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#Post#: 248--------------------------------------------------
Fallout Lore - The Great War (Nuclear War)
By: Fluttershy Date: September 30, 2012, 4:47 am
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The Great War started and ended on Saturday, October 23, 2077
when nuclear weapons were launched by all the nuclear-capable
nations of the Fallout world (mainly from the United States,
China and the USSR). The exchange lasted for approximately two
hours, according to most survivors' accounts. Once the last
atomic bomb and nuclear warhead had fallen, the world fell into
the deep darkness of a nuclear holocaust.
The geopolitical situation that led to the outbreak of the
long-feared global nuclear war was prompted primarily by the
onset of a worldwide energy crisis when the supplies of
fossil-fuels, particularly petroleum, finally began to run out
by the year 2050. This energy crisis was in part the result of
the ever-increasing amounts of fossil-fuel required to power the
Fallout world's larger and less energy-efficient technologies
when compared with those of our own world, due to their failure
to develop miniaturized electronics and more advanced
manufacturing materials. The result of this energy crisis was an
increasing scramble by all of the advanced, industrialized
nations to secure the few remaining supplies of untapped
petroleum around the world. Ultimately, a series of military
conflicts driven by this hunger for natural resources consumed
the planet. The European Commonwealth had reacted to the rapid
raising of oil prices to unacceptably high levels by the Middle
East's oil-rich states in 2052 by unleashing military action in
that region of the world. This intervention ultimately resulted
in the destruction of the Israeli city of Tel Aviv in December
2053 by a terrorist nuclear device and a limited nuclear
exchange between the conflict's participants in 2054, the
world's first since 1945.
As the United Nations tried with little success to keep the
peace, many of that organization's member-states pulled out, and
within two months of the outbreak of what was soon called the
Resource Wars in 2052, the United Nations was disbanded. Next,
following the breakdown of trade talks and the unilateral
American exploitation of the world's last newly discovered
reserves of crude oil, the Chinese invaded Alaska in 2066 in
pursuit of the state's remaining oil reserves. The United States
ultimately annexed Canada in 2076 to ensure Canadian support for
its defense of the Alaskan front even as the American federal
government acted aggressively against its own citizens to
contain wartime rioting, anti-war civil disobedience and
military desertion. The United States retaliated against the
Chinese by launching its own costly invasion of the Chinese
mainland in 2074 to reduce Chinese pressure on the Alaskan
front. Despite initial costly setbacks, this strategy proved
successful and American forces liberated the Alaskan city of
Anchorage and forced the Chinese People's Liberation Army to
retreat entirely from American soil in January 2077. This
victory was largely won due to the more advanced military
technology developed by the United States during the conflict,
especially the deployment of Powered Infantry Armor. Many
smaller nations went bankrupt in the ensuing conflict as their
economies collapsed due to the increasing shortage of
fossil-fuels. The Resource Wars ended with the Great War in
2077.
It is not known who launched the first nuclear weapon that
precipitated the conflict. President Richardson would tell the
Chosen One that China launched first, but he is hardly an
objective source of information. Leftover log entries within
Black Mountain Radio would also seem to imply the initial
launches were by China, with the United States retaliating in
only a handful of minutes.
The nuclear exchange that characterized the Great War lasted for
only a brief two hours, but was unbelievably destructive and
reshaped the climate of the world even as it caused the fall of
most of human civilization everywhere across the globe. More
energy was released in the first moments of the Great War than
all of the previous human conflicts in the history of the world
combined. Entire mountain ranges were created as the ground
buckled and moved under the strain of the cataclysmic pressure
produced by numerous, concentrated atomic explosions. Rivers and
oceans around the world were contaminated with the resulting
radioactive fallout released by the relatively low-yield nuclear
weapons used by all sides, and the climate changed horrifically.
All the regions of the Earth suffered from a single, permanent
season once the initial dust blasted into the atmosphere by the
nuclear explosions had settled - a scorching, radioactive desert
summer.
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