For All Time Pt. 101
January-March 1967

-As American airstrikes from the two carrier groups off Mar Del Plata destroy
several apparant Argentine munitions plants, the fallout from the destruction
of Buenos Aires spreads far beyond the mere cloud of dust and gas and radiation
that falls all along the mouth of the Rio Plata. 

President Barry Goldwater is one of the millions of people who watch the
television broadcasts from shattered Buenos Aires; Guevara's decision to get a
lot of the state-owned media out of the city just before the big day has paid
off big. It is the first televised nuclear blast; and though the melted remains
of Santiago and Valapriso fight with Buenos Aires for ratings...well, hell, you
expect that from Communists. _Americans_ did this. 

There will be no more civilian bombings in the Goldwater administration,
nuclear or otherwise. If innocent people are hurt in attacks on military
targets, well, that's just too bad, but there will be no more Buenos Aires', at
least in his administration. 

Beyond that, of course, there's the problem of the military. The occupation of
Argentina, the reconstruction of Argentina _and_ Chile (where the Argentine
army's fervor seems quite unabated), and the elimination of the Communist
threat in South America is going to take more men than the United States'
relatively small Army and Marine Corps, and Goldwater (a volunteer veteran of
World War II) is thoroughly opposed to the draft. 

Cooperation with Venezuela is possible, and negotiations are already underway
between Ambassador Mackall and the Delgado government; but there will be
problems with that; Venezuela's neighbors already view her as imperialist and a
tool of the Americans, and this just won't help matters. The key is Brazil, and
Goldwater's rather reluctant promise to help fund their war effort gets the
government of Emílio Garrastazú Médici on their side. 

Their various moblizations will take a while, though, (too, Venezuela will need
American sealift to actually get their troops to Argentina, and Medici is, not
unreasonably, worried about a Communist uprising against his own government.)
and so it will be Americans (specifically the 101st Airborne, the only
significant airborne unit in the Army) who are the first in Argentina, on
January 7, 1967.

-Most of South and Central America's Communist parties go, well, nuts.
Kaganovich-Suslov era cutbacks have made the Communist parties of most
developing countries quite strongly Maoist, and those parties are quite
understandably appalled at the attack on their ideological comrade-in-arms.
(Chile was, of course, necessary.) Ernesto Guevara's very public radio and
television broadcasts from the region around Salta don't help matters much. 

A few, a valient few, abjure the Argentines; sure, imperialism is regrettable
and awful, especially when it involves killing hundreds of thousands of people,
and Yankee go home and all that...but there's nothing at all in Marx or Mao
that talks about blowing your neighbors to Hell and gone. 

Publically, the Liberation Party of Mexico is one of these stalwart few. (the
others most prominent are, rather unsurprisingly, the various leftist parties
in Chile.) Privately...granted, the PRI isn't as brutal as the various South
American dictators, but they all saw what Medici did to his Communists when
they celebrated publically. Better to wait for it. 

-In Europe, no one's that interested; Enoch Powell strongly considers offering
assistance to the United States; the Falklands are right there, after all, but
in the end refuses. If the Americans are going to sit idly by while Great
Britain fights her war in Guina (much less cozy up to the Venezuelans), well,
they can fight their own war. 

Maurice Challe is busy stamping out the last remnants of Provencal
nationalists, and thus has no time for Americans and their little colonial
engagements. The war isn't going that well for the central French government,
they've thoroughly dealt with the Provencalists and the Norman rebels, but the
Basques are proving a difficult nut to crack for both themselves and their
Spanish ally. 

As for Brittany, Alsace, and the Saar, well, the less said the better.
Fortunately, they have General Bokassa in Corsica to keep things under wraps
there. And, after all, he is a black African, and what's the risk of a
foriegner associated with Corsica? 

For All Time Pt. 102
April-August 1967

-Alexander Haig, supreme commander of the American occupation forces, arrives
in La Plata (the nearest major city to Buenos Aires) on April 2, 1967, and soon
finds himself with a combat command. Much of Argentina's farmers are armed,
nationalist, and eager for revenge against the people who slew a whole city.
(Many aren't, of course, but Guevara swung more people to his side in a day
than he did through his whole rule in power.) 

As the Americans under Haig move into their primary occupation zone south and
west of the Parana, a variety of rather forgotten campaigns begin; the
Brazilian "peace-keeping" occupation (at the quasi-request of the Montevideo
government, affected badly by leftist riots and the Buenos Aires dust-cloud) of
Uruguay, the naval/Marine "assistance" occupation of Chile under the overall
command of Admiral John Sidney McCain Jr., and, of course, the infamous Treaty
of Managua. (though that won't take effect for a while.) 

-As Mexico's more vocal and leftist students (the ones that rallied in support
of their Argentinian friends) are thoroughly and rather violently crushed by
the duo of President Antonio Ortiz Mena and his Security Minister Gustavo Diaz
Ordaz, the two find themselves growing close indeed. Ortiz had favored naming
his Foriegn Minister as his successor, but Diaz now seems a far better
candidate. 

The US doesn't care _that_ much; Mexican-American relations are important to
both Goldwater and Ortiz, and they're both in favor of taking care of
Communists, especially ones rioting against the United States. Meanwhile, the
surviving students head elsewhere, mostly south, Guerreo and Oaxaca, Chiapas
and the Yucatan, provinces that most people in North America, much less the
Mexican or American governments (even Ambassador Maurer) just don't think
about, except as a source of peasants. It's just after the fifth of May,
somewhere in Chiapas, when Cesar and Fernando Yanez meet *Emiliano Pena.

-The Soviet Union is not a particularly friendly nation to non-Russians.
Outright discrimination is, of course, banned, but the vast majority of high
officials in the Party, the government, and military are Russians, and a
majority of the remainder are at least Slavs. 

Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny is one of the second; the former engineer recieved
his post as Science Minister to satisfy the "Ukrainian faction" of Ukrainian
Party head Leonid Brezhnev and industry head Kosygin. In the months since the
space-borne American attack on Buenos Aires, though, Podgorny has turned a
previously minor post into a tower of Soviet efficiency.

