Scars from the Twilight War

[Anders]

Is there any complete list of the places that were nuked in the Twilight war?

By 2320 most such places would have been rebuilt (or if small, unimportant like many of the tactical nuclear strikes along the European front, bulldozed). It might be interesting to consider what old landmarks remain and what have been reconstructed.

For example, knowing the British, they would probably work very hard at reconstructing Westminster and a number of other key London landmarks (as well as add a second Monument at ground zero). The city also would finally get a more effective street pattern. But in more hard-hit places like Berlin rebuilding probably occured much later and many classic landmarks were not restored at all. Now ones have taken their place - there might be a Siegessäule, but it relates to the War of German Reunification and the Kafer War instead.

I would expect that in 2320 there are still school outings to the nearest blast zone monument and students are shown documentaries about the horrors of the war. The emotional impact may not quite be what it was, though. The people in the documents seem so alien and old-fashioned: they speak and dress strangely, and have ideologies long forgotten.

 

[Border Reiver]

There are a number of "Hit List" sources in published T2K and Challenge Magazine. I remember US, UK, Canadian and Soviet hitlists for certain. There may be others (European??) that I can't recall.

Would it be a breach of copyright or fair use to make a definitive list here on this thread?

 

[deniable]

The Twilight 2.2 main book (Didn't fell like digging for 2.0, but it's probably the same) has target lists for the US, Canada and USSR. The Survivors Guide to the UK has some indications of cities that were hit on the map. Otherwise, you're looking through individual modules. I did a quick google and didn't find anything useful. I did find a DIY google maps tool to plot the destruction, though.

 

[Colin]

In my original draft, many major cities had significant areas that hadn't been rebuilt, or only rebuilt to a certain level, and then seemingly abandoned. This was pure social engineering. Give the dregs a place to hang out, provide a safety valve against the sheer conformity prevalent elsewhere in society. The idea was cut by the editor...

 

[TheKiwi]

My last 2300 game scenario revolved around an anti-cancer "top-up" drug for people who lived in areas subjected to nuclear strikes during the Twilight War. (That, and some very nasty blackmail).

 

[Peter Schutze]

>There may be others (European)

The adventures usually had info on most of the country they were set in. Assembling a polish / german one should be a matter of looking in 2 or 3 adventures

 

[jcrocker]

I got my v2.2 book - it lists US, Canadian, and USSR targets starting on p234 [it reverses Grand Forks, ND and Minot, North Dakota on the map, by the way] and it has a short list of British targets in a sidebar on p. 226.

It has short paragraph summaries for conditions in different regions of Europe, and a bit more detail for Poland. Most of the rest of the planet gets a paragraph or two.

Basically, you can have a target hit or not based on what you want for your campaign - even the hard and fast target lists only cover the big strategic nukes, and if you want a place to have been hit by a tactical weapon, so be it.

 

[Anders]

I don't think there is much radiation left after 300 years. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt very shortly after the strikes and are not overly radioactive today.

Most of the Twilight war strikes were tactical airbursts; this means that fission products gets dispersed by the fallout (and most tend to have a fairly rapid halflife; the "rule of seven" says that for every sevenfold increase in time after one hour you get ten times less radiation), and that neutron activation of elements on the ground is relatively mild. The most risky fallout isotopes are strontium 90 (halflife of 28.9 years), cesium 137 (30 years) and iodine 131 (8 days). Calcium (in concrete) can get activated to calcium 45 (halflife 165 days) - important for the direct aftermath and rebuilding, but not much of a concern by 2100. Chlorine 36 might have one of the longest halflives (300,000 years) of the activation isotopes, but would likely diffuse quite a bit.

The places that still might be dangerous are groundbursts that activated particular rocks and nuclear power plants that got blown up - there (and downstream/downwind) there might be long-lived nasty isotopes. Places like the Amarillo warhead factory, military bunkers (where groundbursts were desirable) and old industry complexes are the likeliest to have some remaining hazard. But there might be small nasty surprises like a piece of cobalt close to ground zero that got activated. Early ruin clearance required careful dosimetry.

