originated from. For the time being, the species had been codenamed “Xenomorph.” The name would stick.
2093-5- (Worldwide) – The rising amount of carbon dioxide, increased development of urban areas in Europe and the United States, and the rising agricultural demands of the developing world coupled with an already damaged environment lead to the onset of a drought across much of Asia. The area greatest hit by the drought was Central Asia, which lead to greater crop failures and eventually starvation in the rural areas. The nations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were hardest hit by the drought, which soon turned into an all out famine in 2094. By 2095, the nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kygerstan had all suffered severe drought and famine with little hope in sight for relief. Their only remaining options were to either petition the United Nations for large scale humanitarian relief, petition the Vulcans and other off world species, join the other two former Soviet Republic in the growing Central Asian Union, or petition the Neo-Russian Empire for aid. In the end, it was agreed that begging the Czar for aid was more agreeable than groveling before the United States or the Iranians.
2096- (Socialist Republic of Vietnam) – Rioting broke out in the business sector of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) after Hanoi announced additional crack downs on political dissent, free speech, and the two month closure of the national stock exchange. The rioters cited the precedent of the last 100 years worth of political and economic reforms as reason enough to begin freeing up controls over free speech and economic freedoms. When the government dispatched the Vietnam People’s Army in conjunction with riot forces of the People’s Police of Vietnam, cells of anti-government, pro-Colonel Green eco-terrorists began tossing Molotov Cocktails and fired AK-47’s and other vintage firearms into the police forces. Before long, the rioting spread far beyond the business district of Ho Chi Minh City and into the countryside.
By the end of the year, the entire southern portion of the nation had fallen to violence, which dragged portions of the border of Cambodia and southern Laos into the violence as well. In Ho Chi Minh City, the People’s Police of Vietnam and the government forces of the Vietnam People’s Army were driven out of the city by the angry mobs after weeks of open rioting. Similar events began to take place in Cambodia and in smaller settlements along the Laotian border. It appeared that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam had lost its grip on power in the south and a possible restructuring of the very system of government in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was inevitable.
2097- (Neo-Russian Empire) – Czar Nicholas IV announced his full support for the reformers in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and declared in a formal statement to the world press that reforms were “necessary in our fast changing world.” And, furthermore, “Socialism in all its forms has been proven to be a failure, the sooner our brothers and sisters in the Far East can see this, the sooner we can move on as a civilization.”
In related events, the Russian Empire had three major events that marked its return to the world stage. The Czar officially announced the return of the Old Russian Imperial flag, instated by Czar Nicholas III in 1914 prior to the outbreak of World War I, a move which many have pointed to as the event which truly marked the return of the Russian Empire.
The second event was the Russian testing of a warp engine aboard the science vessel “Minsk.” The test of the crude warp 1 engine was successful, with the Minsk staying in FTL for nearly 80 seconds before dropping out of warp.
The final event was one which many in the diplomatic world had seen coming for two years. The nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kygerstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia all dissolved their national borders and agreed to rejoin the Neo-Russian Empire. The nations had been facing economic collapse, large scale political corruption and popular dissent, military corruption, and starvation and all saw joining the reformed Russian Empire as favorable to an otherwise bleak existence.
With these three events, the Neo-Russian Empire emerged onto the world stage once more as a major player, equal to any in the east or west. By the end of the 21st Century, the Russians would be testing their own warp 2 engines, anti-matter warheads, energy shields, and phasers.
(United States) – Designs for the new USSC space battleships, the Constitution Class, began their lives on the drawing boards. Built around warp 4 engines and armed with the latest in mass drivers, phasers, anti-matter warheads, energy shielding, and hull plating, the Constitution Class would prove to be one of the most successful and longest lived, of all USSC designs. When launched in 2109, the USS Constellation would set off a space naval arms race akin to the one created by the launch of the HMS Dreadnaught 200 years prior.
“A House Divided…”
Star Trek Non-Federation Timeline Revised
Supranational Defense Organizations and member countries at the outbreak of World War III (2053):
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom of Great Britain, Republic of Ireland, Fifth French Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Romania, Georgia, Republic of Macedonia, Croatia, Albania, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Turkey, Denmark.
Eastern Coalition of Nations (ECON/EC): People’s Republic of China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, People’s Republic of Vietnam, Republic of Cambodia, Republic of Laos, Republic of Myanmar (Burma), Republic of Bangladesh, Republic of Indonesia, Republic of Thailand, Republic of Malaysia, Mongolia, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea.
NATO Allied States in Asia/Pacifica: Republic of Australia, Republic of New Zealand, the Philippines, Republic of Japan, South Korea, Republic of Taiwan, Republic of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, Israel, Singapore.
EC Allies in Asia/Pacifica: Republic of India, Islamic Republic of Iraq, Oman, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Brunei.
February 28, 2050- Earth: The Russian Federation declares neutrality after the Eastern Coalition of Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization declare war after the “Taiwan Straits Incident” when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Missile Cruiser Beijing launched an unwarranted attack against a Taiwanese frigate, bringing the two warring sides to blows. Most citizens felt that the war would only last a few months at the longest, while military planners on both sides began preparations for an extended conflict lasting years perhaps. Hours after the initial declaration of war, advanced forces from the Republic of Malaya enter the city of Singapore and begin the three year long occupation of the banking capital of South-East Asia. Vulcan: The Vulcan Science Council called back the science vessel Surak out of the Sol System after learning of the outbreak of the Third World War on Earth. Those in the science council who had been observing Earth searching for signs that humans were ready for first contact were disappointed when word reached them of the Chinese attack and what appeared to be a war that had the capacity to end human civilization should it turn nuclear.
June 1, 2053- World War III had been raging for three years by this time. Fighting had extended to the Middle East, South-East Asia, Taiwan, and into Siberia, showing no signs of slowing. President Donald M. O’Grady of the United States, who had been elected in the landslide Democratic victory in 2052 on a ‘bring the war to a close now’ platform, had lead his people as best he could. The situation in South-East Asia and on the island of Taiwan was too large for the United States alone to handle, and with the continuing fighting in Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, the EU could spare only token forces to aid the United States garrisons on Taiwan. Fighting between India, a member of the Eastern Coalition of Nations, and Pakistan, an ally of NATO, had gone poorly for both sides. The Iranians had initially declared neutrality, but in 2052 they did decide to declare for the EC, launching military strikes over the Iran-Pakistan border in hopes that their Indian allies would take advantage of the situation and bring Pakistan to its knees. Three years of almost constant stalemate had become too much for some generals in key positions in the Indian Armed Forces.
At 0530 hours New Delhi time, the Indo-Pakistani War, which was considered a side-war in the greater context of the struggle, went nuclear. Over 400 nuclear warheads of varying size were launched between the two nations, devastating the Indian Sub-Continent and bringing both countries to their knees. In both India and Pakistan, there was no longer an effective functioning government to speak of. Fulfilling their treaty obligations, the PRC launched a small phalanx of ten nuclear warheads at entrenched Pakistani positions in the Hindu Kush. Thanks to this shocking development, many NATO commanders began to call for an all out counter-strike against Chinese hardened missile bunkers, ICBM platforms, nuclear weapons storage centers, and any targets that had some military implications.
President O’Grady disagreed. Three hours after the Indo-Pakistani exchange, O’Grady made a series of phone calls to the European allies declaring that the United States would take no part in any counter-strike against the PRC that involved the use of either tactical or strategic nuclear warheads, the end result being an all out nuclear exchange between NATO and the EC. Instead, he supported a plan put forward by commanders in Syria and Turkey, calling for an enlarged offensive against EC positions in the reunited nation-state of Iraq, with possible targets along the Iraq-Iran border should the offensive prove successful.
June-December, 2053- NATO forces, spearheaded by American, British, French, and German armored divisions, launched a successful blitzkrieg-style attack against Eastern Coalition forces stationed in Iraq. Thanks to these attacks, the Iraqi petroleum that many EC countries, especially the PRC, still used to run their nations was cut off completely. For the second time in a century, American forces enter Baghdad.
January-August, 2054- NATO forces plow into Iranian Armored Corps based out of Mandali, just on the other side of the Iraqi border, inflicting severe losses at the Battle of Kirkuk, and at the Battle of Babylon. Thanks to the severe losses, Iranian forces were forced to pull back in early July lest they risk the loss of the entire Iranian Army at the hands of NATO, leaving the Iranian heartland open for invasion.
August 2, 2054- On the exact 109th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the PRC launched a phalanx of 25 nuclear warheads at Japan atop the latest generation Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles. Ten of the twenty-five reached their targets with fifteen loosing guidance lock and falling into the Sea of Japan, or being shot down by Japanese ABM satellites. The cities hit were Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Toyama, Matsui, Sapporo, Hiroshima, Akita, Fukuoka, and Nagasaki. The overall destructive power of the warheads was minimal; however the Chinese nuclear weapons were of a more radioactive sort meant for use on the battlefield, not against civilian targets.
Radioactivity polluted many rivers and waterways for years to come. In response, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces launched retaliatory air strikes against fifty Chinese dams, and twenty Chinese cities, including Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Canton, and the major Chinese port cities of Qingdao and Dalian. When the Japanese counter-strike was completed, the death toll reached above 25 million people, more died in one day, than died in the entire period of active combat during World War One.
August 3-12, 2054- Riots broke out in Central, South and South-East Los Angeles protesting the military draft and the horrific casualty rates of the fight in the Middle East. Some 3,000 businesses were put to the torch, along with 700 tenement apartment buildings; over 10,000 homes and large swaths of Central Los Angeles were burnt to the ground. A state of emergency was declared for the counties of Burbank, Santa Monica, and Los Angeles, allowing the governor to call in the National Guard to quell the rioting. On August 8, the National Guard entered Los Angeles under orders from the governor to bring the rioting to an end, which took an additional four days. Some historians in later years would claim that the Los Angeles riots were as bad as or worse than the Bell Riots in the San Francisco Sanctuary District some 20 years prior.
August 30, 2054- NATO forces, spearheaded by American armored columns capture Tehran, obliterating the remnants of the Iranian National Army and Air Force. With the horrific losses suffered by the Iranian Army in the Iraqi campaign, NATO forces had little trouble in defeating the remnants of the once proud Iranian Army. The Iranian Republic and Iranian Provisional Government was formed by NATO after the fall of Tehran and the flight of most of the Iranian leadership to the mountainous regions of the north of the country. The Iranian Republic would serve as a bulwark against any EC incursions mounted out of Sri Lanka, as well as providing a working model for NATO and the New United Nations during the post-war reconstruction effort in the years to come.