General Secretary Suslov's attention is on more theoretical matters; directing
Soviet troops in the field in the People's Republic of Sudan, regulating the
media and literature, and enhancing Soviet industry. Still, Podgorny's plan
appeals to him; where the capitalist Americans can only build orbital bombers,
a temporary presence in space to match a temporary ideology. 

When the Soviet Union is truly ready to move into space (probably around 1970),
they will stay there, and they'll have the power to strike from space just as
well as the Americans, but all the time, and the irony is, they'll be using
technology mostly discarded in the past thirty years. 

-As the summer goes on, General Jean-Bedel Bokassa (along with a coterie of his
most prized officers) is transferred to Alsace; it is one of the most
rebellious regions of France, and Maurice Challe wants the man who kept Corsica
in the government's hands to fight in Metropolitan France. 

Within a few weeks of his arrival in war-torn Strasbourg, a variety of things
happen in very short order. Bokassa marries his long-time paramour Josephine, a
minor Bonaparte cousin, and adopts her son as his own. And Corsica rebels,
within the space of a single day (August 3, 1967), high-ranking officers in the
police and garrison are assasinated, the civilian governer declares
independance, and suddenly French power on the island is on the run. 

As the bodies of Alsatian rebels are stacked like cordwood, people throughout
France begin speaking Bokassa's name, and it's not all together unpositive...

For All Time Pt. 103
September-December 1967

-Far to the north of most of the world, in frozen, isolated Kane Basin,
tensions are growing. Both Canada and the Nordic Council have been exerting
their muscles in the Third World, seeking to form a non-aligned bloc of
nations, relatively neutral in the various struggles between China and the
CPSD, the US and Western Europe. Both have their friends in East Africa;
Canada's alliance with Ethiopia drove Somalia into the arms of the northerners
by the end of 1966. 

(Tiny Djibouti's membership in the Jerusalem League went almost unnoticed.) 

Only in the north, though, do the two powers come close to bordering; along the
long coastline of Danish Greenland and Canada's Northwest Territories,
seperated by the Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, and sundry other bodies of water
home mostly to bergs and pack ice and hardy sea life, and it is here that the
drama plays out. 

Almost daily, Canadians slip across the narrow, ice-choked water to spy on the
Danish/Nordic installations in Inglefield Land, while Scandanavian teams do the
same to the Canadian base at Alert. Casualties are relatively high in the
frozen waters and incredible isolation, causes vary from bullets of attentive
guards to a near-instant death after falling in the sea, to even an alleged
polar bear attack. 
 
For Joseph Smallwood and the Nordic Council, it's not a very good situation,
especially for Smallwood; Canada's economy continues to struggle, and the
partial collapse of the Progressive Conservatives hasn't actually added much to
Liberal power; the ex-followers of Dalton Camp have joined the party of their
coalition partners. The Social Credit Party. 

-Reluctantly and quietly, President Goldwater authorizes lowering the
recruitment standards for US Army officers; combat in Argentina is proving to
be a disturbing experience, with surprisingly high casualties all around.
Guevara's urban power base, of course, is still a problem, and not a night goes
by in American city barracks where some local doesn't make a try for the
place(s). 

In the countryside, though, things are _difficult_, there's nothing in
particular to differentiate a convoy of pickup trucks driven by Argentine
farmers and carrying their harvest and a convoy carrying Argentine farmers and
a variety of small and medium arms, from rifles to machine guns to grenades,
and enough mistakes have been made either way to cost a lot of lives. 

There's an end to the road in sight, a new government centered around the
former minister of health, it's just the end is so very, very far away in the
hot Southern Hemisphere summer of 1967. Meanwhile, Venezuela occupies El
Salvador and her slice of Argentina; in the south, down to Tierra del Fuego. 

-On September 2, 1967, Brazil detonates an atomic bomb at a facility deep
within the Amazon jungle. Now there are five American nations with nuclear
weapons, three of them occupying a fifth, along with sundry other areas in
Latin America. To combat anti-imperialist (and possible Communist) sentiment in
the rest of the continent, the US calls a conference in Havana. If the smaller
nations object to the behavior of the larger ones, well, they'll just get them
in on the action. Representatives from all over the continent come, even Joseph
Smallwood gets in on the action. 

The United Peacekeeping Council that emerges at the end of December is a
two-assemblied body; all member nations are in the General Council with the
five nuclear powers, Argentina (the reconstruction government), Brazil, Canada,
Venezuela, and the United States in the Security Council. Perhaps not
unexpectedly, the Security Council has most of the power, controlling budgets
and the like. The primary power of the General Council is to call for
"peacekeeping occupation" of member nations suffering from revolts and such. 

-In Dusseldorf, Westphalia, on November 19, 1967, President Reinhard Gehlen
keels over dead at his desk sometime after sunset. Paranoid, with an
ever-changing schedule, Gehlen was such an enigma to even his own inner circle
that no one finds him missing until the next morning. 

In the subsequent dustup, several high-ranking officials die, several dozen
find themselves in various prisons, and a hundred or so board flights to a nice
safe place, most Prio's neutral Cuba, some to Venezuela. When the month or so
of struggle and feuding is up, Westphalia has a new President, the former
commander of the Essen garrison, and he has a remarkable proposal for the Prime
Minister of the Palatinate. (and, by extension, the members of the United
Peacekeeping Council.) 

The free German people have been seperated for far too long, and it's time they
came together in this time of European crisis. A week after President-Colonel
Paul Stütze makes that particular invitation, Westphalia detonates her first 
atomic bomb on December 2, 1967. 

For All Time Pt. 104
January-April 1968

-As the body count of the French Civil War approaches one million, Maurice
Challe is faced with a disintegrating state. There have been successes for the
central government, many of them, but there have been just as many outright
defeats, and a sound defeat always has more of an impact than a blood-soaked
victory. 