Still, anti-radiation drugs are relevant even in 2320. With the number of fission reactors around, radioactive colonial environments (after all, space is filled with radiation), tactical nukes in the Kafer war, facilities that make reactors and missile warheads, and general paranoia against background radiation on Earth, they have a big market. Beside chelators to block particular isotopes there are DNA-repair inducers and radioprotectants that increase antioxidant levels to deal with the local damage (this is apparently where most current research is, although 5-androstenediol apparently helped monkeys with acute radiation damage).

 

[rfmcdpei]

I would expect that in 2320 there are still school outings to the nearest blast zone monument and students are shown documentaries about the horrors of the war. The emotional impact may not quite be what it was, though. The people in the documents seem so alien and old-fashioned: they speak and dress strangely, and have ideologies long forgotten.

The long-run consequences of the Twilight War for the human geography of the world might also be pretty interesting. I came across this passage from Otto Friedrich's The End of the World (New York: Fromm, 1986).

One would think that any disaster that killed 25 million people in Europe alone would leave the entire Continent paralyzed for at least a generation. If the streets of New York City were suddenly littered with a corresponding number of corpses, roughly two million, or if the United States as a whole suffered more than fifty million deaths by bubonic plague within three years, the process of recovery would be hard to imagine. And so it is that we retain from the chronicles of the fourteenth century an image of deserted cottages falling in ruin and untilled wheat fields reverting to wilderness. Thousands of villages all across the face of Europe did simply disappear. The buried remnants are faintly visible in aerial photographs, spectral outlines of a vanished people, and in England alone more than two thousand such ruins have been recorded. The Germans even have a world, Dorfwüstungen, for the process of villages turning into wilderness. The depopulation of the cities was no less remarkable. In Toulouse, to take only one example, the number of inhabitants not only shrunk from an estimated 30,000 in 1335 to 26,000 in 1385 but continued shrinking to 20,700 in 1398 and 8,000 in 1430. Virtually no city anywhere regained its population of 1300 in less than two centuries (134).

(And even in 2320, the populations of Ukraine and America still fall short of their pre-Twilight peaks by about a quarter.)

There should be a fair number of ghost towns on Earth. If there aren't, it might be because they've all eroded, or been rebuilt as (say) 23rd century suburbs.

 

[epicenter00]

It's hard to say how many direct scars there are from the Twilight War. 300 years is usually long enough for entire paradigm shifts in the way people think and dress - long enough for something to be important, then for it to be important to be remembered as important. Then forgotten as to why it's important, and then forgotten entirely.

It's also possible that the Twilight War might be something so traumatic and unpleasant that the survivors didn't want reminders - it was all bulldozed over, the radioactive parts cleaned up and carted away, parks planted there without even a monument. Later, perhaps there would have been small, sober memorials put in. Eventually land prices in the cities would have encouraged those parks to be sold off piecemeal, then the memorials picked up and centralized elsewhere and the parks to vanish entirely.

Perhaps the most concrete remains of the Twilight War might be in the form of mouldering "sewers" under Berlin or Paris where tourguides take people on tours - not students, but adult tourists: "All right, now here we step up these stairs and through this tunnel here and we change from the stacked stones of the earlier Parisian Sewers, and now we're in ruins from the Twilight War. In this particular case, it's the remains of a Banuele along with an intra-city automobile artery. No no, this wasn't all underground. Once this was all on the surface before the Twilight War's bombs levelled Paris. In the rush to rebuild, much of Paris was built over the graded and stabilized rubble of old Paris. The Bastille isn't actually so low in its moat as it seems. Rather, it's that the average level of Paris has actually risen about 1 meter on average in some neighborhoods. The pleasant "hills" of the East Bank actually didn't exist prior to the 20th Century and are indeed large piles of rubble. However, this street here will give you an idea of how 20th Century Paris looked along with a hologram of the skies as well as reconstructed automobiles of the period. No no, the sky really was blue. I'm sure a lot of you have heard about the horrible smog problems of the period. The skies really weren't brown and yellow as in many of the vids. On most days it was blue like this, smog for the most part was more a whitish or grayish haze..."