September 3- NATO and allied naval forces launch full scale attacks against the Chinese fleet off Java. In the largest single naval engagement since the Battle of the Philippine Sea a century prior, NATO naval forces obliterate the combined surface and submarine fleet of the EC. From then on, NATO and its allies in the Indian and Pacific Oceans had the kind of naval supremacy necessary to begin to tighten the strangle hold on any and all neutral trade going in and out of EC territories. Plans were put together earlier in the month for a combined air/sea assault against occupied Singapore that would in turn lead to the now infamous “Malay Campaign,” a bitter and arduous crawl up the Malay peninsula.
September 22- NATO forces reach the Pakistani border, now seen as the final stepping-stone to victory in Asia. NATO commanders pressed their columns of troops forward in hopes of securing what few remaining Pakistani air bases were left in tact to use as forward air bases to be used to strike Chinese forces at the largest staging ground in Western China, Yarkand.
September 30- South Korean forces, seeing the NATO victories at Java, Iran, and the successful Japanese air strikes into China, spilled over the 38th parallel in hopes of ending the three-year stalemate, and 100-year-old cold war fought between north and south. All across the border, thousands of South Korean tanks, artillery, and infantry advanced into the north, with the S. Korean Air Force establishing air superiority within hours of the initial invasion.
October 4- NATO forces launched the sea born invasion of the Malay Peninsula, depositing thousands of men and vehicles up and down the eastern side of the Straight of Malacca. The commanders of the invasion were given the task of liberating Singapore, and sweeping north up the heavily forested peninsula into Thailand, Burma, and capturing the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.
October 17- Pyongyang falls to South Korean Army forces after seventeen days of fighting. Kim Sung Il, the President of North Korea, surrenders to South Korean forces in the presidential palace. A group of North Korean Army generals vow to continue the fight and re-capture Pyongyang from the South.
October 19- American naval forces launch air strikes in the Sea of Japan against North Korean supply lines and cut off entire divisions from reinforcements by destroying bridges, blowing up dams, and cutting highways with laser guided munitions. The American aircraft carriers USS Ronald Regan, Nimitz, and Washington would continue their air strikes until the end of hostilities in Korea.
October 20-November 6, 2054- Seventeen days of fighting ended at the Yalu River, the internationally recognized border between North Korea and the PRC, South Korea officially declared victory and the formation of the “United Republic of Korea.”
October 21-December 31, 2054- The Malayan Peninsula campaign goes in the favor of NATO, with Kuala Lumpur falling to NATO in November, and the rest of the peninsula falling to NATO as well. With this, the NATO expeditionary forces began to push north to capture airfields in Burma and Thailand and open the southern air front against the PRC and its allies in South-East Asia. With Korea united, Japan preparing for an assault against China in Manchuria, Taiwan as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the East China Sea providing NATO with bases to launch dozens of bomber raids per day, the predicament of the PRC and its remaining EC allies, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, Mongolia and Sri Lanka had grown worse. Many in both EC and NATO High Command feared a prolonged campaign in the Asian hinterland to bring China to its knees. Victory, it seemed, would come at a heavy cost in human suffering, a price few in NATO High Command were willing to pay.
January 1, 2055- The Eastern Coalition offered an armistice to NATO in response to the situation. At first, NATO refused the armistice, but after talks among the political and military leaders of NATO, it was decided that a conditional armistice was better than continuing the fight in Asia and a post-war occupation zone comprised of millions of square miles of territory.
January 3, 2055- The NATO-EC cease-fire went into effect at 0001 hours Beijing time, bringing the global struggle to an end. For the first time in five years, the world was at peace.
March 21, 2055- The Eastern Coalition and NATO sign the “Treaty of Brussels,” bringing an end to the Third World War. In the peace terms, the PRC had to give up its leaders who helped lead the world into the bloodiest conflict in over a century. Along with this, it was forced to aid in the rebuilding of large areas of South-East Asia, excluding the Indian Sub-continent, which was a different matter entirely. India and Pakistan had no representative governments left, leading both sides to agree to a New United Nations peacekeeping force entering the lands of the former Republic of India, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in early June to begin reconstruction efforts. The Middle East, being entirely in NATO hands, was left up to the victorious powers to decide upon as they see fit. At 12:30 Brussels time, the most destructive war in human history was brought to a close. The final death toll was staggering: 350 million lay dead, 500 million wounded in battle or suffering radiation sickness from the large-scale use of nuclear warheads in India and Pakistan. The civilian death toll is still unknown for India, Pakistan, and the PRC, while in Japan; 19 million civilians lost their lives in the August 8 nuclear attacks. The world had much to clean up: nations to rebuild, cities to clean up, and the shattered economies of over half of the nations of Earth.
2055- After the end of the Third World War, the peoples of Earth still had much suffering ahead of them. Thanks to the widespread use of nuclear warheads in India, Pakistan, and Japan, coupled with the use of depleted uranium sabot rounds by NATO forces, global temperatures were pegged at between ¼ to 2 degrees lower than average temperatures. With the drop in global temperatures, famine and disease became massive issues for the survivors in the formerly war torn nations of Asia. The final estimate for clean up in Pakistan was 20 years minimum to repair the damage done by the nuclear warfare and return some of the areas to their pre-war conditions, while others were deemed too irradiated to be touched for centuries. However, with the massive loss of life in the Indian Sub-Continent, estimated at between 300 and 800 million in India alone, the reconstruction effort would take much more time than initially believed.
In Greece, the parliament voted to formally end their nation’s membership in NATO after the after-action reports showed that NATO commanders used the Greek troops as nothing more than shock troops and cannon fodder during the fighting in Iraq and the drive on Tehran. In the New United Nations, the New UN Space Council formed a new sub-committee, called the “International Faster-Than-Light Consortium,” representing all nations on Earth who wished to have some sort of vested interest in the continued exploration of space.
2056-58- While Zephram Cochrane worked at Kennedy Space Center on the first warp drive with the full cooperation of the International Faster-Than-Light Consortium, the peoples of Earth desperately attempted to regain some semblance of normalcy. Warlords sprang up in the former war zones of India, and Pakistan. By 2058, India dissolved into hundreds of factions, infighting spread amongst the survivors like a cancerous tumor, all while UN peacekeepers struggled to get aid out to those who needed it most. In Iran, the remnants of the old Islamic Republic government fled to the northeast corner of the country, setting up their capital-in-exile in the city of Gonbad. The United States began experiments into gene therapy and manipulating the chromosomes of unborn fetuses. The experiments bore fruit, with the manipulation of chromosomes of unborn children, or as it is called in the field, “eugenics,” becoming an accepted procedure of the children of the famous and wealthy. After these breakthroughs, the European Union passed bans stopping the eugenics procedure from spreading to their nations, fearing that eugenics would in turn lead to cloning and distorting the gene pool by artificial means without studying the long-term side effects of the procedures. The US military took note of the eugenics procedures and began planning classified experiments to use the eugenics procedures to breed the perfect soldier. These experiments would not succeed until well into the 22nd Century.
April, 2059- The United States founded its first permanent settlement on Mars, Freedom One. It would be in constant habitation for the next two centuries. Freedom One provided the United States and its allies a valuable stepping-stone in the solar system. Along with the settlements on the moon, Freedom One was the hope of NASA for a bright end to the already chaos ridden 21st Century.
September, 2059- NASA began large scale experimentation with asteroid mining techniques on the Martian moon of Phobos. Mining operations on Phobos would continue until 2084 when the captured asteroid was hollowed out and bought by the Boeing-Lockheed Aerospace Corp, after their 2083 merger, for a new research facility for space based research and development.
2060- Zephram Cochrane’s FTL test bed vessel, the Einstein, was completed half way through the year, allowing Cochrane and his team to begin studying the operational limits of his prototype warp core and the effects of near FTL speeds on a vessel’s computer systems, structural integrity, and other vital ship systems. Cochrane’s prototype warp ship, the Phoenix, would be completed on schedule by January, 2063.
2061- After prior warnings were sent to NATO leaders, the United States began construction of its next generation space-based weapons. These next-generation weapons included orbital ICBM launch platforms, upgraded ABM satellites, USAF-run space stations, and the first generation of military spacecraft designed and built entirely for the purpose of fighting other spacecraft and orbital/surface bombardment. As the United States began construction of the orbital scaffolds for its spacecraft, Japan, Russia, and several EU member nations followed suit shortly thereafter. Some military analysts began predicting the start of a new arms race parallel to the one that preceded the Third World War eleven years prior.
2062- The United States launched its first “space cruiser,” the USS Constitution, which began flight trials in July. In conjunction with the launch of the Constitution, Congress approved the creation of a new branch of the military, the United States Space Command (USSC). Under the founding charter of the USSC, NORAD, the resurrected Strategic Air Command (SAC), and Air Force Space Command (AFSC) were all absorbed into the newly formed USSC. However, the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) remained an independent entity from the USSC, allowing freedom of deployment of theatre, tactical, and strategic nuclear weapons for the rest of the US armed forces.
The first official action of the newly formed USSC was to place an order with the defense industry for an additional five space cruisers to join the Constitution by the end of the decade. The five ships, named the USS Concord, Saratoga, Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Midway, would form the core striking power of the USSC for the next thirty years as humanity began to spread its wings and embrace space flight.
April 2, 2063- After two months of systems checks and preparations, Dr. Cochrane announced the Phoenix ready for her maiden flight, and had the vessel moved to Launch Pad 1A at the Kennedy Space Center. The Vulcan scout ship Surak entered the outer solar system to begin a routine survey, amazed to find that humanity, believed to have obliterated itself in World War III, was not only spreading out into space, but preparing for its first FTL test flight. A message was transmitted to the Vulcan Science Council by the captain of the Surak informing them of the coming human FTL test.
April 3, 2063 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time- Cochrane and his team aboard the Phoenix successfully broke through the light speed barrier, traveling at warp 1.001 for 30 seconds and ending in a high orbit of the moon. The Vulcan crew aboard the Surak observed the warp test and sent another message to the Science Council informing them of the successful human warp flight and the captain’s decision to make first contact with the humans.
