DBWI-2008-46 years after the bombs

Hello everyone. I'm just checking in and I'm pleased to see that this kind of communication is still going. Interconnection between our nations is going to be key to our future development. I'm pleased to say that I've managed to get a pretty significant promotion. I can't disclose the full details of my job for security reasons, but suffice it to say that I now answer to a guy who answers to the Protector-General. Its been very exciting, we've managed to close another of the old refugee camps, and another has actually opted to incorporate and become a township of its own. Further, the economy is really starting to burgeon lately, we're seeing some of the most dramatic and sustained growth we've seen in years.

I know that some people here have expressed concern over the Protectorate's foreign policy, specifically with regards to expansion. Unfortunately, all I can say is just that Pittsburgh doesn't want to conquer anybody, but we will protect our interests. The Protectorate has one of the highest populations and population-densities on the continent, and those people have basic needs that need to be met. If we don't secure farmland, our people starve, if we don't secure power-stations, our hospitals don't have adequate electricity, if we don't secure rails and roads, we can't access vital commerce to keep people in jobs. Again, we don't want to have to fight with anyone, but the Protectorate has a lot of people whose best interests we have to keep in mind.

Also, before anyone asks, I am not permitted to comment on any statements made by Archbishop O'Brien or by those connected with him, save to say that neither the Archbishop nor the Steel Cross are affiliated with the Protector-General or his Offices.
 
From New Zealand..

My parents emigrated to New Zealand from Britain in 1960, just before I was born. Had they stayed in London, I suspect we'd all be dead and my brother and sister would never have been born.

I was a baby when the war happened. NZ missed the bombs and much of the radiation though there was some from the Sydney/Canberra strikes.

For New Zealand, the main consequence of the war was human. We found ourselves as sanctuary for thousands of the displaced and the bereft. First came the combatants - three Soviet submarines asked for asylum in December 1962 and their crews were interned followed by an American warship and some British vessels.

Then came the refugees from Australia - by plane or by boat to the west coast of both North and South Islands. We got a few from elsewhere but by the spring of '63 that had more or less ended.

We weren't hit by the nuclear twilight to the same extent as the northern hemisphere but the virtual collapse of international trade hit us very hard. We lost our oil supplies for a number of years and had to fall back on our own reserves of coal.

Most people travelled by train in the 70s and 80s and the Holyoake and Nash Governments extneded the network deep into the countryside. We could grow enough food to survive, if not prosper.

In 1971, an RNZAF plane flew to the South Pole and found the Amundsen Base - everyone long dead of course and NZ has sort of claimed the former British and American Antarctic territories.

We've also taken over the former French colonies in Polynesia and Micronesia - the Tahitians were starving before we arrived.

I wouldn't say we're thriving but we're doing all right. Almost everyone lost a relative in Britain or Europe - I lost my Uncle and grandparents though my Aunt survived until 1984. I've made my life here - married a girl from Taradale and we've got 50 acres of good land in Awararu. I've had to learn farming but it's a good life and we're happy.
 
I think that you overestimate the survival rate. We have sailed to mainland Europe - to Britain, to Scotland, and there is nobody. We have sailed to Ireland, and to Norway, and there are so very few left. You toy with your technology and your civilisation, you pretend that if you wish hard enough then everything will be OK. You are wrong. After the war, people from across the world fled to the farthest point from the destruction that they could. We, and so many others came to the Faroe Islands. They were untouched by the war, and had managed to detach themselves from Denmark. They tried to rebuild, and the massive influx of immigrants helped them establish a nation. But more people came, carrying a devastating plague picked up from the corpses and the radiation and the rats and the fleas. There are now merely 5,000 people left on these islands. We burnt the larger towns that were infested with vermin, and migrated into the countryside where we would build up communities. We farm, fish and mine where we can. We have minimal trade with the few remaining in Iceland and Norway, but many of us have lost all hope. Electricity is rationed, for we fear there is no way of regaining it. We have been like this for over 25 years, but we are surviving.
 
For the most part South Africa escaped the horror of the bombs , but was rocked by revolution. Many of the major urban centers were spared from the nuclear holocaust . The government sold us out to the communists so the cities wouldnt lay in ruins , which is great in retrospect. Durban , Cape Town , Johannesburg , Pretoria , all alive and well. After the Communists were destroyed in a democratic coup in 1990 the full power of the vast immigrant pool we had taken in came to effect. It feels as if though the war never came.. However outside the cities and the areas controlled by the government you might as well be on mars , it is horror.
 