How many beyond historians can even name major battles that occurred 300 years ago? 300 years ago, it was still considered perfectly masculine and socially acceptable for a man to wear tights and a powdered wig (I think or was that in the mid 1750s?).

I think the scars of the Twilight War would be about changes in ideas where the ideas and thinking have shifted, but hardly anyone really remembers why they changed (or would care even if they did). Like the I attribute the "socialist nanny states" of 2300 actually to be a response to the Twilight War - after the abject failure of all governments to help their citizens at the end of that war, people have it in their heads a government that doesn't do a lot for its citizens (ie; isn't visible in day to day life) isn't a government worth having. They're willing to pay high taxes and lowered privacy for this kind of security. Another factor might be large families. While 2300's Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook takes it as canon that family sizes are shrinking, it's entirely possible that governments see nothing wrong with large families after the severe depopulation of the Twilight War - generous government subsidies, tax breaks, and easy access to family counseling (it might even be required - something unthinkable to us today, but maybe it's required that every family go to a counselor every week and discuss things to have an outsider look at family disputes that would normally fester into abuse or divorce) might encourage large families and keep them together. After all - even if there's not enough room on Earth, there's always the colonies to ship people off to.

Oh, and that pesky Kafer War killing people, that is.

 

[Anders]

Another factor about the Twilight war was that the nuclear strikes were not entirely unexpected, at least if we follow the Twilight 2000 history. The use of nukes gradually escalated from tactical strikes to strategic and from just at the front to further away over the span of weeks and months. While the final exchanges may have been a nasty surprise to many people far away from the battlezone (like in the continental US) in places like the UK the possibility was clear a long while before. That in turn suggests that a many key cultural treasures were moved away from likely primary targets. Many people also prepared or did move away from what was thought to be risky places ("We're staying at mum's place in North Hinksey until the worst is over"). The main exception was of course the already war-ravaged parts of central europe where it was not possible to move easily.

I would expect the Twilight war to have temporarily broken the global trend towards urbanisation and led to a temporary return to the countryside. But once the rebuilding was finished it is likely that the urbanisation got much stronger, and there were many smaller places turned into ghost towns or bulldozed. People might want to remember some particular places, but the ugly concrete boxes of hastily built refugee housing (filled with bad memories and unsanitary conditions) were torn down quickly.

I think it was Waldemar who remarked to me that one of the big sociolgical shifts due to the war was a persistent fear of marauders. This helped shape the post-war nations: the prime purpose of the government is to protect the citizens from marauder bands (and presumably nasty splits in the government too).

The Twilight war would likely remain in public memory somewhat stronger than things like the Napoleonic wars, simply because it completely wrecked most of the old societies, uprooted nearly all people in the affected areas and left visible reminders in many places (people are likely still occasionally finding rusty old NATO and Warzaw pact tanks in the strangest places across Europe). Not even WWII changed society as much. Even if people did not want to remember it and during much of the reconstruction it was just "the War" - too big to think about - elements from it, like the family founder's great escape from New America or that great-greatgrandmother once ruled over the free state of North Hinksey, would be strongly remembered. Many historical, administrative and statistical documents will have a big gap around the war, mutely reminding the viewer how much data was lost.

 

[BMonnery]

True, but this is 300 years on. We have some events in history that, whilst not quite as devastating, were pretty lethal. The Black Death is an example.

However in this case, some countries suffered over 90% civilian casualties in the space of a decade (specifically the US, which suffered at least 93% casualties by 2001). The major killers weren't nuclear blasts though, it was the simple breakdown of modern society.

For a well researched series on this event, we could look to SM Stirling's "Dies The Fire" series, where modern technology ceases to work (due to the Nantucket incident, see his Island in the Sea of Time). The world simply dies, it can't fed itself and can't cope with the reemergence of disease.

