For All Time Pt. 114

May-September 1970

-In the end, there's not really a world-wide famine. The ~800 megatons dropped on Korea aren't quite enough to lower temperatures in every crop zone in the Northern Hemisphere, just enough to make for a very cold summer and truly spectacular sunsets nearly everywhere. Some of the late 20th century's best landscape photography is taken through the summer of 1970.

Of course, it's not all fun and games. There are no deaths from immediate blast effects like radiation or heat outside of the Korean peninsula (those Koreans who survive the initial blast and those PLA soldiers unfortunate enough to be in the initial occupation wave), but a dusty cloud of various degrees of radioactivity settles on the fields of Siberia and eastern China, North and South Japan.

Siberia and North Japan have the Soviet Union and CPSD to supply them with food; and South Japan's great friend the United States is quick to keep them in the pink. Times aren't exactly grand, but rationing is nothing new to any of the countries involved, and only a few thousand of the poorest of the poor starve to death in any of the countries involved.

China, however, is a bit more problematic. With agriculture already in chaos thanks to Lin's Cultural Revolution, and no semi-colonial empire to lean on, they are hit hard. Still, it's not as if five million or so dead is much of a worry in a nation with a vast population and rather bloody-minded government, and if there are student riots, well, that's why they call them death squads. (There is, of course, East Africa. With aid shipments from China low, Idi Amin attempts to stage a triumphant return to Kampala. It doesn't go that well, what with the purges and all, but Milton Obote finds himself riding an unstable horse indeed.)

The United States mourns the death of Robert Dornan, planning to name the next generation of military spacecraft after the dead pilot, and moves on. About the only significant change (outside of a wave of South Japanese emigrants to California) is to quietly put the kibosh on President Foss's hopes for a second term. The US expected to defeat Korea, is glad to see it gone, but no one wanted to kill 40 million-odd people. (Bodies of all kinds keep coming home from Mexico and Argentina, though far less from the latter.)

Great Britain, meanwhile, loses a Prime Minister. Harold Wilson's government actually does survive the minor dustup about the body count of the Korean Crisis, but the be-raincoated politician just can't continue running a nation with so many dead, however (relatively) minor his involvement.

Prime Minister Benn's first crisis comes from the Southern Hemisphere...

-Guyana is newly-independant, and the colonial war there has been a relatively important story in the international pages of most newspapers. Most Americans were glad to see the British out. On August 2, 1970, much of the world is horrified when an East Indian nationalist group, backed by elements of the Army, assasinates Prime Minister Winston Smith, the commander of the army, and seizes Georgetown.

As the Benn government strongly considers intervention to keep order (and the alliance) going, Venezuela acts. Success has made the Delgado government rather foolhardy, and the President barely bothers to mention their invasion to the Collective Security Organization before deploying "security troops" across the border.

As an embattled Washington and London react, Venezuelan troops move quickly, with surprisingly little resistance, as if they had agents in-country in advance. Fighting continues in the back country for quite some time after August, but Georgetown falls on August 10, the capitol building taken by General Francisco Tudjman and his Croatian Guards.

There's no war, not quite, but there is something very close, especially after a suspiciously quick referendum unifies Guyana with Venezuela in early September. Delgado survives, but he loses a great deal of political capital; the Special Relationship with the United States is over, and he'll have to build his own nuclear carrier.

As for Tony Benn, well, he slides his way into construction of the largest bomber base Britain's Caribbean ally Jamaica has ever seen. (In Calgari, negotiations continue apace.)

-The French big story is, of course, the Declaration of Brussels on August 30, 1970, transforming the Kingdom of Belgium into the Liberal Social Republic of Belgium. The new government is, oddly enough, not particularly beholden to the CPSD; Vande Lanotte seeks his own path. If the theoretical ideals of "Eurocommunism" soon fade a bit to the temptations of one-man rule, well, such things happen.

To Western Europe, though, Belgium has become Red; a tendril of Moscow flung far west indeed. With the Belgian royal family fled to Paris and tens of thousands of refugees fleeing into the Netherlands and the German Federation, it's not a particularly outrageous idea.

As Bokassa's army makes final preparations to move across the border, reports arrive of rioting in Lisbon, and Portugual's state-owned television stations go quiet with great speed. No one's quite paying attention to Africa.

-On September 4, 1970, Sergeant Paul Dupin bursts into Ma-tan as Sarra, a fragile oasis surrounded by desert deep in southern Libya. Dupin seems crazed to the nomads and small Libyan garrison who are the sole occupants of the area; he is the only survivor of a group of four French noncoms and has been alone and almost entirely without water since crossing the Tibesti mountains in northern French Equatorial Africa in August.

Dupin recovers by the end of the month, and rapidly finds himself on another odyssey; first to Tripoli and then to Jerusalem. He has a rather fantastic story, and this has to go high up. Sergeant Dupin was a photographer in civilian life, and managed to smuggle a small camera onto the factory floor and steal an armload of papers (thanks to a colleague dead of thirst somewhere outside Aozou.

For All Time Pt. 115

October 1970-February 1971

-With all the events happening in Europe and elsewhere, most of the world misses the publication of "Immune Deficiencies in Military and Dependants" in The Journal of Bulgarian Medicine by Dr. Oleg Danylovich of Pechora, a city in the Soviet Union near the Urals and the Arctic.

Danylovich is recently discharged from the Red Army, a veteran of the Yugoslav campaign and the war in Sudan, and his isolated retirement has given him time to concentrate on a lingering puzzle. In the last decade or so of his army service, he noticed a few dozen puzzling cases of soldiers and family members getting sick; very sick. Healthy men wasted away to nothing and died of common diseases, prostitutes in consortation with soldiers acquired a blotchy cancer mostly found in elderly Italian and Jewish men and wasted away in turn.

Very quiet consultation with other army doctors, men posted from Vladivostok to Frankfurt, found similar cases; often with no apparant cause. A married soldier recovering from a car accident seemed to have no connection to a male prostitute, much less an officer's wife a thousand miles away.