Well, I remember living in a huge refugee camp outside of Chicago when I was younger, then we moved to San Diego by train. They had radiation alerts even there, although "Only" the East Coast had been hit.

I don't curse the names of those who started the war, mostly because I was born after it happened so I don't know a whole lot about what life was like before except what I've seen on very old TV shows. I spent most of the Eighties living and then working in the Camp Elliott refugee area. When I was a teenager we were able to qualify for refugee housing near Mirimar NAS. I remember when the Mexican government tried to shut down the border and then-California president George Deukmejian raising hell about it.

Now I live here, after escaping the California civil war of the early 90's and the subsequent Mexican invasion.

OOC: Uh San Diego got nuked.
 
OOC: Uh San Diego got nuked.
OOC: As well as, one would assume, Chicago. I fear that I may have opened a can of worms with my original "Pittsburgh survived by pure dumb chance", as we seem to have developed a truly implausible number of major urban centers surviving. I don't want to rain on people's fun, but lets get some perspective here. It may be hypocritical for me to say this when I was the first to do it, but then again, I 'was' first...
 
OOC: As well as, one would assume, Chicago. I fear that I may have opened a can of worms with my original "Pittsburgh survived by pure dumb chance", as we seem to have developed a truly implausible number of major urban centers surviving. I don't want to rain on people's fun, but lets get some perspective here. It may be hypocritical for me to say this when I was the first to do it, but then again, I 'was' first...

OOC: IIRC an earlier poster mentioned San Diego by name.


I don't remember much about my parents. I know that I was born in San Diego a few years before the Russians bombed it and everything else. I was just a little boy then, no more than four or five years old. My mother was a nurse at County General; I remember her putting me on the plane to New Mexico where I'd end up being raised by my grandmother in Santa Fe. My father was a Marine. I last saw him one morning as he left to board a transport for Cuba. He probably died there...

Santa Fe was just a tiny town then, and it's still not much of a town today despite absorbing all the refugees from Albuquerque when it got hit. The valley just wasn't a good place to be setting off a nuke...it contained the blast nicely, sheltering the surrounding area. The state government collapsed finally around 1968. The Navajo Nation ended up taking over the area and the reservation government effectively became the new state government in New Mexico and Arizona around 1972. I guess there are some advantages to being desperately poor--you've got nothing the enemy wants to bomb.

Anyway, at least when the Indians took over here they didn't resort to lots of show-trials and mass hangings; all in all they've been pretty fair and most of the bandit gangs were broken up by the tribal police by the mid-70's. Not like in Mississippi when the black militants took over in 1965, blaming the war on white people (nevermind that Castro started the whole damn thing). They're still lynching whites in a lot of the smaller towns. We've still got that border dispute with the Mescalero Apaches around El Paso but that's relatively minor; they at least help us when the latest Mexican warlord decides to head north. Overall from what I've been told we're probably in one of the best areas in the old USA--a hell of a lot better than what used to be California or the East Coast, anyway.

I found work with the railroad and we've managed to restore rail service to Arizona, Utah, and parts of Texas and Oklahoma. Some people want to push a rail line all the way up to Canada but there's not much left up there--too far north of Salt Lake City and Mormon country it's just too cold in the winter and it was even worse in the first few years after the war. Anyone who didn't starve probably froze to death.

There's talk of bringing back the USA but I don't know if that's such a good idea; big countries start big wars. The USSR was even bigger than the USA and they started the biggest one of all...

The Navajos have a tradition that when someone dies, their home must be abandonned and burned to free their ghost. The Russians freed a lot of ghosts back in '62...

Albuquerque took it in the teeth. Between its importance to the US nuclear program (hosting both Sandia National Laboratory and Kirtland AFB) and its surrounding geography the Soviets hit it far worse than one would think for a city its size. And Denver, being for all intents and purposes a secondary capitol for the US, is another place fit only for ghosts.

I've had a personal interest in San Diego since I came from there originally. The city itself was completely destroyed and the death zone reaches down to Tijuana (which took a warhead meant for Imperial Beach NAS). There are a few scattered farming communities in the surrounding county but everything west of Highway 395 (OOC: modern I-15/state route 163) is a death zone.

Occasionally we get a few people straggling in from the old Midwest, especially as winter approaches. Omaha (which had the misfortune to host Offutt AFB, home to Strategic Air Command headquarters as well as being a major rail hub) is now a lake fed by the Missouri River. The catfish get really, really big there. :D:eek:



I could see Pitt surviving by accident but not San Diego. To much a military presence.
 
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