AHC: Have the world become an absolute shithole without Nazi/Soviet victory

Colonel Zoidberg

Stanislav Petrov sighs, says, “OK, I guess we’re doing this,” and fires a metric shit-ton of nukes at the US and Western Europe. The US responds in kind, and any place that’s not Third World is turned into a flaming hellscape in no time at all. Even some non-aligned countries get caught up in it, like India and Pakistan.

Survivors overrun Africa and South America and turn both into war zones full of poverty and disease. The world’s wealthy flee to places like Hawaii while the middle class and educated flee to Australia and New Zealand. Living conditions worsen in Australia and New Zealand, reducing the middle class to poor and starving. Africa and South America become absolute nightmares. Only the rich have any semblance of quality of life.

Come to think of it, this is either the next dystopia TL or an AH-based dystopian novel.
 
Fries

Fries

The Soviets don't win the Cold War; nobody does.

Soon after the collapse of the USSR, the LA Riots spread from LA into almost the entirety of California and into Nevada and Arizona. Seeing the central United States government as corrupt and not for the people, they secede into the Pacific American States. Similar riots occur in New England and in Michigan and Wisconsin, which declare independence as the Federation of New England and as the Great Lake Republics, respectively.

The United States, unable to keep itself afloat with even more states joining the Great Lakes (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio), the PAS (Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Washington State) or declaring independence (North + South Dakota as the Republic of Bismarck, Texas as the Republic of Texas, Florida + Georgia + Alabama + Louisiana + Mississippi + Arkansas as the Confederate States of America).

Virginia and West Virginia unite into the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the Carolinas, DC, Delaware, and Maryland join them forming the Commonwealth of Vespuccia. The other states become independent nations. The United States, as of 1992, is no more.

The sudden and violent collapse of the United States leads to the collapse of the US dollar, which leads to a global market crash. Economies collapse worldwide; the reunified Germany can't keep supporting the recently annexed East, leaving some longing for the days of an independent East Germany again. The Euro, without the USD, never exists; the Pound Sterling takes its place as the dominant currency.

The former Soviet republics, their economies already bad from the USSR's collapse, have a massive unemployment and bankruptcy wave. Think the Great Depression in America, but around 10x over. Communism, even after the fall of the USSR, doesn't dissipate as easily. A lot of countries may turn to it or keep it as their dominant ideology; notably, but I'm not sure how likely this would be, Ethiopia, maybe some of the Soviet satellites, and maybe even countries like Canada or some of the former US states.

Germany, only 3 or 4 years after being reunified, adopts the pound sterling as its currency, only to have the former GDR states have massive protests against this action. To make a compromise, Germany adopts its own currency tied to the Pound Sterling.

There we go; no USSR, no USA, no happiness.
 
Histor32

Histor32

WhiteDragon25 said:
...You mean it isn't currently an absolute shithole?

/edgelord comment
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glad I wasn't the only one going to post this

@The Ranger

I think if no nukes .. even after WW II no one wanted another war for a while..

but lets say you then get a conventional WWIII .. who ever wins that one pretty much settles the score card on death toll even with out nukes.
you jets
very accurate bombing and carpet bombing
you now have missiles to launch what you wish at targets
you have nations that still haven't recovered from the last war....


so a worse world would be try yours plus toss in western powers that are going to fight to the end for their colonies performing full on atrocities to maintain control of them.

then during said wwIII biologicals and chemicals are used instead of nuclear..
 

Starslayer_D

Industry and goverments ignore the green movements and club of rome, resource conservation and reduction of pollution are not implemented. Rivers choke on raw sewage, oil is used up prodiguously to power cars, plastic chokes the landscape, wild landfills spread litter everywhere while clouds of unfiltered ash and gases get spread from industrial chimneys. Forests die in acid rain, fish vanish due to overfishing or unliveable water quality, foam chokes the surface of ponds and rivers while algea bloom from prolifigate fertilizer use finishes of the oceans and freshwater. Birds vanish, insects spread, resistant to the rampantly sprayed DDT wich accumulates in the food chain, the ozone hole reaches the north pole while the climate rapidely heats up and the huricane belt reaches middle latitudes and the costal plains become new sea shores choked with rotting algea, plastic chunks and the latest oil fil washed out of ships tanks.

Happy new world.... please shoot me now.
 