Oleg never quite dared to publish his findings while he was in the Army; mysterious, unsolvable, fatal diseases simply did not exist in the worker's paradise of Lazar Kaganovich and Mikhail Suslov, and those who suggested otherwise didn't do so well. It's only now, in safe retirement, that he's ready to take that step.

(To be fair, he has little; no virus, no method of transmission, no potential treatment. All he has is a puzzling pattern of symptoms (mostly made up of other diseases) and a name. Sindrom priobretennovo immunodeficita, syndrome of acquired immunodeficiency. Or SPID.)

-As the Maghrebi journalist Jean Reno later wrote, "The Dupin Papers surprised no one but a lucky few. We all knew. Oh, that we had acted earlier..." By early October of 1970, newspapers from Jerusalem to Jacksonville, from Canton to Canberra, have pictures of human beings being shot, skinned, dressed, and their carcasses cooked and processed, along with a reasonably detailed accounting of the 50,000 or so Frenchmen and Africans and how they came to die there.

(The first effect, oddly enough, is the suicides. French statistics are unavailable, but about 3,000 Europeans and Americans who'd visited France since Bokassa came to power find they just can't live with the knowledge that they ate human flesh. The most prominent dead American is explorer and adventurer William Manchester.)

The most visible effect of the revelations, though, are in France, rather unsurprisingly. The officer class of the French Empire is a rather hardy breed of men; they are supporters of Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, after all. But some of them have limits, and some of those limits include working for a cannibal.

And so, when deployed from the Belgian border to put down riots in Le Havre, Nancy, Limoges, and countless other places, (Started by the surviving resistance members or family members of prisoners storming the temporary jails used before the prisoners are shipped to Equatorial Africa), many French colonels and generals say "Non!"

Many do not, however, and soon French soldiers are shooting at each other...it is an unpleasant winter in France, as the first volleys of the Second Civil War spread over the unhappy land.

-Depending on one's perspective, it's an even more unhappy time in Iberia. On October 5, 1970, the bullet-riddled body of Antonio Salazar is thrown from the window of his Presidential Palace in Lisbon. The Portuguese officer class has always been rather sympathetic to Communism, and the inspiration of Belgium has motivated men long discontent with being told what to do.

Even as the infant Liberal Democratic Republic of Portugal takes place and fighting continues outside Setubal, Francisco Franco moves. The old Spanish dictator has been eying his next-door neighbor with a rather jaundiced eye for some time. (Salazar had been rather obviously going mad since his 1968 stroke.) While he didn't expect this, per se, he expected Communists to do something over there, so he makes his move.

-On December 2, 1970, Spanish troops cross the Portuguese border in the Tagus and Duero valleys. They're really not very good; a third of the Army still has Amsterdam Pact-era weaponry and hasty mobilization means another third has Civil War-era material, but they're there, and they're moving toward the capital of the newest Communist state in Europe.

But Joao Olivares, the colonel who has temporarily won control of the Military Revolutionary Council, has a little surprise for the Spanish Army. Everyone knows of the Portuguese-South African treaty, but no one knows the South African nuclear program was a shared project.

Or that Portugal has the Bomb; two of which detonate under the spearheads of the Duaro and Tagus armies on December 7, 1970. Olivares is playing a difficult game, Portugal only has but a half-dozen bombs, and he can't use many on his native soil for a host of reasons.

That, of course, is what the air force is for. On December 10, even as Spanish forces are desperately regrouping on the Spanish side of the border, virtually all of Portugal's small surviving air force makes a raid on Madrid. Lots of bombs are dropped. One of them is a nuclear weapon of about 100 kilotons.

In a fiery instant, Francisco Franco and his fascist regime (and a million-odd innocent people) are blown to fiery pieces. That does not, of course, mean the war is over. It's a long, bloody two months before Portuguese forces are outside Seville; Spain pulls off a chemical weapon attack against Lisbon that kills tens of thousands, and Portugal drops a near-miss 50K weapon near Toledo that kills hundreds of thousands.

Just over two million people are dead on both sides, and Prince Carlos, invited back to help rally the people (an effort that hasn't gone well; many cities not even held by the Portuguese have succumbed to Communist rebellions of their own) isn't about to let it go on. On February 2, he invites President Olivares to a little demonstration of his own.

For All Time Pt. 116-For Better Or Worse

March-May 1971

-The third of March is a dark and stormy night. Most of St. Louis's police force, even those out walking the beat, are sheltering in the nearest nook from the driving storm. It's the perfect cover for an articulate young black man named Rudolph R. Moore.

Sometime around 3 AM, an anonymous yellow truck turns off Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard and drives onto the grounds of the St. Louis Arch Park, parking next to the left leg of the arch. The driver, quite sensibly, hightails it out of there, running down Route 70.

The rain distracts and delays security long enough that one unfortunate man is just going out to check on the abandoned truck when the several hundred pounds of diesel fuel and fertilizer aboard detonate, ripping away most of the left leg of the arch in a fiery rush of flame and metal.

The collapse of the St. Louis Arch on the morning of March 3 (and the promise of the African People's Militia to f*ck up motherf*uckers) is suddenly almost the biggest story in American newspapers, bigger even than famine-wracked South Japan's membership in the Collective Security Agency of the day before. (Though not quite so big as the story of an American victory in the Yucatan that killed fifty American soldiers and several hundred Maya. There's no particular connection between the independence movement and the Maoists, but the American media doesn't need to know that. Besides, there is shortly thereafter.)

President Joe Foss is never one to back away from a fight, and he escalates martial law, along with (reluctantly), the draft. Veterans of Argentina and Mexico get switched back to the States, and at first it seems quite the leisurely posting. After all, they're posted next to national monuments and tourist attractions, and it's not as if they're denied leave.

