WI/AHC: Worst '80s for the U.S.

I've wondered if this is credible, so here's the pitch.

Reagan is shot by Hinkley, & dies on the operating table.

The World Trade Center garage bomb is detonated.

The highjackers succeed in hitting all their targets with jetliners.

New Orleans wiped out by hurricane.

It all happens between 1980 & 1990.

How bad does the U.S., & the world, look in 1990?

How big are the cultural changes? New/different TV shows, movies, & songs? Vastly more paranoia? (Y'think?:rolleyes: )

Or is it even credible, without the U.S. aid creating the mujahideen?:eek:

Thoughts?
 
I’ve got an easier one. Volker’s efforts to crush inflation fail and cause runaway 20+% inflation unabated with high unemployment. That leads to all sorts of nastiness.
 
There was also a nuclear weapons incident on Sep. 11, 1980, where a Titan II missile caught fire and exploded in its silo in Arkansas, and flung a 10 megaton warhead into a field several hundred yards away. Had it gone off (extremely unlikely but not impossible if the arming circuits had failed in precisely the wrong way) it would have killed thousands and dumped fallout onto a large swatch of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

And in February 1981, an Argentine Airlines jet came within seconds of hitting the World Trade Center, before a controller noticed and warned them off
 
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The Able Archer crisis of 83 escalates into a global nuclear exchange? That would've been the worst possible 80s for everybody
 
Several of your ideas are from the 1990s (1993 WTC attack) and even 2000s (9/11 and Katrina).

However, it's very easy and already been said: the Cold War goes very, very, VERY hot.
 
Several of your ideas are from the 1990s (1993 WTC attack) and even 2000s (9/11 and Katrina).
I do realize that. I was pulling in potential events without regard to the OTL year, with the goal of looking at what might have followed had all of them happened in the '80s, instead.

Maybe I should have been clearer?:oops:
 
I do realize that. I was pulling in potential events without regard to the OTL year, with the goal of looking at what might have followed had all of them happened in the '80s, instead.

Maybe I should have been clearer?:oops:

The thing is, some of your items would pretty much have the same impact no matter what decade they happened in, eg. New Orleans wiped out by a hurricane. There is going to be a certain "sameness" to that event(especially but not only from the POV of people in New Orleans) whether it happens in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, whenever.

And Reagan dying has a pretty minimal effect, it's not like GHW Bush was some sort of wild-eyed Leninist who was gonna reverse course and go leftward on everything.
 
The thing is, some of your items would pretty much have the same impact no matter what decade they happened in, eg. New Orleans wiped out by a hurricane. There is going to be a certain "sameness" to that event(especially but not only from the POV of people in New Orleans) whether it happens in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, whenever.

And Reagan dying has a pretty minimal effect, it's not like GHW Bush was some sort of wild-eyed Leninist who was gonna reverse course and go leftward on everything.
I'll grant that, to a point. All of it in a decade, rather than in about a generation, would seem to magnify the effect, if not of all of it. So, too, would the changed geopolitical climate influence what G H W Bush does (or can do): attacks on Afghanistan in '01 is not the same as attacks on Sov-occupied Afghanistan in '81 or '83.
 
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