Aisha Clan-Clan

Aisha Clan-Clan

Starslayer_D said:
Industry and goverments ignore the green movements and club of rome, resource conservation and reduction of pollution are not implemented. Rivers choke on raw sewage, oil is used up prodiguously to power cars, plastic chokes the landscape, wild landfills spread litter everywhere while clouds of unfiltered ash and gases get spread from industrial chimneys. Forests die in acid rain, fish vanish due to overfishing or unliveable water quality, foam chokes the surface of ponds and rivers while algea bloom from prolifigate fertilizer use finishes of the oceans and freshwater. Birds vanish, insects spread, resistant to the rampantly sprayed DDT wich accumulates in the food chain, the ozone hole reaches the north pole while the climate rapidely heats up and the huricane belt reaches middle latitudes and the costal plains become new sea shores choked with rotting algea, plastic chunks and the latest oil fil washed out of ships tanks.

Happy new world.... please shoot me now.
Click to expand...
sounds like the @B_Munro version of soylent green
 
LouisTheGreyFox

LouisTheGreyFox

Only thing I can think of that nobody hasn't mention yet in this thread would be the following scenario.

1908: Doomsday? (Got a better name? Please feel free to say so)

Instead of the meteor (or whatever it was) exploding over Siberian wilderness creating the Tunguska Event, what if it instead actually crashed into Earth causing an actual great change in Earth's climate? Or better yet what if it instead lets say crashed into Moscow and results in Tsarist Russia falling into civil war and balkanizing, while at the same time rest of Europe ends up getting fucked over due to economic reasons while added with change in climate creating the world's temperature to drop and seasons going out of whack similar to what happened in the Year Without A Summer.

I don't really know how it would render much of the world a "shithole" but I would argue it would absolutely change a lot of 20th century history for certain.
 
Atterdag

Atterdag

Give it a few decades... ;)

In all seriousness. How about the Soviet union winning against Poland in the interwar years and then invading Germany, basically creating a second world war right after the first one had ended? That would cause quite a debacle.
 
Fries

Fries

Atterdag said:
Give it a few decades... ;)

In all seriousness. How about the Soviet union winning against Poland in the interwar years and then invading Germany, basically creating a second world war right after the first one had ended? That would cause quite a debacle.
Click to expand...

I think that counts as a Soviet victory.
 
Fries

Fries

Atterdag said:
OP said Soviet victory in the cold war though!
Click to expand...

Touche.

Anyway, here's another timeline I had in mind.

Japan never attacks Pearl Harbor, which doesn't drag the US into World War 2. D-Day never happens (as it was the brain child of Dwight D. Eisenhower), and the Soviets press way past Berlin, and into the Rhine. German France is still invaded, but from Italy; the war expands into 1947.

Japan wins the Second Sino-Japanese War, and their non-aggression pact with the USSR isn't broken until at least the 50's. Japan is much more powerful, and the fight is equal; eventually, a compromise is made; Japan takes North Sakhalin and a bit of Mongolia (for Mengjiang), if the USSR gets the Kuril Islands and a part of Manchuria. Japan is the dominant Pacific power, and eventually becomes an ally of the UK in TTL's Cold War. It eventually devolves into WW3, with the Soviet Union emerging victorious and becoming the de facto strongest nation on Earth. Japan is crushed in this war, and China, Korea, and most of Mainland Europe become Communist puppets.

No one is able to challenge the Soviet Union, and Communism becomes the world's dominant ideology. The Cold War never happens, and the US remains a strange, isolationist country in North America.
 

Mr.J

For one thing, imagine if CFC's were developed and put into mass production in the 1920s. Nobody has any idea about their ozone depleting effects until it's too late, and so agricultural productivity at high latitudes plummets and everybody starts getting skin cancer and terrible sunburns.
 

Ellis MacVey

Donor
frenchiestfries said:
Touche.

Anyway, here's another timeline I had in mind.

Japan never attacks Pearl Harbor, which doesn't drag the US into World War 2. D-Day never happens (as it was the brain child of Dwight D. Eisenhower), and the Soviets press way past Berlin, and into the Rhine. German France is still invaded, but from Italy; the war expands into 1947.

Japan wins the Second Sino-Japanese War, and their non-aggression pact with the USSR isn't broken until at least the 50's. Japan is much more powerful, and the fight is equal; eventually, a compromise is made; Japan takes North Sakhalin and a bit of Mongolia (for Mengjiang), if the USSR gets the Kuril Islands and a part of Manchuria. Japan is the dominant Pacific power, and eventually becomes an ally of the UK in TTL's Cold War. It eventually devolves into WW3, with the Soviet Union emerging victorious and becoming the de facto strongest nation on Earth. Japan is crushed in this war, and China, Korea, and most of Mainland Europe become Communist puppets.

No one is able to challenge the Soviet Union, and Communism becomes the world's dominant ideology. The Cold War never happens, and the US remains a strange, isolationist country in North America.
Click to expand...

This does not count as a Soviet Victory in the Cold War for the requirements of this AHC, as it is a completely different version of the Cold War.
 
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