April 3, 2063, 2:45PM Eastern Standard Time- Cochrane and his team safely landed at the Kennedy Space Center after the successful flight of the Phoenix and began to celebrate humanity’s greatest scientific achievement, traveling beyond the speed of light. Just as festivities were beginning, however, the Vulcans decided to make their presence known to the people of Earth. The Surak dropped from warp into a Low Earth Orbit and began broadcasting messages of peace and friendship to the population below. The militaries of Earth began to panic, sending their active forces to high alert status, and activated whatever space based weaponry they had. The USSC sent a message to the Constitution and her as-of-yet uncompleted sister ship, the USS Concord, to scramble and prepare for hostile action. The captain of the USS Constitution received the Vulcan message before he could bring his anti-ship missiles to active status, thus avoiding any serious issue.
Before orbital defenses could be brought to bear on the Vulcans, the Surak entered the atmosphere and made its way to the Kennedy Space Center where Cochrane and his team were located.
April 3, 2063, 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time- The Surak landed a few yards away from Launch Pad 1A at the Kennedy Space Center. Celebrations in both the United States and around the world immediately stopped, with Cochrane and his team being the first to drive out to the launch pad to meet the aliens. Humanity stood awestruck, watching their holovids and computer screens in a collective moment of silence as Cochrane extended his hand in a gesture of good will and friendship towards the Vulcan captain.
In what has gone down in human history as one of its defining moments, Cochrane somehow managed to fit some humor into such an historic and timeless event. When the Vulcan captain raised his right hand and split his fingers into a v-shape in the traditional Vulcan greeting, stating to Cochrane, “Live long and prosper,” Cochrane was unable to return the split finger gesture, awkwardly fumbling with the gesture for a moment, choosing instead to extend his hand to the Vulcan captain, smiled, and replied, “Thanks.”
April 6, 2063- The Surak sent word home that they had verified humanity’s breaking of the light speed barrier, but that Earth was still a patchwork of nation-states recovering from World War III, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads, and very much paranoid of the intentions of not only Vulcans, but other species in general. In short, humanity was not yet ready for normalized relations with the rest of the galaxy and still had a lot of “growing up to do” before they could be ready to join the galaxy at large.
April 8- The Vulcan Science Council dispatched Ambassador Varel as a liaison between the Vulcan Confederation and the peoples of Earth aboard the science vessel T’plana-hath, which had been originally assigned to do the survey of the Sol system rather than the Surak but last minute complications with a warp relay forced the T’plana-hath to remain in the Vulcan home system with the Surak taking her place.
April 26- Two days after arriving in New York, Ambassador Varel made his famous “Galactic consequences” speech to the UN Assembly. Varel’s speech has been seen by many historians to be Earth’s formal recognition as a galactic power, touting his famous quote, “Earth conflicts and rivalries must remain confined to Earth and not spread into the galaxy. To do so would result in galactic consequences stemming from Earth bound politics, and possibly could undermine modern galactic politics as they exist in their present state. Until Earth has resolved to solve all its diplomatic squabbles by diplomacy and the patchwork of nation-states have united under a single flag, it is the belief of the Vulcan Science Council, High Command, and myself, that Earth be confined to the Sol System until it is matured enough to enter galactic politics.”
Varel’s statements enraged many representatives, many of whom refused to stand and acknowledge the ambassador after he stepped down from the speaking podium. The actions undertaken by Ambassador Varel in his speech, and the Vulcan Science Council in sending Varel to speak to the UN Assembly and threaten to stop Earth nations from sending out exploration missions and establishing formal relations with other FTL capable powers in the galaxy, were seen by the majority of the population of Earth in an entirely negative light. The negative view of Varel’s statements would be made apparent the next day during the UN Security Council meeting.
April 27- After initial deliberations, eight of the nine permanent Security Council members: the USA, UK, France, Russian Federation, China, Brazil, Germany, and Japan, (India no longer had a functioning government to speak of) along with the 10 elected representatives from the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to condone the statements of Ambassador Varel and the Vulcan Science Council. In the resolution the UNSC voted on, the language used in reference to the ambassador and his people was quite harsh.
“The Security Council…Having Considered the statements made by Ambassador Varel in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations…Taking Into Account the status of reconstruction in the areas comprising the ‘Greater Asian Conflict Zone’ as defined by the Security Council in Resolution 3417…Being Strengthened in its conviction that no government, military, or galactic policy should bar the human race from the exploitation of, claiming of, and settlement of extra-solar territories by Earth governments…Condemns the Vulcan Confederation’s stated policy of restraining Earth governments from claiming extra-solar territories, settling aforementioned extra-solar territories, dispatching armed forces of the claimant nations to defend their extra-solar territories, and extending diplomatic relations to other galactic powers outside the Vulcan Confederation…Solemnly Calls Upon all nations to join in the vocal condemnation of the stated Vulcan Confederation policy towards Earth and her nations…Requests the Vulcan Confederation rescind its stated policy and work with the nations and peoples of Earth to prepare them for joining the larger galactic civilization…Further Requests that the Secretary-General of the United Nations work with leading members of the United Nations General Assembly to draft a resolution for the Security Council and the General Assembly to vote on concerning the legal claiming of, and settling of, extra-solar territories, and matters concerning the contacting of, recognition of, establishment of, and maintenance of formal diplomatic relations with other galactic nations and peoples no later than the first week of the coming month…”
May 9- The United Nations General Assembly and the UN Security Council vote unanimously to both condemn the statements of policy made by Ambassador Varel, and passed a resolution known in the files of the General Assembly as “GA Resolution 63/83,” formally referred to as the “International Extra-Solar Claims and Diplomatic Recognition Resolution.” The resolution was two parts; one was the extension of the right of extra-solar claims by any nation on Earth as long as they could enforce said claim, essentially revoking Resolution 1962, and the Outer Space Treaty as it was when ratified in 1963. The other part of the resolution, the “Diplomatic Recognition Resolution,” extended the definition of diplomatic recognition to allow non-earth based powers to be diplomatically recognized and allowed an observer to the UN General Assembly should they choose to send one by sending an ambassador to meet with the Secretary-General, the Security Council, and speak to the UN General Assembly and provide evidence to prove territorial integrity, and governmental functioning, having to prove the existence of a functioning government.
With these declarations, the UN single handedly overturned 100 years of international policy concerning the development of space for “peaceful means.”
July 7- The USSC suspends all space cruiser construction for the time being until Cochrane warp cores can be fully integrated into the ship designs. Construction on the other two partially completed cruisers, the Concord and the Saratoga, however, was too far along to be stopped. Both ships had launch dates fast approaching and with the revelations brought about by the Vulcan Science Council’s decisions as described by Ambassador Varel concerning Earth’s future, the USSC Admiralty thought it prudent to launch and complete the outfitting of the other two space cruisers should any additional problems with the Vulcans or Earth nations arise. It was decided that once the Concord and Saratoga finished their shakedown cruises the Constitution would enter dry dock to be outfitted with a Cochrane warp core while the other two remained on active status.
2064-66 Diplomatic relations with the Vulcan Confederation continued to be frigid for the most part with few official meetings between heads of state and Vulcan ambassador Varel, dispatched to Earth as official liaison between Earth and Vulcan. In the two years from 2064-66, the USSC completed construction and shakedowns of the cruisers Concord and Saratoga which allowed the Constitution to enter dry dock to be outfitted with a Cochrane warp drive. The remaining seven cruisers had their designs altered to allow their use of Cochrane’s warp drive and were resubmitted to the USSC for construction beginning in 2066 and continuing until 2076 when the final vessel of the 10-ship run would be completed.
The socio-economic situation on Earth was fragile at best. While the economies of the world had recovered in the decade following the end of the Third World War, the economies of the nations of the Near and Far East continued to struggle to recover. In Japan, reconstruction of the cities affected by the Chinese nuclear attack continued on schedule for a 100% recovery of the cities to pre-war infrastructure and economic outlook by 2080, if not sooner. However, in stark contrast lay the economies of South-East Asia, China, and the Indo-Pakistani Conflict Zone.
The destruction caused by the Japanese air strikes to Chinese infrastructure was immeasurable and while recovery was occurring, it was slow to start and was estimated that recovery efforts for the PRC would take 20-30 years longer than other Far East nations, placing a completing date somewhere around the turn of the 22nd Century, a sobering prospect for many in the Politburo and the Party Congress. Worse yet were the economies of the South-East Asian nations who joined the EC and fought in active combat during the Third World War. Bangladesh and Myanmar suffered the worst of the radioactive fallout from the Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange, along with a substantial portion of Sri Lanka’s main food sources located in the ocean, fish and other ocean-dwelling plants and animals.
The nation most affected in its long term international and political output compared with pre-war was the United Kingdom. While the UK was a signatory member of the European Union, it had yet to make the currency changeover from the Pound Sterling to the Euro and was not integrated into the political body of the EU Assembly. In the wake of the war, many in the EU began to move much more closely together than they had in the pre-war years while the UK found itself reviving its close working relationship with the United States.
However, the most important change post-war was the greater role that the UK began to take within the framework of the Commonwealth of Nations, the successor body to the old British Empire. With the devastation wrought by the Indo-Pakistani conflict along with the damage caused due to conventional combat, many British relief efforts were undertaken under the auspices of the Commonwealth Offices, not the EU or the United Nations. Also, the British began to work much more closely with the Commonwealth Realms, most important of which were the ANZAC nations, to help manage relief expeditions and perform peacekeeping tasks in the Indo-Pakistani Conflict Zone.
By 2066 many lawmakers in the parliament, along with their constituencies at home, began to see the Commonwealth not as a remnant of their colonial past but as a way to help shape the future through common efforts and beliefs held among the Commonwealth Realms and the less directly tied Commonwealth Republics. With this in mind, many citizens by the end of the decade began to question the continuance of political and economic ties to the European Union.
The areas least affected by the Third World War, Africa and Latin America, were still trying to figure out their places in the world following the end of the war a decade prior. While many Latin American countries economically benefited directly from the war, the Brazilian and Argentine defense industries both signed lucrative production contracts with member nations of NATO (Brazil) and the EC (Argentina), the continent was still too raw and undeveloped in places to take advantage of the vacuum in international politics left by the withdrawal of India and Pakistan and the loss of prestige the Chinese and their EC allies suffered under the terms of the Treaty of Brussels.