In T2K most of the developed world will die unless it manages to keep itself above an operational threshold. These little pieces of civilisation tend to be small enclaves, with the major exceptions of France, Southern England and a fragment of Japan. Even places never nuked are going to see their populations nosedive as they fail to fed themselves, can't distribute goods and have no medical services.

It's this die-off rather than the war itself that will leave scars I think. The torchbearers of civilisation, France, England and Japan, retain petrol economies, industries etc. and will pull themselves out in a matter of decades. In other parts of the world recovery goes on into the 22nd century (for example, it takes over 150 years for a polity of "Australia" to reemerge, well they lost a third of their population in a morning. This "Australia" almost certainly has no real connection with modern Australia at all. Recovery projects are still occuring there.)

Stirling worked out what regions could sustain ISTR: See http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=58347

 

[Anders]

I think the key question is what regions can maintain organisation, either as governments, smaller political units or through a strong civil society. In a disaster societies revert to a less complex form. Lower levels of complexity cannot support as big economy, hence there will be scarcities - and if they get really bad society breaks down even further. But even with severe fuel scarcity a society with a reasonable level of cohesion and organisation can allocate resources to limp along. It might take a long while to get enough surplus to start progress again, but it is doable.

For example, I would expect TW-era Sweden to have turned into a fairly tight social democrat command-economy aimed at national survival, focusing the limited fuel resources on farming and the remaining electricity resources for industries. Probably some interesting political games with the neighbours (that in the end led to the Scandinavian Union), some ruthless realpolitik about keeping refugees out, and a growing collaboration with the French and British. While I can imagine a return to 1930's mortalities for a number of years it would not be an enormous die-off like in the US.

This is what I think is the secret of the regions that made it through well: they could maintain their societal complexity (France, South America) or deliberately temporarily reduce it (Sweden). Hmm, this might be quite applicable to the French Arm in the Kafer war too.

BTW, a small plug for people who like thinking about TEOTWAWKI: we are running a conference in July about global catastrophic threats here in Oxford. Everything from nuclear wars to nasty superintelligences to bird flu.

 

[BMonnery]

Besides the disruption of the Soviet, NATO and Swedish armies fighting their little war, Sweden loses its fuel supplies.

Norrland is going to die, probably frozen. Svealand has enough of a population density that the resurgent disease environment will rip through the area (especilly as, unlike mainland Europe or Britain, no one burned out the disease centres with nukes*)

The southern coastal strips of Goetaland may well survive reasonably intact (by which I mean ca 50% mortality), they're far enough from Gothenburg and Stockholm to escape the worst of the death zones there, they have agriculture, large forests to burn and it's reasonably warm, although Malmoe is a disaster waiting to happen down there...



* A perverse phenonmemon may occur, that the nuking of major cities allows surrounding rural populations to continue to exist, while an unnuked major city will turn into a flood of humanity taking down the area within about 50 miles.

 

[Waldemar]

I think it was Waldemar who remarked to me that one of the big sociolgical shifts due to the war was a persistent fear of marauders. This helped shape the post-war nations: the prime purpose of the government is to protect the citizens from marauder bands (and presumably nasty splits in the government too).

The Twilight war would likely remain in public memory somewhat stronger than things like the Napoleonic wars, simply because it completely wrecked most of the old societies, uprooted nearly all people in the affected areas and left visible reminders in many places (people are likely still occasionally finding rusty old NATO and Warzaw pact tanks in the strangest places across Europe). Not even WWII changed society as much. Even if people did not want to remember it and during much of the reconstruction it was just "the War" - too big to think about - elements from it, like the family founder's great escape from New America or that great-greatgrandmother once ruled over the free state of North Hinksey, would be strongly remembered. Many historical, administrative and statistical documents will have a big gap around the war, mutely reminding the viewer how much data was lost.