Alsace, Provence, Languedoc and Normandy are firmly under the Parisian thumb,
nationalism there has been crushed by the expedient of public executions of
rebel leaders, rebel soldiers, rebel sympathizers, and all their families,
death tolls are high and tens of thousands of troops died, but they were
_successful_, by God. The Basque country is a little more difficult, but
Spanish assistance has mostly done for the Basques as well. 

Things are more difficult in Gascony and Savoy; central government troops
occupy most of the region, but outright fighting is still actually going on,
and it's not going well. (Especially in Savoy, where the Swiss are making
millions as arms dealers, trading German arms for Savoy gold, and where
hundreds of Italian "advisors" slip across the border from the Social Republic
of Italy.) 

In Brittany, the Saar, and  Corsica, casualties are surprisingly low, but
that's mostly because there aren't any Loyalist troops in any of the tree,
outside of those living a fugitive or bandit existence. The provisional
governments, located for the moment at Brest (because that's where supplies
were arriving from the west), Saarbrucken, and  Ajaccio, respectively, are
already printing their own currency, much less manning their own army and navy.
It will take a miracle to win them back. 

Most people in France look to one man in particular for that, the
newly-appointed Defense Minister, Jean-Bedel Bokassa. (Maurice Challe's stock
remains highest in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; the pied noirs and retired
veterans there have long memories.) 

-Complicating matters in the Saar are events a few miles to the east; hundreds
of dignitaries from the governments of Westphalia, the Palatinate, and points
elsewhere, especially the US, are present in Aachen on March 1, 1968, when
Westphalian President Paul Stutze and Palatinate Prime Minister Willy Brandt (a
former refugee) sign the Treaty of German Federation. 

Presented pretty openly as a first step to unification, the treaty is
relatively honest about who's really in charge; most of the Palatinate's
government will resign immediately and their replacements be appointed by the
President of Westphalia, and while the two countries will keep seperate
military and police forces, the Palatinatian forces will work "in cooperation"
with Westphalia. 

There's a fair bit of dissatisfaction in the Palatinate over such matters; but
they're rather used to being the puppet of whoever's in charge by now. Besides,
the Treaty is only supposed to last for a few years. (Privately, of course,
Stutze is supplying arms to the Saar rebels, once the French war ends, _all_
the German people outside of Communism will be freed.) 

-Oddly enough, German reunification wasn't that much of an issue in the April
elections in Great Britain; both Enoch Powell and Harold Wilson are
uncomfortable at a dictatorship getting quite that much power, but both men
have had enough dealings with France for it not to be that much of an issue.
Too, both men like the idea of _some_ stable, non-Communist government in
Western continental Europe outside of Benelux. 

No one despite the Prime Minister himself is really quite surprised when Labour
wins a pretty fair-sized majority; Powell was elected on a tide of anti-Labour
discontent, and the economic prosperity he promised has yet to materialize.
Too, the man himself has a strong tendency to alienate certain key voting
groups, such as England, Scotland, and Wales. (Many attribute the dawn of
modern Scottish and Welsh nationalism to the Powell administration.) 

The only real surprise, after Prime Minister Wilson takes office, is the
subsequent leadership dispute in the Conservative Party; Powell's angry
resignation has left a big hole open, and the Party has a lot of stout young
bloods who want their own shot at greatness. To everyone's surprise, though,
the Party turned to a son of the lower middle-class, Edward Heath. This'd show
Wilson...

-Originally brought in as a mid-season replacement on ABC, a surprise hit of
early 1968 is _Star Wars_, a surprisingly well-done science fiction television
series by veteran television and movie writers Gene Roddenberry and Rod
Serling. The show doesn't even star big television names, only Jimmy Stewart
(clean and sober six years running) as Avon, the not-particularly-reformed
criminal, is likely to be familiar to viewing audiences. 

The show appeals to the young, in many ways because it's just so subversive.
Roddenberry's vision of seven resistance fighters led by the reasonably noble
Blake (Leonard Nimoy) campaigning against Servalan's (Chuck Heston) corrupt
Federation was sold as an allegory about the French Resistance during World War
II, but to a generation of young people raised on street violence and attempted
alteration of society, it's a story that means much more than that. 

(Making an occasional cameo is Edward D. Wood, with Jimmy Stewart's help he is
making the long, slow trip out of the bottle, but it will be quite some time
before he's ready to make a full-scale return to directing or acting.

For All Time Pt. 105
May-July 1968

-When it comes, it comes as a roar of jet engines. Maurice Challe has been
thinking a lot about his job security; in the twenty-three years since the end
of World War II, France has had three military dictators, and his two
predecessors died violently. (Though Darlan was a suicide.) Half his army wants
his job, the other half would probably like to join the rebels. 

He has the sea; the French Navy has been loyal to the central government since
Francois Darlan built them aircraft carriers, and just about every significant
settler colony in the Empire...but unfortunately, he seems to have less and
less of France every day. (The colonies are loyal for a variety of reasons; a
lot of veterans were settled in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and the army
abroad is largely "Great French."

Maurice Challe isn't a particularly compassionate man publically, the several
thousand dissidents executed during his nearly a decade in office could well
attest to that. But he has a wife and children, and comparing them mentally to
the _survivors_ of, say, Rennes or Marseilles isn't a pretty picture. After
months of preperation, suddenly the Presidential Palace is empty on the morning
of May 3, and Maurice Challe is on a flight across the Mediterreanean. 

The Fourth Republic is born on May 5, 1968, when a coterie of terrified
mid-to-low level civil servants meet in Paris to write a new Constitution.
(Most of their superiors are in Algiers.) By May 13, just about everyone is in
open rebellion; Challe's government in Algiers is calling for France to reunite
around his person to reconquer France, Jacques Massu in French West Africa is
skeptical of that whole enterprise, and even little Tahiti has petitioned the
CSO for help. 

By the end of July, Maurice Challe is alive, well, and in charge of more French
departments than most of his rivals. By the end of July, though, the Army of
the Alsace has taken Paris, and Jean-Bedel Bokassa is "negotiating" the future
of France. 