Until March 17 in Texas, when an explosion rocks San Antonio's Alamo after closing hours. Only heroic efforts by the city save the outer walls at all, it will be unusable for decades to come. Another three dead join the one casualty of St. Louis, two security guards and a janitor.

Previous terror incidents in America have been directed against people; especially lately between the various feuding militias of various racial stripes that have degenerated into little more than criminal gangs by this point. (Although, to be fair, it's more a matter of different rhetoric than different behavior.)

This new strain, though, seems directed more against the government itself, and the very symbols of the United States. White citizens' groups, of course, know just what to do about that. Kill some Negroes! All over the country, members of the various Klan factions, the White Citizens' Council, and the Committee for the Cleansing of America slip through the military presence near black neighborhoods to do their work. In Detroit, a dynamite bomb at a crowded church, in Chicago, it's as simple as machine-gun fire into private homes.

(In the Deep South, of course, it's as simple as lynching! The locally-recruited, nearly-all white Army units in the area are just a tad biased, and let white mobs through their cordons while opening fire on black crowds. The cycle that results is largely the one one might expect, though the suicide bombing of a nightclub near Ft. Pillow, Tennessee on April 9 shows an eye for history, unfortunately not equaled to that of the young white men who open fire on a crowd of students at Howard University on April 21)

Several thousand are dead by the beginning of May, and it's only getting worse.

-Things aren't going particularly well in Great Britain, either. Distracted by the mounting crisis in France in early March, Prime Minister Tony Benn is a step behind his wife Margaret (nee Robbins) as they go to the cinema to catch the latest of George Lazenby's Shakespearean plays updated for a modern audience.

(He stars opposite Diana Rigg in "Romeo and Juliet", with the setting changed to the gritty streets of exotic Cardiff.) It's a surprisingly on-topic choice for a film; it's a Welsh nationalist who throws the grenade that kills Peggy Benn quite spectacularly in front of her husband as they leave the theater.

Walter Walker has never liked Tony Benn much, but an assault on English womanhood, especially the murder of a highly-placed lady, is more than he can take. As the Prime Minister closets himself through the rest of March, blood runs in the streets of nearly every city in Wales, and British soldiers find themselves firing on British people.

As such things do, it spreads, and the Prime Minister rouses himself enough to put the commanders of peacekeeping forces in Scotland and Northern Ireland under the overall control of General Walker. It's a dark and unfortunate time, especially after Prime Minister Benn reemerges and refuses to speak of the matter publically.

Several hundred are dead in both sides from street fighting and snipers, and with the car bomb death of the Mayor of Edinburgh on May 3, it's clear it's only going to get worse...

-It's not getting worse in France by that time, of course, it's hard to get worse than the Second Civil War. (Though later historians will make comparision to the Hundred Years War or the wars of the Revolution, the Thirty Years War is probably a more apt analogy.)

On March 14, responding to alleged cross-border raids by French guerillas, President Stutze of the German Federation mobilizes the Army and marches into Alsace. In the vanguard, of course, are the thousands of Alsatian nationalists driven out of the motherland when the Third Empire came to power. They, of course, purge the enemies of Alsace quite enthusastically.

Emperor Bokassa, quite glad to have an actual enemy to fight as opposed to the multi-headed Hydra of rebellion, declares war on the German Federation on March 17 and moves the nearest Loyalist troops to combat the German threat.

Just in time, on March 20, for the armies of the Republic of Brittany to pour across the border. They're about as professional as the military of a young new state is, but they have a goal, the Cotentin, and a leader. Maurice Le Pen is nothing if not inspiring, especially when it comes to purging the enemies of the people of Brittany.

-This poses quite a problem for Mikhail Suslov. France's membership in the CPSD would be good. Damn good, in fact; but he knows full well the consequences of an invasion of Western Europe. (Nuclear weapons, and lots of them, distributed freely over the USSR and associated states.)

There's another solution, though, and the independence it suggests might be enough to lure Portugal and Spain (Perhaps even edgy, stubborn Belgium) under Moscow's benevolent wing. On April 11, 1971, the General Secretary of the Social Republic of Italy mobilizes Italy's armed forces and positions them on the border with France over the public protests of the CPSD.

A week later, over a storm of faux protest from Moscow, elements of the Italian army slip across the border...

For All Time Pt. 117

July 1, 1971

Pope JOHN PAUL I is slowly getting used to Manila Cathedral. On a papal visit to the Philippines when the Iberian War broke out, he watched in horror as Portuguese armies were driven almost to the gates of Toledo before being driven back, then the horror grew as Toledo's western suburbs were destroyed in a 50 kiloton nuclear blast by a particularly dirty Portuguese atomic bomb.

Catholic nations over the world have offered him shelter, from King Carlos' government in the Republic of Spain (Balearics) to Delgado's Venezuela. But he's not about to flee, the Catholic Church isn't about running to the nearest shelter when times get tough. Nor is it about living in an officially areligious state, so the continuing invitations from the Social Republic of Italy and the People's Republic of Spain are right out. (He considers Canada carefully, but decides there are just too many Protestants, despite the similarities to lost St. Peter's.)

With the near-collapse of British power in South Asia, the MAHATHIR goverment in Malaysia has gone with nearly the next best thing, Ernest Manning's Canada. Soon, soldiers like General PHILIP MCNAIR and Colonel JOHN TURNER are training Malaysian soldiers on the newest weapons to fight (mostly Chinese) Communist insurgents, while an army trained for desert warfare in Africa finds itself learning a little something about the jungle.

And eying Thailand with a mistrustful eye, and getting the same right back. The Nordic Council has been suspicious of Canadian intentions for a long time, especially after the spectacular failure of Gerald Bull's space-gun, and their acquiring of a strategic nation right on Scandanavia's Asian flank (Thailand) doesn't help matters.