Indeed, it is my opinion that the fear of the marauder is still quite present in 2320 AD's society. That is one of the things driving mistrust between the Core and the Frontier. The Frontier seem to have attitudes similar to the marauders of old times.

Another factor is of course how much weight you want to give GDW's canon in your adventures. Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook states quite clearly on page 7 that one of the predominant cultural traits of society is a nostalgia for pre-WWIII 20th century. If I remember correctly, Rotten to the Core even stated that a street gang in Libreville directly copied the outfits of a WWIII rag-tag marauding army unit.

Correction: the Corpsmen on page 37 did not only contain outfits from WWIII, but also from other eras.

The most visible physical scars of the Twilight War are most probably in the huge changes of India and China, of even completely abonadoned megacities.

 

[Anders]

Lack of fuel would be the big problem, although assuming a divergence in the late 80's and a long runup to the nuclear exchanges would mean the old enormous emergency oil stockpiles would have been topped up (there are some pretty impressive underground cistern complexes scattered around Sweden). How many of the hydropower plants and nuclear power stations work is anybody's guess, since there is no canon material about it (neutral country, but could possibly be sabotaged by NATO or Warzaw forces if they thought the other side might use them).

Norrland would not be a very nice place in the winter, but it is survivable if emergency preparations have been made - and that is very likely. The kind of escalation TW2000 implies seems to be just the thing the 80's civil defense plans of Sweden were built to handle.

The assumption of starving hordes escaping from the cities only works if there is a sudden loss of all infrastructure and cohesion, which is unlikely both in the TW scenario and based on real experience in disaster areas. Stirling's assumptions do not work here. He set them up to make a good story, not to examine real infrastructure vulnerabilities.

 

[BMonnery]

Lack of fuel would be the big problem, although assuming a divergence in the late 80's and a long runup to the nuclear exchanges would mean the old enormous emergency oil stockpiles would have been topped up (there are some pretty impressive underground cistern complexes scattered around Sweden). How many of the hydropower plants and nuclear power stations work is anybody's guess, since there is no canon material about it (neutral country, but could possibly be sabotaged by NATO or Warzaw forces if they thought the other side might use them).

Norrland would not be a very nice place in the winter, but it is survivable if emergency preparations have been made - and that is very likely. The kind of escalation TW2000 implies seems to be just the thing the 80's civil defense plans of Sweden were built to handle.

The assumption of starving hordes escaping from the cities only works if there is a sudden loss of all infrastructure and cohesion, which is unlikely both in the TW scenario and based on real experience in disaster areas. Stirling's assumptions do not work here. He set them up to make a good story, not to examine real infrastructure vulnerabilities.

The fuel stops very suddenly. The soviets made a very sudden nuclear offensive against the fuel infrastructure of the western world (not limiting themselves to enemy nations, they nuked everyones oil infrastructure). The nuclear exchange is comparitively long at about two weeks (late November-early December 1997), about a year after NATO mobilisation. During the winter of 1997-8 nations start falling apart.

While in the year leading upto the exchange would allow for considerable preparation, unless the population has been dispersed already major cities will suffer the fate of New York (which did run out of food and millions died).

 

[ben51]

I think the Twilight War has shaped the world in the same way that the fall of the Roman Empire shaped the ancient world. That is to say it brought about massive changes at every level. But I think the subsequent response would be different in each area.

Forgetting our real history for a minute, we have to look at what the world was like when T2K was written. This was pre-collapse of USSR, pre-EU, pre-9/11, pre-Iraq boondoogle and so how we view the world in 2008 is not a valid starting point for envisioning 2320AD.

My feeling is that Colin generalizes too much in regards to the Big Brother nanny-state being a global situation. Sure he mentions Azania as being basically survelliance free, but I think you would have an ideological bloc centered on America that would remain anti-suvelliance, pro-individualism and anti-big government. This makes sense from the context of America's long struggle against maruaders, New America and a second civil war. Gun rights would be untouchable and the idea that if you want something done you did it yourself would persist. America would be joined by Australia, Texas and Canada in having similar ideologies based largely on similar post-Twilight experiences.