Africa was also another area where the internal political and economic development hampered their entrance into more active rolls in international politics post-war. While South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt were all uncommitted members of the NATO alliance in the last two years of the war, no nation from the continent of Africa was directly involved in the Third World War. Economic and infrastructure development both helped play a role in the declared neutrality of many African nations in the conflict. However, by the time of Cochrane’s warp flight some of the major power brokers within the African Union were petitioning the AU to take on a greater role in international politics. These petitions picked up momentum and by 2065 had reached the floor of the Pan-African Parliament.
Support for a move towards a unified African continent was divided. Many in West and Central Africa supported the petitions to unify Africa before the end of the 21st Century. But, some of the most vocal resistance against unification was heard from representatives of Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa, the four uncommitted NATO allies. While the other AU member states had spent the war selling war material overseas and using the profits to build up their nations’ economies and infrastructures, the “Big Four of Africa” had grown much closer to their European and American allies rather than to their African neighbors.
South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria had also grown closer in the decade since the end of the war to the UK and took on greater roles in the Commonwealth of Nations than they previously had undertaken. The promise of greater economic stability and access to advanced technologies lay with Britain and the Commonwealth, while the promise of helping found a united African state with the potential to become the number one economic and political force in the world lay with their African neighbors. The only thing that was certain was the promise of a difficult decision and an uncertain future.
Finally, the Russian Federation had come to a crossroads in its political and economic history. While originally a founding member of the Eastern Coalition of Nations, Russia had declared neutrality at the outset of World War III due to political issues centered on the reform of the Duma, the powers of the presidency, and economic hardship due to NATO embargoes. Reforms to the power and scope of the executive and legislative branches of the Russian government were passed by a majority vote in the Duma and signed into law by the president in 2054, and economic recovery from the NATO embargoes had brought the Russian economy back to its pre-2050 state. But, the changes in the Russian economy and political scene had come too late for them to make up their minds on intervention in World War III. By the time the issue had been brought forward in the Duma, the EC was in too weakened of a position to win even with Russian firepower and support for joining the NATO allies was almost nonexistent.
Many in Russia felt that they had lost their chance to strike back for all the injustices and hardships the Russian people had suffered for over a century, stretching back to the days of the Russian Revolution and Civil War when European nations intervened when they should have stayed out of Russian affairs. Thus, the age old debate in Russian political circles was made manifest for all to see: Where should Russia focus her attention, Asia or Europe? Should Russia be involved at all in European politics? What role should the Russian people and government place in Asiatic affairs? Most importantly, what place should Russia take in the new, post-war world? These questions, and so many more, would remain unanswered for the time being.
Sir Thomas Lloyd Andrews, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Oxford University wrote a book in 2113 on this period of time entitled “Pride, Promise, and Peril,” which has become the standard for all history texts focused on this period of time. In his introduction, he describes with curious detail the state of affairs:
“In the whole of human history, few eras hold such a place in our development as this, and few years have such far reaching implications as these. Dr. Cochrane’s first test of his faster-than-light vessel, the Phoenix, was not simply a milestone in the scientific field or a visual symbol of the triumph of human ingenuity and creativity over the laws of nature and the universe, it marked the end of an era, the demarcation line which separated the old world from the new. Before Cochrane lay the history of human endeavors stretching back to the late 19th Century where nation and empire ruled, unchallenged and unquestioned in their supremacy. The shape of the old world, carved out of the agony and suffering of the early 20th Century clashes of arms, lay prostate before the ambitions and dreams of great and small men alike. The bloody conflagration of the Third World War destroyed what little semblance of order remained since the dissolution of empire. Yet, even while nations and leaders trumpeted the return of peace, the war was still being fought. In bombed out cities, humanitarian relief missions, and rebuilding efforts, the war was still being fought in the hearts and minds of the human race.
Few wished to face the reality of the world they now lived in. It was as if the species had collectively entered a period of hibernation, or suffered a bout of amnesia. Cochrane’s flight was humanity’s alarm clock, waking us from our slumber to begin anew with the hope and promise of a new age. Yet, few understand the importance of these two years upon the next century of human development. The whole of civilization, past, present, and future, was in doubt. Many questioned humanity’s place in the universe, some believed it would have been better to destroy Cochrane’s designs and fall inward to isolation out of cowardice or fear. Others still believed humanity had been given a new purpose, the triumph of human civilization over the wild and unknown corners of the galaxy. Finally, some nihilists believed it would have been better to have launched the nuclear missiles and brought an end to the suffering and catastrophe of human existence.
Within these two years lay the hope and promise of a brighter day as well as the bleak despair of darker times. Such was the state of affairs after Cochrane and before the Alpha Centauri mission. They were humanity’s last days of isolation, the last time that our mastery over our domain was nigh unquestionable. Collectively, we slowly awoke from our slumber and prepared to face a new age of uncertainty and doubt. We took in all that was, weighed every option available, gazed upon the remnants of the old order as though they were the long decayed ruins of the Coliseum or the Acropolis, fondly looked back on everything that had been and once was, and prepared to take the final plunge into the unknown.”
2067- Through invoking the International Extra-Solar Claims and Diplomatic Recognition Resolution (IESC), the United States laid its first claim to the Proxima Centauri system. Shortly after its construction was completed and trial runs successful, the USS Concord was dispatched to the system with 200 colonists in suspended animation in late spring. The Concord reached Proxima Centauri in late July and stayed in the system until early 2068 and aided in the construction of the first extra-solar colony, Proxima Colony, on a small moon in the inner Proxima Centauri system. The American use of the IESC preemptively prior to planting the Proxima Colony allowed them to lay a blanket claim to the entire system. However, future claims to other star systems would not go unopposed.
2068- British scientists successfully followed in Zephram Cochrane’s footsteps and broke the light speed barrier in May. By September, the first British extra-solar expedition had been dispatched to Alpha Centauri. The expedition would not reach the system until November and did not have any colonists to begin settlement and legitimize British claims to the system.
In April, the Americans dispatched the USS Concord again to the Proxima Centauri system to drop off supplies and help in the expansion of Proxima Colony. An additional 150 colonists, mostly military families, joined the 200 original colonists, which in future years would allow the American military to expand its scope of operations within the Proxima Centauri system. Along with the dispatch of the USS Concord, the United States Space Command (USSC) announced the completion of the space cruiser USS Saratoga, which allowed the USS Constitution to enter space dock to be outfitted with a Cochrane warp core. The as-of-yet unfinished sister ship to the other USSC space cruisers was officially renamed USS Lexington by an act of Congress to keep with naval tradition.
By the end of the year, civilian corporations in both the United States and Britain began lobbying their respective governments for access to the plans to the Cochrane warp cores to expand their range of operations into the outer solar system, previously considered almost inaccessible with existing rocket technology, and the surrounding systems. While official documents detailing the designs of the Cochrane warp core were not released to civilian contractors until 2099, many corporations began investing heavily in space based technology and, in case their governments refused to release designs for the Cochrane warp core, began funding their own FTL research divisions.
2069- Two key events occurred this year, setting the stage for the remainder of the 21st Century. In March, the USSC expedition to Alpha Centauri, lead by the USS Saratoga, successfully entered orbit of the fourth planet of the Alpha Centauri system, an M-Class planet suitable for human colonization without extensive terraforming or use of pressurized shelters as were used at Proxima Centauri. The 200 colonists were immediately woken from suspended animation and sent to the planet’s surface. While the American colony’s presence in the Alpha Centauri system violated the spirit of the IESC, it did not break the wording of the UN Resolution. Before long, the British government lodged a formal protest with both the United States and the United Nations for American claims to the Alpha Centauri system which had been claimed by the earlier British expedition. The future UN Commission on Extra-Solar Territorial Integrity and Claims would find in favor of the American claim’s legitimacy, while still recognizing the legitimacy of British claims within the Alpha Centauri system, leaving no formal claim by either side on the entire system, only claims on asteroids, moons, and continents on Alpha Centauri 4, the only M-class planet.
The second event occurred in July at the Commonwealth of Nations meeting in Ontario. With their collective experiences in the Third World War at the back of their minds, representatives from the remaining Commonwealth Nations (Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean nations, Belize, Guyana, the United Kingdom, and the Indian remnant) debated, and finally passed, the Commonwealth Defense Act of 2069 which unified the military high commands of all the remaining Commonwealth nations into a single command structure, effectively unifying all of their militaries into a single, cohesive fighting unit. With the passage of the Commonwealth Defense Act, the British were once and for all turning their back on the European Union and embraced a future separate from European affairs. By 2075, the separate space agencies of the Commonwealth nations would be united under the Commonwealth Space Act which formed the Commonwealth Space Agency and later Commonwealth Space Corps.
2070- The first of the new USSC space cruisers, the USS Lexington, built from the keel up as a warp capable starship, set out from space dock on its shakedown cruise, lasting until the end of the year. The cruisers Gettysburg and Midway would soon follow in 2071 and 72 respectively. The British ordered their first three spaceships for military use, the HMS Nelson, Rodney, and Elizabeth I. All three British vessels would be finished before 2075 and would serve the British, and later Commonwealth, well into the 22nd Century.
2072- The European Union Constitution, passed just before the beginning of the Third World War in 2048, came into effect. The EU Constitution came into effect on January 1, abolished all national borders, and made the EU Parliament and Prime Minister the absolute authorities of European affairs. On December 31, 2071, the British Parliament voted to officially dissolve its political and economic ties to the European Union and called its observer at the EU Parliament in Brussels back to London just in time to avoid any legal ramifications from the Constitution’s ascent.
2073- Representatives from the British and American space programs announced plans to launch a joint US/UK mission to the Tau Ceti system in 2074. The EU Space Agency began construction of its first Cochrane warp drive powered vessel, Europa. The Europa would not be completed in time to take part in the farewell celebrations for the Anglo-American expedition the following year, but would complete several test flights before the end of the year.