Lieutenant ALEXANDER ZHIRINOVSKY is one of thousands of young Russian soldiers volunteering to join the Italian Liberation Force occupying Nice and the surrounding areas of war-torn France. The Suslov government has shown a firm hand with these young men, many of whom are officially AWOL from the Soviet military, sending the returnees to hardship postings like the Black Sea or the coast of the Serbo-Croatian People's Republic.[1]

AKIRA TAKARADA is one of South Japan's youngest post-war Prime Ministers, and certainly her boldest. Takarada's Reform Party rose to power after the minor post-Korean famine brought down the ruling Progressive Conservatives[2], and he has taken steps to move into the American sphere, discouraging the development of an independent nuclear deterrent, encouraging Japanese migration to the United States, and (very, very quietly) allowing President Foss to station nuclear-equipped bombers at the great American base outside Yokohama.

Attorney General WILLIAM REHNQUIST hasn't had a particularly enjoyable term in office. The growing problem with black nationalist terrorists (an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge on the last day of May was averted only by the early detonation of the warehouse in which the dynamite was stored) is matched only by the growing problem with white supremacist terrorists (the attack on the Golden Gate was to be a retaliation for an attack by off-duty policemen on Mississippi Valley State University, an all-black campus, that killed eleven.)

Too, President Foss isn't helping matters much. Deeply frustrated by the failures of his foriegn and domestic policy (the wars in Mexico and Argentina continue to quietly simmer, with perhaps 20,000 dead in both conflicts.), he has found solace in football, cheering on his beloved Cowboys as they dismantle the Green Bay Packers at the very first Superbowl.

MARGARET THATCHER's mourning for her husband Dennis, lost in a minor, unimportant skirmish as British forces evacuated Guiana (a mourning made worse by the way the Labour government just stood by and let Venezuela take over) isn't so much ended as it is suddenly changed by Prime Minister Benn's announcement of July 1, 1971.

In consultation with Labour and Conservative Party leaders, mindful of the assasination of his wife, Benn's announcement is thus. On December 1, 1971, Wales, Scotland, and England will vote seperately on their political future. Union, independance, or "association"?

As Northern Ireland (and indeed, many of the more conservative areas of the rest of the UK) go quite mad at this announcement, Margaret Thatcher rises from her widow's weeds on a new mission. Labour's not going to let another country be dismantled on her watch, no sir.

[1] It's a clever sham, y'see.
[2] Limited post-war reconstruction coupled with some serious economic turbulence in the 1950s and 1960s has kept Japan from being a one-party state dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party. In its place has been a party system with all the stability of OTL's Italy.

For All Time Pt. 118

July-October 1971

-On July 2, 1971, Maghreb President Paul Rassiner gives the order and the great processing plants of northern Equatorial Africa go up in a great blaze of nuclear fire. (The unhappy inmates of those appalling places have mostly outright disappeared, whether into the deserts of northern Chad or the mass graves prepared by fleeing Bokassaist troops.)

While only three bombs (totaling around 200 kilotons) were used, it's still quite a gesture by a nation with only a dozen nuclear devices to begin with. Rassiner is facing a new wave of migration from the north, the ongoing war is multisided and bloody, with all sides simply ejecting inconvenient or potentially disloyal population groups, and quite a few are aiming for good old North Africa.

Rassiner, never a man to worry much about morality but a French patriot nonetheless, has found a use for the refugees, especially those old enough to fire a weapon. The purges and massacres of Muslim Algerians of his predecessor have given way to "resettlement", hundreds of thousands of non-assimilated Algerians driven south, below the 30th parallel, with their homes in the hands of ethnic French. Rassiner promises independence for the Algerians, but that's more of a convent way to not actually feed the people driven into the desert.

-In the end, the shadow of Oliver Cromwell falls a long, long way. It's clear to keen observers in the summer and early fall of 1971 that something is going on with the military, what with the sudden occupation of elements of British telecommunications and transportation by various Army and Navy units in turn between July and October. However, paranoia on both sides coupled with tight media control by the state ensures that rumors of General Walker flying to London to confer with the Queen, Anthony Parsons' near-simultaneous conferences with the Naval High Command, and then Tony Benn's personal visit to Walker's Cardiff headquarters remains just that, only rumors.

In the end, the British public knows only a few things for sure. General Walter Walker accepts command of the British garrison occupying the Socotra islands off the coast of unhappy Aden on September 15, a variety of particularly aggressive Conservative backbenchers resign, and a few dozen elite soldiers of the Army and Navy are reported killed by friendly fire in exercises off the Orkneys. And finally, after a great deal of debate, Queen Elizabeth II announces that she will abdicate the throne in favor of her son Andrew on the 20th anniversary of her accession, February 6, 1972.

The referenda in Scotland, Wales, and England will go on, as Walker's successors begin the slow task of patching up relations between the British Army and men and women who may not be Britons anymore come December. [1]

- Carel de Wet was elected on a platform of "peace in Africa", and Greater South Africa's new President intends to do just that. On August 3, 1971, South African tanks rumble across the border from Chingola into the former Belgian Congo. De Wet's goal centers around money dressed up in ensuring security. There are a lot of valuable industries in the southern Congo, most of them left abandoned to precarious safety in the hands of Belgian corporations switched to new ownership or local governments.

South African control of those rubber and mining industries would be very profitable, continung their domination of most of the economy of sub-Saharan Africa, and South Africa's government has been conditioned to think in favor of domination in the decades since the acquisition of Portugal's colonies and the mergers with the various Rhodesias.

But South Africa's people haven't been thinking only that way, no indeed, and soon South African students are (very, very carefully) taking to the streets to protest the government's continued involvement in foriegn affairs and colonialism abroad at the expense of South Africans, Afrikaaner and English alike.

The government has ways of dealing with that, true, but not so many ways to deal with mobilizing East Africa...

[1] Unir snvgu va Purg, Xney.

For All Time Pt. 119

October-December 1971

-On October 9, 1971, a street mime bows low before Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa and detonates the several dozen kilograms of plastic explosives and nails strapped to his back. More than just the Emperor and four bodyguards are shredded by the blast, the already shaky authority of the French central government collapses quite spectacularly.