-It's hard to say which issue is bigger in the 1968 American presidential
campaign, the merrily spiralling inflation of the last few years, the ongoing
war in Argentina, or civil rights. President Goldwater isn't running for a
second term, but very few people are surprised at that; from "supporting
homosexuality" to the war in Argentina, Goldwater has made himself deeply
unpopular, despite the popularity of certain of his programs. 

(He has proven successful in one major area; whatever your opinion of the
various New Deals, it's a safe bet to say Barry Goldwater successfully
dismantled them. With the Tennessee Valley Authority sold to private
businesses, the Department of Energy's vast nuclear reactor network sold to the
states, and the national road system turned over to state and local
governments, the federal government has a great deal of cash on hand; the
question is what to do with it.) 

The Republicans, not unreasonably, follow the formula that won them their last
election. (Goldwater may be personally unpopular, but the G.O.P. itself is
doing just fine, thank you.) They select a Senator from a relatively small,
Western state, a hero of World War II, a patriot if he is nothing else; Joseph
Jacob Foss, former Governor and Senator from South Dakota. With the Democratic
Party in big, key Texas divided, Foss opts to try to split them right down the
middle, and takes former El Paso Mayor and Congressman Hal Warren as his
running mate. 

After another bitterly divided convention in Chicago (an increasingly familiar
pattern to party regulars) the Democrats finally settle on a bi-coastal ticket,
with California Senator Alan Cranston and New Jersey Governor William Brennan
heading the top and bottom, respectively. (Most comtemporary observers conclude
the convention spells an end to the political career of the Governor of
Pennsylvania; Jim Jones waged a bitter fight for both the Presidential and
Vice-Presidential nomination before storming off the convention floor in
disgust. Storming out of the hall with his wife Barbara in tow, Jones, having
already resigned his post in expectation of the nomination, returns to his
native Indiana to ferment.) 

For All Time Pt. 106 
August-October 1968

-The final settlement of the "French Question" will last into the 21st century,
but its broad strokes are settled through the last few days of August 1968. One
thing is certain; the world-bestriding empire of France is dead. Those places
not beset by colonial insurgencies are covered in "governments-in-exile" or
outright independance factions; while France herself has lost far too many
young men and women to think about reconquering them, even with nuclear
weapons. 

Of Metropolitian France; Brittany, the Saarland, and Corsica have their
independance, assistance from a foriegn power or oceans have proved sufficient
to overcome the population and industrial power of Francophone France, as it
were. (In early September, the President of the Saar Republic agrees to merge
with the Westphalia-Palatinate Federation in 1970, and all three agree to make
their very own state at the same time. Representatives from all three powers
meet in Dusseldorf under the watchful eye of the Westphalian government to
begin writing a constitution.) 

As for the relatively new states, only the fledgling Maghreb Federation
recieves a significant number of refugees/immigrants from the motherland. Of
the slightly less than forty million or so French, perhaps one million flee to
the new North African state by the end of the year. (As this is half the
existing pied noir population, the first challenge of the Challe government
will be to keep the nation from starving. Only the empty agricultural land left
over the expulsions of the 1940s and 1950s keeps the new nation from foundering
on a rock of starvation, death rates are very high even so.) 

Things are far less pleasant in French West Africa; facing poverty, revolts,
famine, and other such problems, the French garrisons in towns from Dakar to
Nouakchott, Niamey to Bamako, simply leave, departing en masse to join one of
the new French governments, or else just departing. Governed directly from
France, with as little local self-government as possible, the former colony
explodes into war like no other. 

(In the Pacific, Tahiti and her associated islands become the very first
"security zones" of the Collective Security Organization; with occupation by
CSO troops, mostly Peruvians and Ecuadorians, and beneficial trade packages,
it's even better than the Australian occupation of New Caledonia, and the CSO
is far less openly imperialist than the National Party government. Another
French possession, the former French Guinia, is the CSO's newest member in
October.) 

Of France's former colonies, only French Equatorial Africa and, oddly enough,
Madagascar, remain loyal to Paris. FEA is the birthplace of the new French head
of state, and a massive investment in the colony has kept it in Parisian hands.
Madagascar is rather loosely loyal, and there is a significant partisan
movement in the interior, but France's vast naval complex on the Indian Ocean
island will keep most of it in French hands, at least for the moment. 

In France herself, General Jean-Bedel Bokassa is crowned Emperor Jean-Bedel I.
There is no small resistance to this in France, a black African with Bokassa's
reputation for brutality has more enemies than friends, but there are many ways
to simply leave France, whether to Brittany, Corsica, or the Maghreb. For those
who stay and and won't stay quiet, Bokassa begins building a large facility in
northern Equatorial Africa, one of the largest and most secret prisons in the
western world. 

-The 1968  Wellington Olympics were relatively undistinguished by sports
standards; very few records were broken, very few great athletes performed at
their best, and the same American/Soviet/Western European complex won the same
number of medals they always have. 

In political matters, however, they were rather noticeable indeed; two Scottish
and one Welsh gold medal winners took the occasion to openly call for their
respective national independence, black American medalists raised their fists
in a black power salute, and France's athletic team just opted to settle in the
Antipodean state. 

-In Korea, Kim Il-Song takes his last tour of the Panmunjonn Complex. Decades
of work are getting very near to fruition; they've got it up to full-strength
now. Even dictators have humanity, though, and he spends most of the night of
October 19 pondering what they're doing. They are two years away from
completion, and two years from Korea ruling, if not the world, then at least
quite a bit of it. 

His stroke the next morning puts an end to such thoughts, though; after a few
months of recovery, he can speak, he can think, he has all the old fire and
power...but he does what Kim II-Jong suggests. And his son has no reservations
about ruling the world, not even a little bit.

For All Time Pt. 107
November 1968-February 1969

-With deep reluctance, Harold Wilson begins a slow pull-out from British
Guiana. It's exactly what Enoch Powell warned about during the election, but
Great Britan _needs_ troops, to quell the growing riots in Belfast, to hang
onto strategic Aden and oil-rich Nigeria. Promising independance by the middle
of 1969, Wilson begins the pull-out on November 2. 