2074- The joint Anglo-American expedition to Tau Ceti, lead by the USS Saratoga and HMS Nelson, departed the Sol System on January 2 amid many celebrations and festivities worldwide. The 125 man joint venture reached Tau Ceti before the end of March and stayed in the system until mid-September, departing in time to return home before the end of the year. British and American claims to Tau Ceti were recognized by the UN, giving both nations the time to plan follow-up expeditions to the star and gather volunteers to plant colonies. The British expedition to Tau Ceti would be the last time that the British undertook an expedition to a star system independent from their Commonwealth allies.
The EU Space Agency launched its first Cochrane warp core test vessel, the Europa in February, one month shy of the launch of the Anglo-American expedition to Tau Ceti. The Europa would break the light speed barrier four times between its launch and the end of the year.
2075- At the annual Commonwealth Conference, plans were finalized and put in place for the total unification of the separate space agencies into a unified Commonwealth Space Agency by the end of the year.
In Russia the socio-political situation, made worse by a continuing economic downturn that lasted the better part of a decade, reached critical mass. On February 7, the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, the principal stock exchange in the Russian Federation, suffered the single worst sell off in its 80 years of operation with a 420-point drop. The cause was narrowed down to three natural resource trading corporations who dumped thousands of their competitors’ stocks in an effort to force the companies to submit to hostile takeover gestures. The next day the sell-off continued, trigging other large corporations to follow suit against their competition and tens of thousands of additional stocks were dumped onto the already oversaturated market. The Moscow Interbank dropped an additional 400 points.
By the end of the week the sell-off, which was originally centered on a small number of natural resource and industrial corporations, spread out and began affecting other businesses that were non-resource or industrial oriented. In the following weeks, the Moscow Stock Exchange, the Russian Trading System and the Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange all had similar downturns which lasted well into March. By the end of spring the Russian economy had begun to feel the effects of what became referred to as the “Moscow Stock Crash,” with the industrial, agricultural, and natural resource sectors all suffering equally.
The Moscow Stock Crash came at the worst possible time for the Russian economy. Russian neutrality during the Third World War had allowed the economy to recover to its pre-2050 state after the lifting of the NATO trade embargo. However, after the Treaty of Brussels came into effect in 2055, the Russians found it difficult to find markets for their export goods with the US and its NATO allies shouldering the burden of relief and reconstruction efforts in the Middle East and Central Asia. A problem rose soon after; there were not enough consumers of the Russian exports yet resource extraction and industrial production continued at pre-war levels. Over the following two decades Russian companies struggled to adjust to the new world marketplace, with many businesses failing to do so and declaring bankruptcy.
When the Moscow Stock Crash occurred, the Russian economy was already primed to suffer a total collapse. By early summer, unemployment had risen to 9.5% and showed no signs of slowing down. The economic downturn had begun to impact politics as well. The volatility of Russian politics began to play out on the floor of the 450 seat State Duma; physical brawls broke out between members of the leading political parties, political discussions became more absolute and took on militaristic overtones as the year dragged on, and political rallies began to have an increased number of attendees bringing weapons with them.
By November, the government reported unemployment at 11.5% and still rising. Twenty years of the economic disintegration of the Russian state, coupled with lagging frustration over Russian neutrality during the Third World War and 80 years of political corruption in public office had taken their toll. Russia was teetering on the edge of its greatest political crisis since the October Revolution of 1917 and it appeared that there was nothing anyone could do to bring the nation back from the edge.
Waiting in the wings, the four major Russian political parties; the United Russia Party (Centrist), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (Ultranationalist/Neo-Conservative), and Fair Russia: Motherland, pensioners, life (Socialist, populist, nationalist) had begun bringing other, smaller, political parties and organizations into their orbits. By the end of the year, the four largest political parties had begun preparing for an extended period of social unrest and political violence.
While the four parties prepared for open violence, a fifth political organization, what we now refer to as the United Russian Imperialist and Monarchist League, a united front of domestic tsarists, imperialists and strict conservatives, backed by groups of exiled Russian monarchists, (many of whom traced their lineage back to White Russian exiles and monarchists), imperialists, and conservative factions within the Russian Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches, began to coalesce around Nicholas Dimitri Romanov, the pretender to the Russian throne. While not well known domestically, the United Russian Imperialist and Monarchist League began to gather funds and weapons in preparation for what everyone knew was coming next.
The stage was set for all out civil war in the coming months, all that was required was a single spark to light the fires of social unrest.
2076- 2076 has been considered by many one of the turning points of the last half of the 21st Century. Three events occurred that helped shape the course of events well into the 22nd Century: The founding of the United Nations Space Probe Agency, commonly referred to as the UNSPA, the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the subsequent release of the Congressional report on the state of American democracy, and the beginning of the Second Russian Civil War.
(United Nations)- The formation of the UNSPA was the culminating event in the 20 year history of international FTL research. The International Faster-Than-Light Consortium had waned in power over the 2060’s, due in large part to American and British military research into FTL applications to weapons systems, and was nearing the end of its UN charter. While the three nations with FTL capabilities, the United States, European Union and Britain continued to expand funding to their national warp projects, funds for the International FTL Consortium began to dry up by 2070 which drove many international commentators to write opinion pieces for such daily newspapers as USA Today and the London Times which called for renewed funding of the FTL Consortium to allow every nation on Earth equal access to warp technology.
Over the following six years, public outcries for additional funds and manpower for the FTL Consortium continued unabated even after the successes of the Proxima Centauri colony, the Alpha Centauri missions, and the joint Anglo-American Expedition to Tau Ceti. When the charter for the consortium came up for renewal at the beginning of the year, several ideas were put forward for both the renewal of the charter, and successor organizations to the International FTL Consortium.
Heated arguments over the future of the international efforts towards continued FTL research and development began almost as soon as the General Assembly reconvened in early January and went through well into the early spring. Finally, a compromise was reached when the ambassadors of the EU, America, Britain and Japan came up with the idea for the United Nations Space Probe Agency, or the UNSPA for short. The UNSPA would become the successor organization to the International Faster-Than-Light Consortium, inheriting the staff, research facilities and experimental craft currently operated by the FTL Consortium. It would answer directly to the United Nations General Assembly and the UN President. Funding for the UNSPA would come directly from the yearly operating budget of the UN along with a new due owed by all UN members to be paid out at the beginning of the new fiscal year. The UNSPA was to take on the roles of exploration, scientific research, colonization efforts, humanitarian relief, and diplomacy on behalf of the UN and representing, without bias, all nations and peoples of Earth. In effect, the UNSPA was to become humanity’s official presence in the larger Milky Way Galaxy and filled some of the roles that the Vulcan consulate had deemed “appropriate,” which were exploration, scientific research, off-world colonization efforts, and diplomacy to the galaxy at large.
The idea for the UNSPA was well received by the General Assembly and almost as soon as the ambassadors put the UNSPA in front of the General Assembly, a consensus was reached and a committee was formed to flesh out the concepts put forth and to write a founding charter. On April 3, coincidentally on the 13th anniversary of Zephram Cochrane’s, the draft of the UNSPA Charter was finished, which included a preamble that drew heavily from the founding documents of both the UN and several nations, including Great Britain and the United States.
By the end of spring, the UNSPA Charter was finalized and put before the General Assembly for the final vote. While several states, including the People’s Republic of China and several of its Eastern Coalition allies who were barred from participating in the International FTL Consortium due to stipulations written in the Treaty of Brussels, voiced dissent against the dissolution of the FTL Consortium without proper deliberation, there were no “nay” votes against the UNSPA Charter. With 8 abstaining, the core 8 Eastern Coalition nations, the UNSPA Charter passed with 184 yeas, 0 nay, and 8 abstaining from voting.
Coincidentally the General Assembly vote on the UNSPA Charter was the last time that the member states of the European Union would vote as independent political entities. The following year, all of the ambassadors would be recalled to their respective member states within the EU and were to be replaced by a single ambassador representing the European Union.
(United States)- The tri-centennial celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence were considered by many to be the largest 4th of July celebrations any who were alive at that time had ever seen. Across the United States, the insular territories, and the American off-world colonies, there were parades, speeches by prominent civic leaders at the state and national levels, barbecues, fireworks shows and all the other customs associated with 4th of July celebrations in the United States. However, while the celebrations went on as planned, a day earlier the “Franklin Commission,” a bi-partisan congressional group devised and commissioned by former President Kenan in 2071 to investigate the status of democracy and representative government in America, released its findings to the public. While such commissions were common place in the post-World War III years, the Franklin Commission was the last of the so-called “Congressional Reconstruction Narratives,” which gained their unofficial title due to historians and social commentators in later years calling the commissions collectively the, “Official government narrative on the status of the post-war reconstruction efforts at home and abroad.”
The chair and namesake of the Franklin Commission, three-term Senator Henry Thomas Franklin (R-NC), was the first to speak at the press conference. In an uncharacteristically short 10 minute speech, Senator Franklin laid out the findings of the commission in a frank and honest fashion. His opening statement, along with the introduction to the president’s speech at Ft. McHenry in Baltimore the next day, has become indelibly attached to the Franklin Commission’s findings:
“Ladies and gentleman of the press, foreign and off-world dignitaries and citizens of the United States, on this, the eve of the tri-centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the Revolution, I come before you with both sorrowing data. The status of democracy, and of representative government, here in the United States, is dire. Participation in local, regional and national elections is at 37% overall. One in three of us even bother to vote when elections take place. The public sentiment has been, and continues to be, that their votes mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, that the end result of any public election has already been predetermined by the powers that be, and that the government cannot be trusted to carry out the results of the election no matter how the election may go.
Moreover, it was found that somewhere around 65 to 70% of all citizens do not believe that the government has acted and continues to act in their best interests, that the government is corrupt and untrustworthy, and that most importantly of all, they hold no shred of belief that their government represents them or their beliefs. In short, to the majority of Americans, our government is untrustworthy, corrupt, and drunk with the economic, political, and military power it wields.”