A war that began as an uprising against a creatively evil despot has now become a multi-sided struggle, with local commanders struggling for dominance and attempts at government collapsing within a matter of a few weeks. There is the remnant of the Imperial government, with authority over northwest and central France down to about Poiters, a faction of former naval officers running an area centered around Bordeaux, the Lyons Liberation Government, and perhaps a half-dozen others.

The rest, of course, is dominated by the foriegners. The People's Republic of Spain clings to the French Pyrenees and French Basque country, Lepenist Brittany continues its slow march down the Loire valley, while the German Federation's drive into the Champagne-Ardennes gains ground by the week. Only Belgium and Italy are more circumspect, under pressure from Great Britain and the Soviet Union, respectively; Belgium hasn't moved much beyond the Lille area, while Italy is content with the home of that first great people's revolutionary, Nice.

Great Britain herself has been mulling Continental intervention for quite some time, but Tony Benn doesn't trust the Army, not even slightly, not until a lot of highly-placed officers are put in a position where they can't risk governmental stability again, not ever. Not to mention, of course, watching the Conservatives quite carefully indeed...

-A variety of factors come together on December 1, 1971 to produce the results of the Kingdom Vote. The Welsh vote for confederation surprises no one beyond the most extreme Unionists and Liberationists; very little can overcome the centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence between England and Wales, but there is still the very recent memories of British troops firing on rioting Welsh crowds to consider.

Confederation means Britain and Wales will keep a common currency and have no real trade barriers between them. Too, Cardiff and London will maintain a unified foriegn policy, with Wales at least theoretically following the larger nation's lead. Finally, they agree to cooperate on criminal matters, with both signing broad mutual extradition treaties.

But that's about it; Wales will have its own army, own police force, their own code of laws, and they will maintain their own Parliment and Prime Minister. If the vote had happened a few months later, they might have gone for keeping things as they were, as it is, the interim Welsh government quietly persuades London to keep the Royal Navy bases in Wales so thousands don't lose their jobs.

Scotland's vote to stay in the United Kingdom is rather unsurprising, the circumstances of the last few years are only enough to make it a close vote indeed. (Nationalists will charge voter fraud for decades to come, and while there were certainly some irregularities on the tallies from Aberdeen, they don't seem to be enough to account for that extra seven hundred and thirty-five votes.) Benn's offer to encourage and protect Scottish economic and cultural practices is enough to overcome any lingering reservations about Great Britain. (A similiar offer wasn't enough for Wales.)

And then the English vote tally comes in. By a margin of 37% to 35% to 28%, the people of England vote for independance from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This was not particularly expected.

-On December 12, 1971, Private Jamey Sheridan[1] stumbles into Methodist Hospital in downtown Brooklyn, suffering from a high fever and hacking cough. Sheridan, a 1969 draftee, has spent most of his military career posted to a military facility in Seattle, but is one of the many American soldiers transferred to guard first national landmarks (in his case, Fanieul Hall in Boston) and then sent home for Christmas.

As Brookyln doctors watch, Sheridan's flu turns quickly into pneumonia, then into death, just before the end of 1971. At first, it seems just an unfortunate accident, a young man dead of a natural cause. Until, of course, the first few cases arrive from Sheridan's Brooklyn apartment. Meanwhile, in Boston, visitors to Fanieul Hall have been checking into hospital with a hacking cough and high fever, along with soldiers posted to Seattle's vast military complex, airport personnel in Boston and New York City...[2]

[1] Get it? [2] 80% or so of the Sheridan Flu cases are just that, the flu. 20% or so turn into pneumonia, and of those, around 75% die. It's slightly more infectious than the standard strain of flu. And you thought I'd forgotton Linus Pauling.

For All Time Pt. 120

December 25, 1971 - A Christmas Montage

MOSCOW:

"...Minister of Justice Chernenko sharply rebuffed attempts by Western journalists to corrupt the work of the Ministry today, announcing that the executions of economic criminals under the 1937 labor laws will proceed as scheduled on the first of January. This marks the second great victory for the Minister and General Secretary Suslov this year, when efforts from the government broke the infamous diamond smuggling scandal of the Brezhnev-Kirilenko faction in March." [1]

LOS ANGELES

"...Julie Andrews dismissed charges by conservative critics that her Christmas-released musical comedy Patton was disrespectful to American troops deployed in South and Central America, saying "Patton is a tip of the hat to all the brave men who served their country in World War II." The 2 hour MGM epic, starring Joel Grey as the late general and Andrews as his "military muse" is second at the box office this Christmas Day, behind Marlon Brando's The Dark Ring." [2]

LONDON

"...Prince Edward declined to comment on rumors that he would accept the English Crown upon her independence from the United Kingdom on March the first of next year, calling speculation on the matter "premature." In a related story, Prime Minister Benn confirmed statements made by Home Secretary Castle that he would continue to serve as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and England until the interim elections scheduled for the beginning of April, blasting Conservative members who called for new elections as "traitors and cowards who seek to stir a revival of the disorders and bloodshed of the last few years.", pointing to Unionist riots in the Midlands as an example of the Conservative future. Opposition leader Maudling replied with a blast on Labour's "dissolution of Great Britain and dissolution of British democracy", promising to hold a new referendum upon the formation of a Conservative government."

WASHINGTON:

"Treasury Secretary Rhodes announced today that the government's economic program for 1972 and beyond would give every American consumer "the kind of present they really deserve: an end to the inflation imposed on the United States by the economic errors of the Kennedy administration." Rhodes is considered a front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1972, along with Vice-President Hal Warren, Illinois Senator Charles Percy and California Governor Rock Hudson." [3]

HANOI

"...In response to prevarication by the government of fascists and capitalist running dogs in Beijing, General Secretary Truong Chinh[4] promised that any Chinese incursions along the borderline established on 7/11/1953 would be dealt with the full vigor of the peoples of the United People's Republic of Indochina and her allies in the Council of People's and Socialist Democracies."