(Outside of suddenly making Wilson's government rather shaky, the primary
effect of the pull-out is on Carlos Delgado; the dictator has known nothing but
success, and now he's stared down Great Britain and they've blinked. He's less
a leader now, and more a god.)

-Joseph Foss (the name he prefers) is elected America's 40th President on the
night of November 3, 1968, by a rather narrow margin. Most attribute his
victory to the post-Olympics wave of civil violence centered around the
returning "black power" American track team; while relatively minor in
comparison to the last few decades, the riots were enough to put the law and
order candidate into office. (Cranston had addressed rioters in Los Angeles as
"my friends", a gaffe that will haunt him until the end of his days.) 

Foss's support base is surprisingly large, though; military contractors like
the idea of a "four-ocean navy, air and space planes to rule the heavens, and
an army the envy of the world.", social libertarians agree with his
anti-government stance, and like his predecessor, he is oddly popular with most
radical movements, he just doesn't care about race or religion, and is pretty
open about it. 

(One proposal Foss rejects both in the transition to the new administration and
after his inauguration is a manned landing on the Moon; as much of a fan of PR
as the next man, the new President is thoroughly contemptous of using it in
military operations like space travel. The United States will build space
planes under his administration, and they'll build damn good ones.) 

-With his attention on the ongoing conflict in Argentina and the growing uproar
over his leaked order authorizing the bombing of "potentially non-civilian"
targets, President Foss barely takes the time to notice reports of the new
civil war in the Belgian Congo. Noting with some horror the chaos in the former
French West Africa, the Belgian government had moved to delay Congolese
independance indefinitely, a decision greeted with automatic weapons fire in
most of Belgium's last remaining colony. 

Even as deeply demoralized Belgian troops begin yet another round of rebel
supression, the Congo becomes a cauldron of war, with arms slipping across its
long border, from Sudan and the Soviets, from the East African Federation and
the Chinese, and even from the South Africans and French. 

As horror stories of the hell of war leak out into the rest of the world, most
people conclude that the unhappy Congo is truly the most unlucky nation on the
face of the Earth. 

-Meanwhile, France is suffering through a famine. With agriculture wrecked, the
economy destroyed, and infrastructure shattered, starvation is imminent, with
even Emperor Bokassa's inner circle suffering deprivation as the malnutrition
deaths begin. 

Bokassa has been planning for this day. It is grim, but these are the choices
forced on a man. Beginning in February, the first shipments of Equatorial Pork
arrive in France. Farmed by prisoners with a life sentence in the vast new
"Bokassa Prison" in what would have been Chad, the meat tastes odd, but it's
from a long ways off, after all, coming down a long single-track rail line from
the interior of the continent. 

Besides, for a people freezing in bombed-out houses or starving in cratered
fields, it's the finest meat they've ever tasted, and most people get the
cheaply prepared, cheaply sold meat as often as possible, and eat ravenously. 

For All Time Pt. 108
March 1969-May 1969

-On March 3, 1969, George Arthur Philip Charles, eldest son of Queen Elizabeth
II and the Duke of Edinburgh, Philip of Greece, leaves London on the royal
train. His destination is Wales, and more specifically, Caernarvon Castle.
George, Prince of Wales since his ninth birthday eleven years earlier, is to be
formally invested in that title on June 1 at Caernarvon. 

European royalty, by virtue of funds and social position, has been largely
insulated from Europe's shaky economy; even tiny Monaco had its lavish (and
rather scandalous) wedding of Prince Rainer to the American movie star Doris
Day. George, however, under pressure from his mother, has been learning Welsh,
visiting impoverished areas in Great Britain, and generally being one of the
most public twenty-year olds in Europe. 

Unfortunately, this has made George one of the most tempting targets in Europe
as well; the Irish have turned inward in a bitter secretarian struggle, and the
infant "Free Scotland" groups are a bit more peaceful than most, mostly
concentrating on cultural exchanges with the Republic of Brittany. 

As for Wales herself; the independence faction is a (relatively) small one,
mostly akin to OTL's Scotland around this time. But they've got good
recruiters, especially among Welsh veterans of "London's War" in Burma, and so
Meibion Glyndwr is actually larger and more professional than in OTL. 

And, for that matter, they've got better intelligence, and so they know the
Prince's exact route as he tours through Wales, making not particularly
inspiring speeches. On April 5, 1969, the royal train is crossing the Brittania
Bridge in north Wales, across the Menai Straits between Angelesy and the
mainland, when a Welsh nationalist nearby presses a button on his big radio
controller, detonating several hundred pounds of dynamite secreted in the
center of the bridge. 

The blast throws the locomotive off the tracks entirely, with it dragging most
of the front of the train under; the center of the train, with the royal car,
is shattered by the explosion, with the rear cars joining the span of the
bridge collapsing into the water. There are few survivors, perhaps 50 out of
several hundred on the train, and there are no survivors from the royal car.
(George was, in fact, killed in the initial blast.) 

Anti-Welsh riots rock the United Kingdom; George had been a popular young
prince, linked romantically to many beautiful young starlets and princesses,
and the televised statements of Meibion Glyndwr don't exactly help matters.
After Welsh counter-riots rock Anglo neighborhoods in Wales, Prime Minister
Harold Wilson bites the bullet and leans on the Cabinet to declare martial law,
sending in the troops on April 15, 1969.

Riots rock Wales through the rest of April and May, particularly in those areas
with populations that still identify themselves as Welsh; many
anti-independance people, many who have barely heard Welsh spoken, come out of
the closet as pro-Anglo mobs go out looking for anyone who might be connected
to "Poor Little Georgie." 

-Thousands of miles away, as President Foss extends his sympathies to the
United Kingdom in general and Queen Elizabeth in particular, Jean Moffit wins
yet another US Open, continuing her meteoric rise to the highest ranks of golf.
(And especially women's golf, millions of young girls want to grow up to be
just like Jean Moffit.) 

