DBWI Challenge: Prevent World War III

While the preparations for nuclear war certainly insured that it was a possibility but, the aggressive actions of the CIA in seeking to destabilize communist countries pushed the USSR into a corner and they choose to fight rather than await internal divisions that would have lead to the dissolution of the USSR.

If it was decided to scale back operations instead of increasing them after the successful Bay of Pigs invasion, than you might be onto something.
 
That's an interesting though, although the exchange didn't happen until the late 70s. Of course, killing Honecker was probably one too many...

The whole paranoia of the era--the quest to match the "Mindshaft Gap", the whole 1950s movement towards a deeper future in "Hobbiton". There were a conflux of factors going on. I mean, the critical answer that allowed WW3 to happen is that, despite using 2 gigatons of nuclear detonations, damage to most of the world was essentially minor. There were a handful on the lunatic right that celebrated the deaths of the poor and impoverished as "God's judgement"; to a very large degree, life simply went on.

I guess the real point is that nuclear war, while a definite bogeyman on the US and Soviet Political Horizons, was seen as a challenge to be endured, not a possibilty to be avoided. Some on the Left spoke of Mutually Assured Destruction, but the right thing to do was clearly to have definite answers instead of relying on diplomacy with someone who, according to chaos theory, might launch the nukes anyway. (OOC: Trying to work in the Chaos Theory as a reason why diplomatic means were not pursued)

We all knew the big one was going to happen, but we didn't know that the only thing holding it back were the elites determined to ensure their own survival and prosperity in a post-nuclear world. It would be an act of extreme heartlessness to "Save the Rich and Burn the Poor", but with two and a half decades of preparation, most of the world was ready.
 
What surprised me was that the Western European allies didn't oppose the US build up as much as they ought to have. They most certainly didn't have the capital to dig in properly, and when the die was cast for Operation Morning Star in 77, they found their entire homelands turned into a tactical nuclear battlefield.

They suffered a whole hell of lot more than we did, and yet they didn't fight very hard to get tactical nukes out of their homes. Sure, Britain lucked out with her "Better Red than Dead" policy, but it seems like they're going to be getting the worst of both worlds, thanks to the prevailing winds.

It may have been survivable, and life went on in spite of around 20 million causalities, civilian and military, but it sure as hell hasn't been comfortable. At least before the War, going topside was still an option for most of us. Being cooped up into those glorified fallout shelters they call cities, with the constant threat of radioactive ground water seeping into our homes has made life a nightmare for a lot of people, even the wealthy. Living standards definitely plummetted, and I suspect they won't ever reach pre-war levels.

As well thought out as the urban survival programs were, they did not give long term thought to sustainability. Eventually the radiation seals will break down, and the urban hobbits will be forced topside again. There was a lot of short-sighted engineering that went into those projects. I think it's another symptom of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower spoke about in his memoirs.

Perhaps if we had been more cautious about the combine between a defense industry all to eager to earn the next defense contract and a political class chomping at the bit to conjure up a new hobgoblin to frighten us, we might have avoided the dig in mentality. There was a whole lot of lobbying by defense contractors for the "peace time mobilization" necessary to surivive the nuclear exchange, long before the issue was a public debate.
 
I guess since I live in the Great Californian Maze I don't feel like the end is near--I mean, it's been thirty years since the war and we've got Las Vegas, Bakerfield, San Diego, Tijuana and just recently, Phoenix, connected by Subway.

I suppose its because then Governor Nixon insisted that California survive "The Big One" that we were so much better prepared than even the Northwest. It'll be a long time before we can hope to reach something like Chicago.

As for a lack of preparation--when we reached Sonora, the first thing we smelled was burning flesh. The Mexicans were starving, suffering from various ailments, and dying of containment breaches. While I hope I never have to see that sort of thing again, I suspect that this story has been repeated throughout the world. Of course, this was supposed to be the second part of the project that much of the world ignored--building a way out in case something goes bad. Much of the world never implemented such measures.

I am optimistic that we have survived the worst, and indeed, our standard of life is slowly rising as subway freight boosts industrial needs and scientific research in the University of California is ongoing.

Any chance of the Chicago-Pittsburgh Maze reaching you? Radio communication says they're close to meeting up with Boston-Norfolk.

The situation around the world would be better off without the nukes, this much is true. But there is a fundamental question in play here--is it better to be ready to kill someone or better to die? Our leaders then would rather kill than die, and that's what happened. If it were the other way around, humanity would never have launched the nukes in the first place. Perhaps a critique of sociology is needed, but once we were reasonably confident that we would survive the worst (at least many of us, before the various failures), we pushed without remorse...
 
Actually, I've spent most of the past decades topside. Traded my writer's pen for a rad suit and geiger counter. College degrees can be quite the assist if a writer suddenly has a midlife crisis.

I did spend a lot of time in the North West right after the cataclysm, while the dust was still settling. Like you said, they were a lot less prepared then Cali was. Still, they did a whole lot better than the Midwest states did. Most of the cities weren't big enough to justify digging in, so they had to evacuate in the wake of fall out from all the silos that were hit.

There are a few rays of sunshine out east, though. While I was last out in Michigan surveying background rad levels, I heard about some joint Canadian-American projects to connect Toronto, Montreal and surrounding areas with Chicago-Pittsburgh. Any good news is heartening after my last assignment in the Great Plains Wasteland. The use of salted nuclear weapons on those states have left them deserts. Nothing but a few species of moss and lichens will grow in such in tense background rad.

If I make it out West for an assignment, I'll be sure to check out the way things are going there.

That is the pressing question of our time: the executioner's dilemma. I always thought it was a trivial psychology exercise when I was in college, but damn, I can hear my prof chastising me now. My hope is that the generation of leaders that grew up during the War will be wise enough to deal with this sorry state we've given to them.
 
I was in New York when the bombs hit and it didn't spare any better either (the old above ground one, not the below ground one now). A lot of cities just had either atomic leveling or fallout to deal with. NYC, being on the coast, had that and the fact that water came sweeping into the crater that used to be half of the city. So even if you survived the bomb, you could have ended up drowning for all your effort. Subterranean New York suffered from occasional water leaks until they built the dam topside in '92 for goodness sake.

We did, however, manage to recover the Statue of Liberty and bring it down below only a couple of years ago. Luckily it wasn't vaporized but it ended up under water and suffered radioactive contamination so they had to put some special chemical coating over it.

Since '82 they've managed to get the subways back up connecting the state (New York-Albany-Syracuse-Buffalo-Rochester; though I think there's some contamination and a doomsday cult or something in Syracuse.)

I think the United State's plans for who got leadership of whatever government's managed to survive were woefully neglected when written and vague enough so you didn't know if they wanted city states, state governments or to somehow keep a United States. It took a decade before the all the sub-metro Mayors agreed to reinstate a state-wide government with a senate, supreme court and governor, and about another 2 years before the disputes between Albany and NYC on where the capital should be were settled.

Any way, how would culture have developed if the "Big One" didn't happen? I mean, I know New York has somewhat stagnated to the culture of when the bombs hit (the 70's; disco, progressive rock, weed and what have you, cop shows, and John Lennon is still going since he and Yoko got stuck with us obviously), and I guess I'd like to know some of your regional cultures, but how would the culture have developed in a non radioactive United States?

On a side note, does anyone know if that "Deseret" rumor's true?
 
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