The next day, President Brenden addressed the crowds gathered at Fort McHenry in Baltimore for the traditional Fourth of July celebrations. Prior to the presidential address, tens of thousands of spectators lined the shores of Baltimore harbor in anticipation of the presidential address commemorating the national tri-centennial. In a last minute decision, President Brenden had the podium for the address moved from inside Fort McHenry to outside the sally port (main entrance) to address the Fourth of July crowds who came to hear him speak. The 45 minute long address to the nation would go down as one of the most widely watched presidential addresses in the nation’s history, and would be quoted for years to come. Many political analysts in coming years would cite the president’s speech at Fort McHenry as what single handedly won President Brenden his second term in office:
“My fellow Americans, it gives me great pleasure to address you on this, our nation’s most cherished holiday, and on the celebration of our nation’s tri-centennial. I am standing in front of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor where on September 13, 1814 one thousand American soldiers withstood a 25 hour bombardment by the British Navy. The garrison’s refusal to surrender even under the combined might of the Royal Navy flotilla would go down in history as the inspiration for Francis Scott Key to write what would become our national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner. It was here, on the shores of Baltimore harbor, against all odds, that we looked the most powerful nation in the eye, took all that they could give us, and won the day. At a bleak time in the War of 1812 when our nation’s capital was in ashes, our army unable to fight off the advances of the British army, and public support turning against the war, the 1,000 defenders of Fort McHenry were able in one day to raise the spirits of the public and instill in all Americans a sense of national pride and unity.
Once again, our nation faces challenges of equal stature as those we faced in 1814. Only this time we face not the violence of combat, not the threat of invasion, but the threat that our own long cherished traditions of representative government, and democracy it self, may disappear forever. The threat lies not with invading armies or economic collapse, but with our selves. We have grown a culture of national distrust of the federal government; we no longer believe our government to be representing our own best interests, political corruption is around every corner in Washington, and fiscal responsibility is non-existent. What’s more, because of these beliefs, many of us do not bother to even vote, believing it a pointless exercise in futility, that our voice does not matter, and that even if we did vote, our vote would be ignored and cast off to the side like a piece of scrap paper. We have lost faith in our government, and even in the democracy that we so cherish as the cornerstone of our nation’s foundation.
My fellow Americans, this challenge might be the single largest and most difficult our nation has ever faced. There is no enemy we must fight, no evil to defeat, no nation to vanquish, there is only us. We have become our own worst enemy, the perfect foe to which there is no fight we can wage. Our collective mistrust of all things associated with politics and the national government, built up over the past century since the end of the Second World War and supported by the stark realities of the Cold War, and the government failures of the War on Terror and the Eastern Coalition, has lead to the very challenge we now face.
No other nation, save the Roman Republic in the years leading up to the rise of Julius Caesar in 44BCE, has ever faced the same kind of challenge we now face today. There can be no tactical withdrawal, no retreat, and no surrender to this enemy. For if we surrender, we seal the fate of our democratic heritage and forever doom future generations to a slow but sure descent into absolute despotism. We are in the position today that the citizens of Rome faced in the waning days of the republic. We see tyranny around every street corner, corruption in every day dealings, and fear the very government which was created to serve us. The only thing standing between us today and the Romans before Julius Caesar is the breakdown of the social order and the rise of fraternal, multi-sided civil war among the elite and powerful of society.
What will future generations say of us today and our actions in the coming decades if we choose to do nothing? If we choose to give in, throw our hands up in defeat, and allow the end to come, how will they judge us? Will we be seen as cowards? Self serving profiteers? Criminals who abandoned the ideals central to our national identity? Or, will we be seen as historians today view the citizens of Rome in 44BCE, who valued personal security and their livelihoods over the republican ideals they espoused? Will our children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren be the ones to give into corruption and vice, to surrender all that we hold dear to us as American ideals, and welcome a modern Caesar with open arms? What, if anything, can or should be done to prevent this descent into tyranny?
I can only speak for myself and my family when I say this: As long as I hold breath in my lungs, as long as I can have some impact on what the future may bring, I will do whatever I can to prevent this catastrophe from ever taking place. We have a responsibility both to ourselves and our children, and to the men and women who have fallen in the defense of liberty since the minutemen lined up on the parade grounds in Lexington town square in April, 1775 and took the first stand in the defense of freedom, to do everything in our collective power as citizens of this nation to do what is right.
We must rebuild public trust in the national government, we must eliminate vice and corruption from the halls of power, we must restore public belief in the idea that each and every one of us as citizens of this democracy has the right to voice our dissent at the ballot box, we must revive public involvement in government, and most important, we must teach our children, both at home and school, that the ideals and principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are at the heart of everything that it means to be an American, and that the glory days of our nation are not behind us, but are ahead of us.
My fellow Americans, I come to you on our tri-centennial with this call to action. We must take action now, immediately, to reverse the course on which our nation is following. We must face these challenges head on and with the stalwart determination that we will not allow this country, our country, to succumb to the same fate our republican ancestors did 2,000 years ago. We can, all of us, take part in this effort to restore our government and restore the democracy we value and cherish. When, in the near future, our efforts are found to have succeeded, we will have proven ourselves worthy to call ourselves heirs to the democratic ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the institutions created in the Constitution. We will, moreover, have proven ourselves truly worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the other citizens of the galaxy as equals, ready to take our place in the galactic brotherhood of civilizations, bringing meaning to the old NASA motto, Per Aspera Ad Astra, through hardships to the stars.
In closing, I would like to wish all of you a happy and safe Fourth of July. May God continue to bless America, and may he guide us in the coming months and years. Thank you and good night.”
(Russia)- Finally, in Russia, the disintegration of the remaining authority of the central government and the outbreak of violence and civil disturbances among political supporters took place before the spring thaw had set in. After the first of the year, the economic collapse which had begun the previous summer reached its low point. After the reopening of the stock exchanges and banks on January 2, Russians of all economic and social status showed up in droves to pull what little money they had still invested out of the market.
Fears of total economic collapse became a reality by the end of the week when foreign investors were advised to begin selling their shares in Russian based businesses before the value of the ruble went too low. Coupled with the massive foreign sell off in the second week of January, was a public panic over the issue of bank insolvency, long term mortgages, and credit debt in the now failing Russian economy. Before long, bank runs began after rumors of widespread bank insolvency in several major banks and creditors, including the largest private commercial bank in Russia, the Alfa Bank. Along with the runs on the Alfa Bank, runs commenced on the VTB Bank, the Russia Bank, the International Industrial Bank, and Rosbank.
By the end of the month, the Alfa, Russia, and International Industrial banks had all suffered extended runs and were no longer solvent, leaving millions of Russians without access to their life’s savings and unable to deposit and cash pay checks. Moreover, by the end of the month, official reports from the Central Bank of Russia laid out a very real chance of the central bank loosing solvency as well.
The loss of solvency would come too late to have a real impact on the coming civil war. In March, protests erupted across the nation, many of which turned violent, and proved once and for all the lack of central authority that Moscow held. The March protests would be to the Second Russian Civil War what the October Revolution of 1917 was to the first, the spark that started the proverbial forest fire.
On April 2, protests outside the Kremlin turned violent. The president and many of his advisors were drawn into the protests. Historians still argue over where the shot came from, the protestors or the police, but whoever the shot came from the effect was all the same. While the president attempted to speak to the protestors face to face, a shot rang out and the president fell to the ground with a bullet lodged very close to his heart. He would not last until the ambulance arrived. Spectators at the scene reported later that his final words were, “Don’t let the dream die, don’t let all that we have worked so hard for, die this way.” The president’s hopes would wither in the fires of civil war.
The next day, the State Duma argued over the successor to the presidency. The four-way split in support over who the president should be was split right down party lines. No successor would be chosen, for by the end of the week, all four parties had stormed out of the assembly hall and prepared for the inevitable outbreak of conflict. By the end of the month, open conflict among the major political parties was a reality. International support for the disparate factions in the Second Russian Civil War would be split down ideological lines and the individual factions would take on the names of their ideological predecessors 160 years prior during the First Russian Civil War:
United Russia (White Russians): Limited international aid from the European Union, Japan, and the United States
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Red Russians): Large scale economic and military aid from the Eastern Coalition and the PRC in particular.
Liberal Democrats/Fair Russia Coalition [merger with United Russia by 2079] (Blue Russians): Large scale international aid from the European Union, United States, Great Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations, and the African Union.
Monarchist League (Green Russians): Limited international aid from conservative monarchist factions in the United States, the European Union, Great Britain, and the Commonwealth of Nations.
2077- (United Nations) – Arguments are heard in the UN General Assembly on whether or not the UN Trusteeship Council would become the governing organ of the quickly growing off world colonies in both the Sol System and the extra solar colonies in Alpha and Proxima Centauri and elsewhere. While the arguments would go nowhere for the next few years, the two big stories were the suspension of Russian voting power in all United Nations political organs, and the Vulcan Confederation’s entrance to the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council.
By the spring, members of the Security Council were growing weary of the Russian issue stemming from the issue of which faction had the right to claim the Russian Federation’s seat at the Security Council and the General Assembly. With all UNSC members sending aid to political factions in the conflict, it was agreed after a very heated debate and close vote in the General Assembly to suspend the Russian Federation seat in the General Assembly and the Security Council until the successful conclusion of the Second Russian Civil War.
The Vulcan Confederation’s agreement to enter the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council under observer status has been the cause of much debate over the intervening decades. Some have pointed to the debates in the General Assembly over extending the powers of the old Trusteeship Council, inactive since the dissolution and reformation of the old United Nations in the early 2020’s, as the reason for the Vulcan entry into Earth politics. Others pointed to the explosion of energy poured into FTL technology by the Earth governments as the reason why the Vulcans entered the UN. Whatever the reason, on April 1, 2077, the Vulcan ambassadors formally entered the UN Assembly Hall in New York with observer status.
(United States)- Aero cars began to make their first appearances in the airspace over New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and other major metropolitan centers. Many have also pointed to this year, 2077, as the year that the BosWash (Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor) megalopolis emerged as a single cohesive, entirely connected, metropolitan center. The urbanization of the last remaining areas between Baltimore and Washington, and New York and Boston was completed. Over the next 50 years, additional megalopolises would emerge in the Pacific Northwest (Greater Seattle-Olympia Metropolitan Complex), Southern California (Greater Los Angeles), and the Great Lakes (Greater Chicago-Pittsburg Complex).
Also, the November 2 San Diego Subway Bombing has been marked as the second rise of Eco-terrorism, the first being from the early 21st Century until the end of the Third World War and the disappearance of Col. Phillip Green, ex-USMC, from public life. Colonel Green’s fanatical eco-terrorists were held responsible for the near destruction of the city of Chicago in 2039 with a suitcase nuclear warhead. However, Green and his cohorts were never caught by law enforcement.