The United States watches another shipment of young men go south to the low
rumble of fighting in Argentina; virtually all of the regular Army and much of
the National Guard is deployed in the Southern Hemisphere. America's cities are
quiet, though, Foss is a firm opponent of the draft, and the sweetheart deals
he's offered to encourage enlistment are purely voluntary. 

-South of the Rio Grande, Lazaro Cardenas' meetings with the Yanez brothers
hasn't particularly satisfied any of the involved parties; Cardenas admires the
revolutionary zeal of the two younger men, but isn't about take part in any
revolution: he's too old and too settled to fight against a government that's
probably just going through a bad period. 

The Yanez brothers, meanwhile, are left with the problem of a quiet
proletariat; while the   growing authoritarian hand of the Ordaz government
(not to mention its foriegn policy failures vis a vis the US, Venezuela, and
the CSO), has made it unpopular in Mexico, they're not nearly unpopular enough
for outright rebellion, even among the least fortunate sections of society.
They've built a respectable revolutionary force in the mountains of Guerrero
and elsewhere (or at least their ally Emil Pena has), but they want to do more
with it than blow up government buildings and kill some "PRI fascists." But
they just don't have a way to appeal to the peasants, the people, the common
people. 

On April 30, the Yanez brothers leave the former President for the last time;
in the end, loyalty to the system he helped create (and its undoubtable merits)
is stronger than any urge for a murky, dangerous, not terribly worthwhile
revolution. Minutes later, PRI troops burst in; normally they would be
respectful of the revered retired politician, but they've got good information
that the worst leaders of Mexico's leftist movement are right there, now, and
someone fires a shot...

On May 1, 1969, Mexico goes quite mad.

For All Time Pt. 109
May-July 1969

-There are a lot of new, not particularly stable states in the former French
West Africa, most of them kleptocracies with varying degrees of democracy, real
and faux. Through the summer of 1969, most sign treaties of alliance with the
French Empire; France herself is relatively unpopular, but Jean-Bedel Bokassa
is a popular man in West Africa, many people are secretly proud of the local
boy made good, even if he is from the wrong tribe. 

One of the key ingredients of the West African Pact; outside of mutual defense
and such, is the status of political prisoners; all of the states involved have
quite a few. France nobly volunteers to shoulder the burden of those tens of
thousands of prisoners, intelligentsia, and uppity members of the wrong tribe,
delivering them to the Equatorial prisons. 

Meanwhile, shipments of Equatorial Meat, one of the fastest-growing companies
in the French Empire, are distributed all through France; it isn't much, but
it's enough, and the stuff sells like hot cakes. (A small but steady number of
French Army officers, mostly those with African posts, commit suicide every
month. Many of the survivors are posted there permanently.) 

-Struggling Belgium finds itself facing a significant Flemish revolt; the
government had expressed support for Wilson's occupation of Wales; and the
Flemish inhabitants of Belgium see an all too real possibility, that their own
government might emulate the "oppression" in Wales, but without even the excuse
of the assasination of a prince. (Prince Alexander has been invested in the
title of Prince of Wales in an undisclosed location in London.) 

Fighting a guerilla war in the Congo already, the Belgian government buckles
down to another round of battle, this time in her own borders. The officer
class, meanwhile, isn't exactly contented with the way the nation's being run,
but they've got their own solutions to that particular problem. 

Karl Marx.

-1969 is a summer of horrors in Mexico, horrors inflicted on the people by the
government and on the government by the rebels. An increasingly paranoid Diaz
Ordaz calls out the Army to repress the riots that the funeral services for
Lazaro Cardenas soon turn into; and while many units obey orders, and some put
down the riots without bloodshed, many don't. 

While few units defect, many soldiers and more than a few officers join the
rebels, and of course the survivors of various massacres join the Yanezs and
Pena in the mountains. The Maoists are, of course, brutal in their own turn;
respected judges, authors, and journalists that criticize the rebels are
assasinated, often by car bomb, and it's...well, it's not good to be in those
few provinces where the rebels are in majority. 

As the death toll mounts, Ordaz strongly debates calling on the CSO for help;
it would certainly help put down the rebels, but calling on the CSO (the
Americans, essentially) would seal his fate and reputation forever more, not to
mention its effects on American nationalism. 

The US itself, of course, watches Mexico quite anxiously, but there doesn't
seem to be that much of a threat; the Maoists are relatively weak in provinces
that border the United States, and one of the first things the Mexican
government does is guard all those American investments in Sonora and points
elsewhere. 

Until July 20, 1969, when a man dressed as a waiter walks into an Acapulco
hotel lobby packed with Americans, cries out "Death to Yankees", and opens fire
with an automatic pistol. He gets through two magazines before police sniper
fire brings him down; twenty Americans are dead. 

As anti-Mexican riots explode through the United States, President Foss sends
stern instructions to Ambassador Maurer and, to his own disgust, asks Congress
for a national draft. After several hours of violent argument, Ambassador Leon
Maurer leaves Diaz Ordaz with a paper calling for CSO security troops to assist
Mexico's, just as Joe Foss goes on national television...

For All Time Pt. 110 
August-October 1969

-With anti-Mexican riots sweeping the country and Mexico's invitation to send
in security troops, President Foss's renewal of the draft isn't so much a
choice as it is a necessity. Still, isolationism is a moderately strong
sentiment in Congress, crystallized by the formation of the CSO, and President
Foss is forced to agree to a variety of special favors by various influential
politicians, most especially Alabama Senator Asa Carter, who is allowed to pick
the new head of the FBI. 

As the draft bill quickly passes, Foss, always more comfortable with foriegn
affairs than domestic, opts to deploy those forces on hand into Mexico.
Slipping across the border and leaving Gulf ports, the mostly National Guard
troops will leave an indelible mark on the Southwest especially; armed soldiers
marching right around the riot-torn cities of Texas, Arizonia, New Mexico, and
California. 