KASANGA, EAST AFRICAN FEDERATION

"...War has come to East Africa, I say again, war has come to East Africa. At approximately 9 AM yesterday, President Amin ordered air strikes on a Greater South African military convoy on the shores of Lake Tanganiyika that he claimed was preparing to cross the lake and enter East Africa. In response, Prime Minister de Wet has closed South Africa's borders and begun a program of air strikes against cities in..."

For All Time-Smokey and the Warhead

Washington, D.C.
February 1, 1973

President George Stanley McGovern looked at the big map on the Situation Room's wall for a while before turning back to the Secretary of State. "Thirty divisions...Jesus, that's a third of their field army right there. Lin must be damned serious about taking on the Indochinese."

Secretary of State Shriver nodded somberly. "It seems that way. Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi have gone insane, as you might imagine. Bobby and Stephen can't even get in the front door to see Suslov or Lin, and Mark has started evacuating his people already. He says the Chinese are already hitting Hanoi maybe four, five times a day, they seem to have commited a fair percentage of their strategic bomber force."

"Damn..." The President thought for a moment, then turned to Colonel Colin Powell. Powell was one of the few blacks with a high rank in the United States Army, and about the only one in a position to work with the White House. "Colin, if this spreads, what can we do?" 

Powell shrugged. "Short of using strategic nuclear weapons, Mr. President, not much. Most of the Army and National Guard is still tied down in the South and in the major urban centers, not to mention Argentina, and by the time we
redeploy, this crisis is likely to be over, one way or the other. And if we redeploy, we might..."

"Start the last few years over again?"

Colin Powell nodded, his impassive face betraying nothing. The nuclear destruction of Philadelphia had brought the nation within hours of full-scale genocide; his predecessor in the White House had confided over drinks that Foss had actually talked about deporting blacks to Africa in the mad opening hours of the attack. It had led to something like genocide in many areas, mass lynchings not seen since the 1920s, before the Argentine Liberation Army had claimed responsibility. About a million Americans had died in the bombing and afterwards, not to mention the Argentines who had put up a fight after the second occupation....

Like the god-damned African Front could have gotten their hands on a one megaton bomb anyway., Powell thought irrelevantly. "Unfortunately, we can almost be certain that it is going to spread.", spoke up Secretary of State Shriver. From all we know of Suslov, there's no way in hell he's going to let the Chinese get away with invading a CPSD member, not to mention the Soviet troops already under fire in Indochina. And Lin's not going to back down. Everything we know says he's stir-crazy..." Not that we can so much as stick our noses out of the Atlantic or the Pacific without Europe having a coronary, thought the Secretary of State. The Sheridan Flu had killed an average of one half of one percent of the world's population, much less in the industralized countries...but it had been enough, by God. Hanging Pauling and that idiot Colonel Flagg who'd been running biowarfare hadn't stopped the subsequent anti-American sentiments, but then, to be fair, it hadn't stopped biowarfare research either.

McGovern looked up at the map again. "So what you're saying, Sarge, is that we're looking at a war. The first honest-to-God nuclear war between the superpowers." East Africa doesn't count, he thought. The mutual exchange that had shattered both the old apartheid government and Idi Amin's empire in East Africa had been more a campaign of suicide bombings on the part of the East Africans.

"That's what it looks like, Mr. President."

from The Sino-Soviet War, John Keegan

"Whatever else the flaws of the Chinese government, they retained elements of strategic sense...[Lin] successfully evacuated his government to Qinghai before ordering the tactical strikes at Hanoi and the strategic strikes  against the Soviet Union.

[Suslov] refused offers of evacuation, instead choosing to stay in Moscow while organizing the attacks upon the Soviet Union. He seems to have been killed by the sole successful Chinese strike west of the Urals, a three megaton bombing of central Moscow. Further waves of Chinese tactical bombers succeeded in largely destroying the most of the major urban centers of Siberia south of the 60th parallel and the capital cities of the Soviet Muslim republics. Perhaps 100 million Soviets died in the initial attacks and the weeks after. By the end of the day on February 19, 1973, the major phase of the Sino-Soviet War was over.

The Soviet counter-strikes were significantly more destructive. The Chinese attempt at strategic decapitation might have proved successful without the backup command center in the Ukraine, and so there was nothing to materially hamper the counter-strikes from bombers and space-based craft already in the air before the destruction of their Siberian and Kazakh bases.

Of a Chinese population of 900 million, the Soviet destruction of every city with a population greater than 1 million east of the 100th meridian together with massive strikes on agricultural, industrial, and military areas killed 3/5ths, or 540 million Chinese. Subsequent die-offs, given the large-scale destruction of Chinese agriculture in the east, coupled with the Soviet invasion through the spring and summer of 1973, (the Chinese  attacks were directed, probably mistakenly, against Soviet urban and civilian populations.) killed roughly half the survivors.

The Soviet Union, by leaning very strongly on the other nations of the CPSD and by leaning strongly toward the new breed of totalitarian ideology under the new [Chikatilo] government in Volgograd, managed to survive the turmoil of the immediate post-war years. The People's Republic of China, however, was an entirely different kettle of fish, at least outside of the post-treaty borders that awarded Manchuria, Gansu, and Xinjiang to the Soviet Union, while Mongolia recieved Inner Mongolia and the virtually depopulated Liaoning province, giving Mongolia its first coastline in a very long time..."

Map of Europe, 1973

For All Time: Home Stretch

from Decade of Decision, Mike Davis[1]

"There seem to have been a variety of factors behind the Soviet attack on the Jerusalem League from October 2-3, 1975. The Renaissance Party that had dominated the JL governments since the late 1960s was strongly anti-imperialist and pan-Islamic, in particular in the governments of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. With the near-mortal weakness of the Soviet bloc during the early 1970s, the EIS had taken an interest in their co-religionists in Iran, Kurdistan, and Anatolia, funding anti-Communist groups and various attempted rebellions.