Thus after a 20 year lull in activity, Green’s “Earth Liberation Front,” or “ELF,” named in honor of a late 20th and early 21st Century eco-terrorist front responsible for arsons and vandalism in the Pacific Northwest, became active once more. The ELF would become a thorn in the side of the United States government for the remainder of the century and well into the first quarter of the next.
2078- (former Russian Federation)- After two years of open conflict, the three largest fronts in the Second Russian Civil War, United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and the Liberal Democrats/Fair Russia Coalition had fought each other to a virtual stalemate and had driven most of the civilian population away from supporting any one side. Looting, pillaging, raping, murder, all were common place, which has lead some historians to compare the Second Russian Civil War less to the first and more to the kind of warfare experienced in the Thirty Year’s War in the 1620’s. After the onset of the stalemate in 2077, with no end in sight, many field commanders began ordering the use of small and large yield tactical nuclear warheads.
Over the course of several weeks, two to three dozen tactical warheads were used by the three factions either in hopes of opening holes in one another’s lines to exploit in an offensive action, or in retaliation against the use of tactical warheads. By the second week, several full yield atomic and thermonuclear warheads were detonated. The highest yield, a 1.5 megaton thermonuclear warhead, was launched atop an aging and once decommissioned R-36 ICBBM by the Liberal Democrats/Fair Russia Coalition at the headquarters of the Communist Party front, which also contained the largest arms cache and supply dump for their armed forces. Several additional sub-megaton and megaton warheads were used by the Communist front, as well as the United Russia front, in the last days of the nuclear exchange.
Thankfully, most strategic warheads were used by the combatants in more sparsely populated areas against formations of soldiers, rather than against civilian population centers. However, at least a dozen or more tactical nuclear warheads were used in the heavily populated areas of European Russia, west of the Ural Mountains. Nuclear fallout began to impact large metropolitan centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, the water supply was, in some areas, made unfit for consumption due to radioactivity, perishable food stuffs were contaminated and had to be destroyed. The very fabric of Russian society began to come apart at the seams with mass rioting, looting, hoarding, and the widespread proliferation of small arms amongst the remaining population.
The two week nuclear exchange also managed to decapitate the leadership of all three fronts. With the deaths of most of the political leaders, leading generals began to fight amongst themselves over who would assume political control over the fronts. In short order, the generals began sending the remaining forces still under their control to try and either defeat the competition and assume control through brute strength, or use shock and awe to bring the rival factions back together. In the end, not even the generals could control their armies, which quickly dissolved and began coalescing around charismatic individuals who turned into regional warlords. Within a month of the first tactical nuclear strike, all three fronts had dissolved into regional warlords and had dragged much of Russia down with them.
Control of two of the key cities in the entire nation, Moscow and St. Petersburg, was lost. Most of the civilian population of Moscow either evacuated in the days leading up to the conflict, or had armed themselves and formed competing street gangs vying for control over food distribution centers and the few relief convoys. In St. Petersburg, most of the middle and upper classes fled the city at the outbreak of fighting and made their way across the Karelian Isthmus into Finland, an EU member. Like in Moscow, armed street gangs took control of the streets and regional warlords made receiving food and medical supplies almost impossible. In essence, the unified Russian state ceased to exist, and the chaos of the Second Russian Civil War had become pure anarchy in most urban centers. However, as the cohesiveness of Russian society dissolved and all seemed lost, the fourth and final front in the Second Russian Civil War emerged from the chaos.
With limited financial resources and foreign support, the Monarchist League, also referred to as the “greens,” was never seen as a major threat to any of the three major fronts and was left alone. By a twist of fate, this left both the political and military leadership of the greens relatively in tact after the nuclear exchanges. In the aftermath of the nuclear exchange and the collapse of civil society in urban Russia, the greens made immediate efforts to stem the rising tide of warlordism wherever they could. They used the preexisting frameworks of the pre-war local governments, found city planners; law enforcement heads, mayors, city councilors, or any other civilian government leaders still alive, and put them back to work in relief efforts.
The greens worked from the outside in, they used what limited resources they had at hand and worked from the town down to the village levels. They used Russian Orthodoxy as the key to success; they built their efforts around churches, which were usually located at or near the town centers. By the fourth month after the nuclear exchange, in mid-May, many of the smaller towns and villages surrounding the three key cities of European Russia: Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd, had been secured. Highways and railways were soon secured and the work of disarming and disbanding the smaller, less powerful, warlord armies began.
The goal of securing Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd took into the fall to complete. Several warlord armies outside Moscow put up heavy resistance to the greens. However, as the only remaining political front with any cohesive leadership left, they overcame the resistance and on the morning of August 22, 2078, advance forces for the Russian Monarchist League entered Moscow. By the afternoon, the greens held a small ceremony in Red Square celebrating the victory over the local warlords and began relief efforts to the people of the city. Two weeks later, the cities of Volgograd and St. Petersburg fell to the greens as well.
It would not be until 2079 the final victory was secured over both the warlords, and the remaining organized forces of the other three fronts still fighting in Siberia. However, the way was paved for the eventual green victory and the return of the Romanov exiles to the motherland.
(United States)- During a brief lull in the Congressional debates over possible intervention in the Russian Civil War, a military expenditures bill was passed which freed up $10 billion for the development of mass drivers, which were seen as the logical progression from the small caliber rail guns that had been mounted on the American space cruisers. Several riders were attached to the bill which included a $100 million investment in NASA’s space elevator program, $50 million to go towards ongoing recovery efforts in the Indian Sub-Continent and $15 million to the Space Studies Institute, a non-profit institute founded in 1977 by the late Princeton University professor Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, to fund its ongoing research into O’Neill cylinders and other large space habitats for human colonization.
(Eastern Coalition)- After two decades of recovery efforts, the remaining member states of the Eastern Coalition of Nations emerged once more onto the world state with the People’s Republic of China at its helm. After their humiliating defeat at the hands of the US/EU lead NATO and their Mid East allies, the Chinese and their South-East Asian allies launched “Operation: Smiling Dragon,” the first of a series of air and naval exercises over the South and East China Seas designed to announce to the world the EC’s return after a 20 year recovery. Two PLAN (People’s Liberation Army Navy) task forces entered the South and East China Seas and, in conjunction with forces dispatched from as far away as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, ran a series of war games as close as legally possible to Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean territorial waters.
Along with “Operation: Smiling Dragon,” two Chinese armored corps held military exercises along the Sino-Russian border. PLA representatives responded to the foreign press by stating that it was not against international law to hold exercises in your own nation, even if said exercises are close to, or located on, a foreign border. Western military analysts began dusting off pre-war reports on the possibility of Sino-Russian hostilities.
2079- (Siberia) - With covert Eastern Coalition support, several generals with Communist loyalties were able to rein in several rogue warlord armies and were able to reconstitute the Red front. In response, 10 warlords formally associated with the United Russia and Fair Russia fronts put aside their temporary hostilities to form a united front composed of the United Russia and Fair Russia fronts, now simply referred to as the “White Russians.”
By the end of the year, the White and Red Russians were once more fighting for control of Siberia. However, the situation was changed compared to 2077. The Green Russians were in control of all of European Russia. With European Russia, the Green Russians had a large portion of the Russian nuclear stockpiles, much of the Russian infrastructure, and control of over 60% of the remaining Russian population. The Russian Monarchist Army by 2079 was outfitted with modern aircraft purchased from the Americans and the Europeans, relatively modern American surplus tanks from World War III, and modern pre-war Russian small arms. Both the White and Red Russians were outfitted with pre-2020’s small arms, including millions of AK-47’s left in old Soviet era stockpiles, Cold War era Soviet tanks, and limited aircraft.
The Russian Monarchist Army began its first military operation in November which pacified the warlord controlled just east of the Ural Mountain passes. By the end of the month, a half-dozen smaller, unaffiliated, warlord armies had been disbanded and Green Russian control was extended almost to the borders of White and Red Russian control which began at the city of Omsk. In December, monarchist forces secured control of the city of Omsk, a White Russian stronghold, and began the long drive east to Vladivostok.
(Commonwealth of Nations)- Months of tense deliberations among the Commonwealth members lead to the announcement of the formation of the “Commonwealth Space Administration” and the “Commonwealth Space Corps,” the successor organizations to the individual space programs of the separate nations of the Commonwealth.
In September, the HMS Nelson left Earth orbit with a full crew and with 300 colonists in suspended animation to formally begin the settlement of the Alpha Centauri system. With over half of the total colonists being from the African “Big Three,” Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, the first steps towards human colonization outside of the solar system were to be of a more inclusive nature than the colonization efforts on Earth in centuries past.
(Worldwide)- Fusion reactors began coming online in the more developed regions of the world. Beginning in the European Union, United States, the Commonwealth, and Japan, several large fusion reactors came online by the end of the year. The power needs of large portions of the populations of these nations would from then on be dealt with in a much more environmentally friendly way. However, as fusion power and fusion reactors spread in the following decade, Helium-3 deposits on the moon became a much sought after commodity on the world market and would lead to several conflicts in the 2090s and early 2100s.
2080- (South America)- The Union of South American Nations, USAN, formally began assigning passports to all citizens of South America, save French Guyana. Over the preceding three decades, customs unions, a common currency, and the lowering of all internal trade tariffs had brought the nations of South America closer together and had prepared them for the final steps towards unification which would come by the end of the 2080s.
(Vulcan)- The Second Andorian War broke out over the sacred Vulcan P’Jem Monastery. The First Andorian War in the 2020’s had been considered a stalemate, with much of the fighting limited to space combat in and around the P’Jem system, while fighting in the Second Andorian War was spread out over both Vulcan and Andorian controlled space. Some of the most brutal fighting was isolated to the Dessica System, where Vulcan and Andorian troops would engage in jungle fighting operations that were eerily similar to the American experiences in the South Pacific and Vietnam War during the 20th Century. In coming decades, both the Dessica and Deneva systems would be abandoned as human settlers moved in and in greater numbers
In one of the greatest individual rights violations of the 21st Century, agents dispatched from the Vulcan High Command ruthlessly exterminated the population of several Andorian colonies captured during the main offensive, including settlements in the Dessica system. Many historians point to this instance as the first time when human developed strategies for conquest were applied to alien conflicts. Andorian stories about the Dessica massacre would become the basis for the famous Hollywood movie “Dessica,” released in 2095 and the winner of the Academy Award for best motion picture that year.