For there are riots, in towns from San Antonio to El Paso to Santa Fe to Los
Angeles, long-simmering racial sentiment turns sharply on the "Red Commie
Greasers", and white mobs charge into Mexican-American neighborhoods to work
mayhem. In the way of such things, the attacks turn on other Hispanic groups,
especially the Puerto Ricans, and thus the wildfire spreads; in New York,
Boston, and Philadelphia, sympathy marches by black and Hispanic groups turn to
riots in a pattern all too familiar to FaT's America as "law and order"
organizations turn out in record numbers.

Except that now; there really aren't any troops, and won't be for some weeks;
in that grim late summer of 1969, there's very little the always over-worked
police in America's urban areas can do but hold their ground. With their cities
in peril, many young men of all colors and creeds do the only sensible thing: 

They join race-based militia groups and go out to keep down the damn bastards,
the definition of such varying from group to group. A new generation of leaders
is beginning to emerge; while old veterans like Meir Kahane, James Meredith,
and Henry Gonzales remain in power, young faces like Chicago's Bill W.
Rodham[FN1], Washington State's Edward Abbey, and Houston's Slim Pickens make
the news for the very first time. 

By the beginning of October, American troops, with long experience in urban
areas, are deployed to Mexican cities all throughout the north and east, and
fighting alongside their Mexican comrades. There's little oversight in Tampico,
and conduct unthinkable in the US is encouraged by a more pragmatic security
apparatus.

-In Wales, as riots continue to sweep places as diverse as Cardiff, Holyhead,
Aberystwyth, and Blaenau Ffestiniog, Prime Minister Harold Wilson bites the
bullet and orders internment of suspected terrorists. He's deeply uncomfortable
with it, it feels like a Conservative thing to do, but the assasins of Prince
George remain uncaught, and the press continues to report every pro-Welsh march
as a den of sympathizers and terrorists, not to mention what they say about
actual riots where actual people die. 

-On October 1, 1969, Joseph Smallwood's reign comes to an end. An autocrat, a
socialist, and a chocolate magnate, his career as Prime Minister has been
marked by lows of incredible unpopularity and highs of massive devotion;
federal interference in a land dispute in Quebec between the Mohawk tribe and
the small town of Oka proved the last straw and pulled his last low down a
little too far. 

Canada's new Prime Minister is a deeply religious Albertan; a man whose career
has spanned Mayor of Calgary, Premier of Alberta, Diefenbaker's Fisheries
Minister, and nearly two decades as Member for Calgary. 

His name is Ernest Manning, and he is Canada's very first Social Credit Party
Prime Minister. Almost immediately, he finds himself embroiled in a quiet
border crisis, the Scandanavian nuclear icebreaker Malmo has taken up position
in southern Baffin Bay, glowering mightily amid a vast field of ice. The size
of a WWII battleship, spy planes have seen what looks very much like a giant
cannon on the bow; perhaps their worries about the Nordic Council's hiring of
South African ex-patriate Gerald Bull were correct. 

Manning dispatches Canada's only nuclear submarine, the Vancouver, quietly
armed with nuclear torpedoes, to keep a watchful eye on the big Malmo as she
steams about the ice-ridden waters of the North. At the same time, observers
note a sharp increase in border incidents along the Ethiopian-Somali borders. 

[FN1]-The son of a traveling salesman named William Blythe, Bill Rodham moved
with his family to Chicago in 1948, where his father abandoned the family. His
mother Virginia, left with a small son in a strange city, married a grocer
named Hugh Rodham, with a daughter near to her son's age. 

For All Time Pt. 111
November 1969-February 1970

-November 10, 1969 dawns like any other day for the men of the Louisiana
National Guard posted around the Liberty Place Monument in New Orleans. New
Orleans has been one of the more "exciting" places in the disorders of the last
few months; its diverse racial makeup has made for a thousand ingredients of
pain, a gumbo of riots and counter-riots. Perhaps five hundred people have died
on both sides since the beginning of the troubles in July. 

Still, Liberty Place, one of the few monuments in the United States to openly
triumph white supremacy's victory in Reconstruction, has been oddly quiet
beyond a few (easily repulsed) attempts at vandalism. The only item of interest
today is a newscrew from distant Dallas and a Time photographer, both of whom
recieved an anonymous tip to visit the Monument today. 

There are few veterans among the Lousiana soldiers, even regular National
Guardsmen are few and far between, most are fighting in Guerrero and other
distant parts of Mexico (not to mention Argentina) alongside Venezuelans and
Brazilians, and so no one has quite picked up on the significance of this.
Bored, relaxed, most of the men have spent the day smoking, drinking coffee, or
chatting with the amiable Texan newsman Dan Rather. 

At noon, a crowd begins to gather in the square opposite the monument, and the
tension begins to grow. The National Guardsmen, many of them in the service
only a few weeks, nervously check their rifles and ammunition, the newsmen roll
their cameras and the photographer begins snapping a few pictures. 

This crowd is small, though, and oddly quiet, many of them only in white robes.
More than a few are amused by the resemblance to WCC-VC members occasionally
seen roaming the streets, taking a shot at rioters and looters, but the
amusement doesn't last for long. 

At 1 PM, three young black men, all of them in those same white, pure robes,
step from the seething mass of the crowd, again, eerily, almost completely
quiet. One young man, standing a little apart from his two fellows, cries, "And
as we are burned and pilloried by the white man, so we burn ourselves to shame
him!" 

The National Guardsmen just have time to smell gasoline before the three young
men strike a match and immolate themselves. The pictures are carried out on the
national media, almost live, and are on the cover of Time the next week. 

-With the immolation of the "Children of God" in New Orleans, the disorders in
the United States grow worse and worse, taking on a new undertone of violence.
On December 3, a young Mexican emigre walks into a Protestant church in Houston
and detonates ten pounds of dynamite and nails under his shirt. Two dozen die.
On December 13, a crowd of Anglos surrounds an isolated Mexican church outside
Brownsville, nails the door shut, and sets the place alight, plinking off
escapees. Dozens die. 

On January 1, 1970, a young black woman steps out the crowd and shoots New York
Congresswoman Golda Meir three times in the head. Two days later, a Jewish man
named Bill Hodes listens to a speech by Meir Kahane about purging Jerusalem of
the ungodly. On the fifth, he walks into a mostly-black church in Yonkers and
begins throwing Army-surplus grenades. 