Too, the Soviet Union desperately needed foriegn exchange to survive. With the United States distracted, Europe impoverished, and South Asia teetering on the edge of starvation, there were certainly markets for Soviet products like oil and gems, but the USSR needed to get rid of the competition first.

And, finally, General Secretary Andrei Chikatilo was a sociopath. It was under Chikatilo's government that the terrible cleansing camps in Siberia were set up. Prostitutes and homosexuals from all over the Soviet Union (primarily the least experienced or most obvious of both, especially those with no Party connections) were rounded up and sent to camps near bombed-out Siberian cities, where a good two-thirds of three million "contaminants" died of a combination of freezing, starving, and radiation poisoning. It was under Chikatilo's government that the mass public executions of "wreckers and sloths", those who hadn't contributed enough to restoration efforts, were inaugurated in the capital cities of Soviet republics and CPSD member states, and it was under Chikatilo's government that the Soviet government methodically and efficiently stripped Eastern Europe and North Japan of every moveable resources to rebuild the motherland.

By 1975, Chikatilo's government had been at least partially responsible for the death at least five million people in Soviet and Soviet-supported countries. With the "Middle Eastern War", he seems to have been aiming to prove to the world that he was tough on foriegn as well as domestic enemies of the Soviet Union.

And he certainly did that. With most of the Soviet ground forces in western China or in internal security roles, the Soviet side of the war was largely limited to use of the surviving strategic bomber forces against the Iraqi and Saudi oil wells. While they did succeed in crippling the Middle Eastern oil industry, the most noticeable side of the war was the Soviet effort against civilian targets. 

The destruction of Baghdad and Damascus certainly crippled the armed forces of their countries (League bombers succeeded in hitting Baku, Ankara, and Tehran with ~50 kiloton bombs, but that was largely the extent of their  successes during the war), but Chikatilo reserved a kind of unprecedented revenge for the unhappy Kingdom of Egypt.

The three megaton warhead detonated against the High Nasser Dam unleashed Lake Aswan upon the Nile Valley. The wall of water was 150 feet high and moving at 130 MPH when it hit the city of Cairo, and over 60 feet high and 50 MPH at the edges of the Nile Delta. It killed approximately 98% of the 40 million people living in Egypt.

(The nuclear devices dropped on Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina were relatively small compared to the rest of the Soviet onslaught, but their combined 120 kilotons did more damage in certain respects than all the rest. The broken holy places would prove perhaps the largest obstactle to reconstruction.)

Andrei Chikatilo's idol was Joseph Stalin, a non-Russian who rose to lead the Soviet Union. In 1975, he surpassed his hero.

Foriegn sanctions were a very close-run thing, despite Chikatilo's pre-war speeches about the "soft, pink, piggish West." Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber was in favor of them, but the Republic of France was by far the poorest member of the European Customs Union[2]. Ernst Nolte's government in the German Federation spoke for most with its condemnation of the Soviet destruction of Egypt...and little else.

George McGovern was determined to pass some sort of sanctions against the Soviet Union, and his personal condemnations of dictatorship and wanton savagery in war still ring out. Unfortunately, by late 1975 and early 1976, President McGovern was despised by the electorate that had catapulted him to office three years before. Slowly rising inflation had become a veritable stampede by 1975, and now economic woes drove many Americans onto the street, where racial ones had sufficed in decades past.

There seemed to be nothing to stop the Soviet Union, either from destroying itself or destroying all around it...

[1] Hey, look it up.
[2] Given the collapse of international trade after the nuclear destruction of Philadelphia, it strikes me as likely that some sort of inter-European federation, at least among non-Communist nations, would be inevitable. No one's that paranoid. Except the Belgians.

For All Time Pt. 122

1975-1976

-With the new militarization of the Chikatilo regime, some weaknesses must be opened in the previously sealed walls of the CPSD border. While Chikatilo isn't enamored of the idea of his subjects...err, comrades, getting away, hey, the border patrol is a lot of money that could be better spent on things more useful to the still-reeling Soviet bloc.

Like that big statue of him in every major Soviet bloc city, not to mention the camp-factories along the Arctic Circle where the munitions for a new age are being turned out and thousands of traitors are being disposed of daily.

So an odd hundred thousand or so Soviets and other CPSD citizens slip out into the west; France is desperately poor but needs labor to rebuild, and the German Federation is happy to take in Volga Germans and other co-ethnics. The remainder manage, by various hooks and crooks, to slip into the United Kingdom, England, and even the distant United States, where the McGovern administration is battling for its life.

Between the war and inoculations and such, a fairly large percentage of the refugees have taken donations from the Soviet blood bank system, which, with truly heroic donations from inmates, has stayed functioning even through one of the more destructive wars in history.

Like many war refugees throughout history, they find their bodies make a currency acceptable anywhere.

-Despite some rather interesting personal differences,  Prime Ministers Enoch Powell and Michael Foot have organized a customs and trade union in the British isles. Ardors have cooled with the new borders, granting self-government for the various nations formerly in the United Kingdom, and the prospect of trade and profit can sway the hardest of heads.

Things have largely settled down in matters musical, too, a big-toothed American named Bobby O. is playing the piano in London while his sister sings the blues in Edinburgh, but Britain's own musicians, men like McCartney and Jagger, women like Richards and Hall, are just as big in the Continent (well, mostly Scandanavia) and the US as their foriegn counterparts are back home. It's a nice exchange.

-Gough Whitlam is a national hero to much of Australia, at once the victor of several wars in the blood-dimmed pool that is Indonesia and the man who pulled Australia out of several others that just weren't going the right way.