The Second Andorian War was also the first interstellar conflict where human reporters, dispatched from all major news organizations, were witnesses. Reports from the frontlines on the newest Vulcan phasers and shield technologies would drive most Earth nations to begin investments into both technologies in an effort to close the tech gap between Earth and its interstellar neighbors.
(Russia)- The Green Russians declare victory in Siberia after the destruction of the last Red and White Russian holdouts in the Russian Far East. The offensive into Siberia has been hailed by many historians as the last of the so-called “textbook” armored column advances. As the Green Russian upgraded T-90 and T-105 tanks swept aside the Red and White Russian Cold War era T-56’s and T-60’s, already plans were developed abroad for the deployment of rail guns to heavy armored divisions. Plans for rail gun armed tanks would reach fruition by the early 22nd Century, just in time for the
After the final defeat of the Red and White field armies, the moment over a century in development finally came to Moscow. On September 1, 2080, the official heir to the Romanov Dynasty, Alexander Romanov, an American born Russian who grew up and lived most of his life in New York City, was presented to the world in a coronation ceremony broadcast across Earth and the off-world colonies. In his first speech to the Russian people, in perfect Russian, Alexander IV called on the remaining pockets of Red and White Russian resistance to throw down their arms and join the rest of Russia in the reconstruction of their nation. Scattered guerilla forces, mostly Red front troops, continued resistance into the 2100’s.
2082- (Eastern Coalition)- The Republic of Sri Lanka officially rescinded all ties to the Eastern Coalition after 20 years of increasing relations between the island nation and the Commonwealth. Threats from China and its other EC allies to launch a full blockade against the island went unfulfilled as the Commonwealth and NATO moved to protect their new ally in the Far East.
(Commonwealth of Nations)- Commonwealth colonies on Alpha Centauri reach 1000 people as asteroid mining operations reached their peak efficiency for the 21st Century. From here on until the late 2090’s, mining operations would become largely isolated to the private sector. The DeBeers Corporation, world renowned for their diamond and gold mining operations in South Africa, would reach out into outer space and before long had opened mining operations in the Asteroid Belt, Mars, and the moon.
(United States)- Construction on the first space elevator began on Aguijan, an island several hundred miles north of Tinian in the Northern Marianas Islands. Initial investment in the LEO space elevator ranged in the billions of dollars and was managed mainly by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Management of the finished space elevator would be a joint NASA-USSC affair.
2083- (Vulcan Home World)- The BBC, CNN, New York Times, London Times, and Reuters all opened news bureaus on Embassy Row down the street from the Vulcan High Command to allow for ‘round the clock news coverage of off-world news events. The first major story that broke: The reopening of the P’Jem Monastery. News reports on the reopening of the P’Jem Monastery helped spark protests on Earth outside Vulcan embassies due to the now infamous reports about the Dessica massacre.
(East China Sea)- People’s Liberation Army-Air Force (PLAAF) J-12 fighters engage in aerial maneuvers with US Navy F-39 interceptors based off the USS Ronald Regan. The Regan was a veteran of combat in the East China Sea, having served with the 2nd Carrier Fleet based out of Tokyo Bay and Taipei during the Third World War. While no shots were fired between the two J-12’s and the four F-39’s, the aerial dog fighting maneuvers were a reminder to military planners in the west that the Eastern Coalition was once again a major player on the world stage.
2085- (Russian Empire)- The former Soviet break away republic of Belarus rejoined the reformed Russian Empire after nearly a century of a failing economy, environmental fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, and a disintegrating political scene which had devolved to party infighting and street violence during elections.
(Solar System)- The off-world population reached 25,000, with the largest settlements on the moon and Mars. Several asteroid colonies had reached nearly 1,000 settlers. Settlements in Alpha and Proxima Centauri were not included in the figures, but had reached into the thousands themselves.
(Eastern Coalition)- The PLAAF announced its first successful launch of a military space craft into LEO since the outbreak of World War III in 2051. The Chinese military vessel, named “Dragon’s Breath,” was simple in design, consisting only of a few older space capsules connected via docking tubes to one another and armed with only the simplest of rail guns and lasers, but showed its self to be enough of a threat to NATO and its far east allies that the USS Constitution was dispatched to LEO to watch the Dragon’s Breath’s every move.
By the end of the year, the Dragon’s Breath would be converted into the first of many orbiting space habitats for the PRC and its Eastern Coalition allies. Shipyards would soon follow.
2088- (African Union)- Representatives from all but five African nations, save the African Big Three, Egypt, and Libya, signed the African Union charter in Kinshasa, bringing an end to the individual nation-states of the African continent and giving birth to one of the major players on the world stage. Some of the first objectives of the AU were to begin laying the ground work for a unified transportation network, and the expansion of mining and oil drilling operations. Unfortunately for the AU, most profits from oil drilling would be short lived as fusion power and battery cell technology became more developed as the 22nd Century loomed.
(Saudi Arabia)- Representatives from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Libya met in Riyadh to sign the United Arab League Charter, which formed a united trade bloc, a common currency, and laid the groundwork for the greater Arab state to be founded in under a decade’s time.
2090- (Iran) - Representatives from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan (recently released from allied control), Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan met in Tehran to discuss the formation of a trade bloc to rival the newly formed United Arab League. The representatives decided on forming the Persian League, a trade and political bloc to prevent the spread of the United Arab League beyond its borders and to encourage the economic rehabilitation of the area.
2091- (Vulcan Home World) – The CIA opened a field office out of the US Embassy, just down the street from the Vulcan High Command and other alien embassies, including the Andorian and Tellarite Embassies. Within weeks, the field office had contacted the Andorian Embassy and had begun talks with the Andorians and others to purchase star maps and technologies, including the designs for warp 3 engines, energy shielding, and designs for basic phasers and anti-matter warheads. By the end of the decade, the designs for all technologies had been either sold to other NATO powers, or stolen by foreign intelligence organizations. The dissemination of these designs would prove to be the key to the rise of humanity as a major galactic power during the first half of the 22nd Century.
2092- (United States) – Analysts at the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia began looking into several archeological field reports translated and filed out of the field offices at the US Embassy on Vulcan that discussed a creature so violent that “not even a Klingon would dare battle it, for it is nay indestructible.” CIA Director Shannon Mallory ordered the field offices on Vulcan to begin sending out information gathering missions to the Zeta I Reticuli system where the archeological field report had originated from. For the time being, the species had been codenamed “Xenomorph.” The name would stick.
2093-5- (Worldwide) – The rising amount of carbon dioxide, increased development of urban areas in Europe and the United States, and the rising agricultural demands of the developing world coupled with an already damaged environment lead to the onset of a drought across much of Asia. The area greatest hit by the drought was Central Asia, which lead to greater crop failures and eventually starvation in the rural areas. The nations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were hardest hit by the drought, which soon turned into an all out famine in 2094. By 2095, the nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kygerstan had all suffered severe drought and famine with little hope in sight for relief. Their only remaining options were to either petition the United Nations for large scale humanitarian relief, petition the Vulcans and other off world species, join the other two former Soviet Republic in the growing Central Asian Union, or petition the Neo-Russian Empire for aid. In the end, it was agreed that begging the Czar for aid was more agreeable than groveling before the United States or the Iranians.
2096- (Socialist Republic of Vietnam) – Rioting broke out in the business sector of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) after Hanoi announced additional crack downs on political dissent, free speech, and the two month closure of the national stock exchange. The rioters cited the precedent of the last 100 years worth of political and economic reforms as reason enough to begin freeing up controls over free speech and economic freedoms. When the government dispatched the Vietnam People’s Army in conjunction with riot forces of the People’s Police of Vietnam, cells of anti-government, pro-Colonel Green eco-terrorists began tossing Molotov Cocktails and fired AK-47’s and other vintage firearms into the police forces. Before long, the rioting spread far beyond the business district of Ho Chi Minh City and into the countryside.
By the end of the year, the entire southern portion of the nation had fallen to violence, which dragged portions of the border of Cambodia and southern Laos into the violence as well. In Ho Chi Minh City, the People’s Police of Vietnam and the government forces of the Vietnam People’s Army were driven out of the city by the angry mobs after weeks of open rioting. Similar events began to take place in Cambodia and in smaller settlements along the Laotian border. It appeared that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam had lost its grip on power in the south and a possible restructuring of the very system of government in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was inevitable.
2097- (Neo-Russian Empire) – Czar Nicholas IV announced his full support for the reformers in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and declared in a formal statement to the world press that reforms were “necessary in our fast changing world.” And, furthermore, “Socialism in all its forms has been proven to be a failure, the sooner our brothers and sisters in the Far East can see this, the sooner we can move on as a civilization.”
In related events, the Russian Empire had three major events that marked its return to the world stage. The Czar officially announced the return of the Old Russian Imperial flag, instated by Czar Nicholas III in 1914 prior to the outbreak of World War I, a move which many have pointed to as the event which truly marked the return of the Russian Empire.
The second event was the Russian testing of a warp engine aboard the science vessel “Minsk.” The test of the crude warp 1 engine was successful, with the Minsk staying in FTL for nearly 80 seconds before dropping out of warp.
The final event was one which many in the diplomatic world had seen coming for two years. The nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kygerstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia all dissolved their national borders and agreed to rejoin the Neo-Russian Empire. The nations had been facing economic collapse, large scale political corruption and popular dissent, military corruption, and starvation and all saw joining the reformed Russian Empire as favorable to an otherwise bleak existence.
With these three events, the Neo-Russian Empire emerged onto the world stage once more as a major player, equal to any in the east or west. By the end of the 21st Century, the Russians would be testing their own warp 2 engines, anti-matter warheads, energy shields, and phasers.
(United States) – Designs for the new USSC space battleships, the Constitution Class, began their lives on the drawing boards. Built around warp 4 engines and armed with the latest in mass drivers, phasers, anti-matter warheads, energy shielding, and hull plating, the Constitution Class would prove to be one of the most successful and longest lived, of all USSC designs. When launched in 2109, the USS Constellation would set off a space naval arms race akin to the one created by the launch of the HMS Dreadnaught 200 years prior.