This different view towards government/civil rights would be one reason that America took almost 300 years to end its isolationism. And also the lack of an oppressive central government could be the reason America's colonization effort has been comparably small as there was less psychological pressure forcing "individualists" to leave Earth.

For Americans the Twilight Scars are largely psychological. As for the physical scars I think the idea of an American megalopolis is down right silly. During the Twilight the cities were death traps. Survival meant self sufficiency. The nuked cities would have been left fallow to become preserves similar to Chernobyl is in OTL. Only a few historic regions like downtown Philly and DC would have been reclaimed the rest would have been picked clean of salvage and forgotten. By the time the nation had recovered these "dead-zones" would have become some of the most pristine wildernesses in the Nation. The new National Parks are the old Hit List.

Benjamin

 

[epicenter00]

ben51, that's a pretty interesting picture of North America, but I'm not so sure it would turn out that way. That's the fun of speculative futures, right?

Forgive me if I'm treading over previous ground - I think I may my mentioned some of this in past threads.

I believe that much like America today, the US would actually be softly split between people who want the comfort and security of a nanny-state and the rugged independent types as you suggest. I say softly because divisions like this are never as sharp as pundits and the media would suggest. For instance, a gun-toting rancher in Montana might be virulently against the Office of Domestic Security's ID chip initiative but he may certainly have a much softer view towards socialized healthcare, even going so far as to be willing to pay taxes for that especially if he is married or is taking care of his parents in their old age.

I'm not even sure the gun-toting individualist is going to survive the Twilight War with an untarnished image. Why? New America. NA sticks around for long time in the US, I personally think they last longer than they probably had any right to, but the survival of a white supremacist state in the US for so long has all sort of implications about the psyche of the United States. NA is based around various white supremacist groups as well as survivalists and militias, plus quite a few wealth white Americans who may not be consciously racist but certainly hedging their bets, especially when it looks like a nuclear war might be looming. NA loses its cohesion after losing its leader, but the enclaves survive for decades after the Twilight War's end. In 2300, there's mention that the US will never name a colony "New America" because of the scars of the long, bitter fight against NA. This is a bitter fight, and obviously NA isn't without its supporters - this isn't some genocidal regime of Khmer Rogue in the US - NA obviously has to strike a chord with a sufficient number of Americans who actively support NA's vision of the US or are sufficiently sympathetic to it to turn a blind eye. That NA counted amongst its supporters various groups of "gun-toting rugged individualists" is going to tarnish that particular image, I think.

 

[ben51]

epicenter - Well, given the discriptions of the New America organization per several T2K moduals I think that New America was closer to a nanny state than MilGov or CivGov. Also with the collapse everyone has become "a gun-toting individualist." I can't see how any sort of stigma would arise out of this. Even the survivalist groups would not be seen in a negative light as in this reality they were right!

Given that it took till 2020 for CivGov and MilGov to reunite, I think its safe to say that the immidate post-Twilight generation will be highly skeptical concerning the federal governments ability to provide any assurances let alone be trusted as a nanny state. Then it will be another 25 years until New America , based largely in the southern states (per Earth/Cybertech) is defeated. This statge is even referred to in canon as a civil war. I'm guessing that New America received outside support perhaps from Mexico and maybe even France in order to survive that long. As this is also an ideological war with NA cells throughout America there is no front line and armed citizens would remain at the forefront of this fight. It is easy to postulate that the Second Mexican-American War was a continuation of the post-Twilight struggle against NA and an attempt to punish Mexico for its persistent meddling.

With recovery occuring at slower pace than the rest of the world and over a century of armed conflict/recovery/citizen defense it is easy to invision America with a widly divergent domestic ideology from accepted global norms. This could also explain America's long isolation from world affairs and reluctance to enter into formal treaty arrangements.

Not to be argumentative but I just think that painting the entire world in such broad strokes makes Earth one of the least interesting planets in the entire game.

Benjamin