With the shenanigans in the United Kingdom bringing apparant royal authority to an all time low, it is perhaps an inoppurtune time for Governor-General Randolph Churchill to stick his nose into the constitutional crisis besetting both the Australian Senate and the nation. But, hey, he's an inoppurtune sort of guy.

It's a very interesting year in Australia and Whitlam only has to call out the Army once. But, by God, he stays in power through that interesting year, and one heck of a precedent has been set for Australian constitutional government. Indeed, the victory of the Republicans in the referendum in December comes almost as an afterthought.

-For such a tumultous election, 1976 is marked by some darn low voter turnout. Liberal Republicans just don't like California Governor Charles Manson, and they form the biggest defections to the John Anderson-Eugene McCarthy third party ticket that year, pushing several New England states into the independent camp.

Manson's opponent, however, has mass appeal; a former minister and inspiring speaker, he does well in the South, but as an advocate of urban reform he does well in the big cities and in black voters. The middle class is a bit less optimistic, and he IS a member of George McGovern's party, but the two men are certainly barely speaking to each other, and it's not as if Joe Foss' time was much better.

Election eve is surprisingly quiet, with only a few scattered bombings of polling places by various political action commitees. Jim Jones carries the South, New York State, and even (with the help of third parties) Manson's own California, and with it, the election.

For All Time Pt. 123 - Messiah

1976-1977

-Charismatic, articulate, and absolutely ruthless, Charles Manson has built a strong, unified regime in California. Backroom influence has put his cronies in high office in the state National Guard and in the bureaucracy, and the order he has brought to an always turbulent state has made a lot of street-level Californians loyal to him.

Of course, he has more than his share of enemies, and enough people sucked it up and walked past the "peacekeeping" National Guardsmen outside the polling places to vote for Jones to give the state to the Democrats. Still, Manson is unquestionably the most powerful man in California. With Jones in the White House, Manson is given to meetings with old comrades like New Hampshire Governor Lyndon Larouche, the highest-ranking ex-Trotskyite in the US and the only state governor with similar power in his own state.

-The rather anemic federal response to such things is surprising; President Jim Jones, meanwhile, has been quite ruthless in going after militants of all stripes. His credentials among black voters means that Jones, and perhaps only Jones of American politicians of his day, can round up the associates of R. Ray Moore and place them in the federal "agricultural projects" in southern Nevada and eastern California while awaiting trial. And perhaps only a former Disciples of Christ minister could send troops to arrest Byron de la Beckwith and similar cretins without provoking too much disturbance in the South.

No one much cares about the internees, beyond a few isolated liberals. Nuclear terrorism and the destruction of Philadelphia, for all that it was Argentinians, has made Americans just not care what's done to terrorists and friends and well-wishers of same. Bob Woodward's attempted expose of the Death Valley farm is quietly quashed. Two weeks later his commission is called back up.

Jones is a bit more pragmatic with Jewish and other Middle Eastern militants; the collapse of most Middle Eastern governments has finally opened a window of opportunity in Palestine as the surviving governments struggle just to stay afloat. Ariel Sharon and Meir Kahane, veterans of years of battle in the US, are among the many who slip across the sea to ports in the Maghreb, and then further east through Libya.

-The energy crunch of the late 1970s has gone unnoticed by most people; the loss of the Middle Eastern oil fields to nuclear bombardment by the Soviets could have knocked Western Europe and the United States for one hell of a tailspin. Only the Kennedy-era nuclear power plant system, privatized under Goldwater, has kept the American economy going with no more than a sputter.

(Which has, of course, been lost in the spiraling tide of inflation. The dollar has bred like rabbits for the last twenty years, and it's only getting worse. President Jones' price freezes of October don't so much solve that problem as they replace it with several more.)

The Ross Barnett Memorial Nuclear Power Facility (located near the site of OTL's Barnett Reservoir) has had a rather unhappy history. Privatization found no corporation in Mississippi with the expertise and cash to buy the state's big reactor complex, and Mississippi pride forbade selling the plant to an out-of-state company.

The plant is manned by an interesting combination of hired nuclear employees (mostly those who've left jobs at other plants, Mississippi just doesn't have the money to pay the same wages as New York or Iowa) and physics grad students from the many fine universities of Mississippi.

The President himself is supposed to visit on July 5, and so the plant begins making certain tests before his arrival. After all, security is extremely important these days. On May 25, the evening crew begins the last test; determining how long the turbines will spin and what power will be supplied in the event of a main electrical failure. It isn't the first time this has happened.

Automatic shutdown mechanisms would interfere with the examination, so they are of course shut down. As the coolant supply decreases, the power output increases, until finally a nuclear engineering grad student tries to shut down the reactor.

The fuel elements ruptured and the resultant explosive force of steam lifted off the cover plate of the reactor, releasing fission products to the atmosphere. A second explosion threw out fragments of burning fuel and graphite from the core and allowed air to rush in, causing the graphite moderator to burst into flames. 

There is some dispute among experts about the character of this second explosion, seeing as how there weren't that many talkative survivors in the plant. The graphite burned for twelve days, causing the main release of radioactivity into the environment.

It's a very interesting year in Mississippi. When it's over, the evacuation zone includes the city of Jackson. A vast population of Mississippians has been unsettled, perhaps 200,000, with many exposed to rather high levels of radiation, more as dolomite leaks down the Pearl. As the "Pwits" fan out across the United States, hurried examination of several other nuclear plants across the US, particularly the Three Mile Island and Delmarva plants, reveal similar design problems.

It's a sticky situation, and now nuclear power plants are guarded by the military as hostile crowds, remembering the few thousands dead in Mississippi (a number that grows, particularly among firemen and engineers who rushed to the burning plant) and not wanting to join those ranks. Counter, pro-nuke demonstrations tend to be mobbed even by private citizens.

Among the dead out in southern California after an encounter with a resettled group of Pwits is a doctoral candidate named Jerry Pournelle. As nuke plants are shut down by panicky state governments or collapsing corporations, the energy crisis really begins...