By the time a police sniper picks him off a few hours later, thirty people are
dead. These are only the most outstanding incidents, they are repeated a dozen
times all over the country, in a hundred different guises. 

In Washington, President Foss grits his teeth and calls for a more extensive
draft, and makes quiet inquiries into the status of certain federal facilities
in the Southwest, along with opening new ones.

-As sympathy riots break out in Halifax, Prime Minister Ernest Manning puts
Canada's military on alert, calling out the reserves and deploying virtually
all of the regulars. Distant Scandanavia grows nervous, not quite understanding
what Canada's problem is, and orders more bombers to Greenland. 

Manning, growing irritated, does the same, and the winter of 1969-70 is a
remarkably warm one, at least emotionally, off Canada, as virtually all of
Canada's nuclear jet bomber wing is shifted to the heavily-militarized island
of Newfoundland, and the duel of shadows in the Davis Strait heats up, as now
whole squadrons chase each other (slowly) through the ice and (faster) under
the sea. 

With all the great powers distracted, there's no one to even talk about
mediation. 

-General Walter Walker is not a particularly happy man. He'd come to Wales to
put down an attempted rebellion against the government of England[FN1] and
catch the assasins of Prince George. (A crime still unsolved.) Instead, he has
found a province in growing rebellion; even internment, opposed for so long by
the nameless pansies back in London. (Namely, the Prime Minister.) has served
mostly to stir up the contemptible taffies. Worse, he has found clear and
convincing evidence of the Republic of Brittany, a few veterans of her war have
turned up in rather embarassing places. 

On November 30, something happens in Fishguard. No one argues on the most loose
details; several hundred Welsh were marching to protest internment without
trial. And no one disputes, too, that the 1st Parachute Regiment fired directly
into the crowd. And no one disputes the 13 dead. 

The British say the Welsh march was illegal, and that they were carrying
weapons. (Some are found on the bodies, one of whom turns out to be a citizen
of the Republic of Brittany.) As the Wilson government protests in scorching
language indeed, barely surviving a vote of no confidence, and Prime Minister
Le Pen defends the right of their citizens to work for the benefit of their
co-ethnics, Wales explodes. 

Late 1969 and early 1970 see riots rock every city in Wales, all of them
bloody, and now there's no particular reason to hold back. Britain's new
colonial war seems far, far too close to home. 

For All Time Pt. 112
March 1970-May 15, 1970

-On March 1, 1970, the embattled Belgian government, facing loss after loss in
the Congo and a full-scale rebellion among the Walloons, grants peremptory
independance to the Belgian Congo: "Washing our hands of the whole affair." as
the Prime Minister puts it. The Belgian officer corps doesn't like this,
though, not one bit. 

They've spent decades fighting and dying in jungles thousands of miles from
home while the civilian government just sat around and sent in more troops; and
if they've picked up Marxism from their African enemies, it's not a Marxism
subordinate to Moscow or Beijing. 

As March turns into late spring and a whisper of summer, the Belgian army turns
on the Walloons like the wrath of God; the announced civilian casualties are in
the low thousands, but it's actually perhaps ten times that. Belgium is densely
populated, and the suppression of the Wallons is weeks of bloody, bloody street
fighting. 

Meanwhile, General Vande Lanotte, former commander of the Belgian army in the
Congo, has quietly moved to occupy the Prime Minister's residence and various
other government buildings in Brussels, and has been engaging in private
conversations with the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. (Not to mention, of
course, the Queen.)

On May 7, 1970, the Belgian Parliment meets for the last time to vote to create
a completely new constitution; giving full power in the meantime to the
military (and General Lanotte), especially to put down those dastardly
Walloons. 

-Meanwhile, France has been mobilizing. (Slowly.) Jean-Bedel Bokassa has enough
wit to know that France isn't really ready for another war, but the Third
Empire is founded on France for Frenchmen, and on the (theoretical) protection
of Frenchmen abroad. 

But France is greatly distracted; the German Federation's union with Luxembourg
had tied down a fair portion of the military on the border, and in terms of
mobilization at least, the French military isn't particularly efficient. 

At this stage, it is all more bluff than anything, but it does deplete much of
the French military's local presence, especially along the border of the
Republic of Brittany. If there is a connection between the sudden paucity of
regular military in northwestern France and the detonation of a tanker trunk
outside the Bayeux Monastery on April 30, 1970, it's not for a historian to
say. 

What can be said, though, is that within two weeks, Ambassador Mantua is in
deep conversation with Prime Minister Wilson in London. They have a common
enemy, it seems, a Brythonic one at that. (Meanwhile, in Cardiff, General
Walter Walker has lost, of all things, a helicopter; crashing down on a crowded
street and killing dozens. Furious, he had arrested hundreds of Welsh citizens,
vowing retaliation unless the assasins reveal themselves.) 

-On the morning of the 15th, Kim Jong II goes on TV. Later observers will note
the fluffy white cat in his lap, the shaven head, and, of course, the
announcement. 

For All Time Pt. 113
"Ring of Fire" 
May 15-17, 1970

-It is perhaps ironic that Kim Jong II, General Secretary of the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea's Communist Party and absolute ruler of that unhappy
country, would lay the foundations for a kind of world peace not seen since
1945. That near future was not quite on the mind of Kim (or of any other major
world leaders) on May 15, 1970; no, that day was reserved for the Declaration. 

In a speech about as exciting as one might expect from a man of Kim's
background and speaking ability, the Korean dictator announced that the DPRK
had developed nuclear weapons. One particular nuclear weapon, in fact, the
"Glorious People's Revolutionary Hammer." Built over several decades by Korea's
top scientists (none of whom have survived the relevant purges of recent
years), the GPRH is a fusion device with a magnitude of 250,000 megatons. 

The General Secretary goes so far as to cackle malevolently at that; before
continuing. His demands are simple. There are several million Koreans in
Manchuria. Logically, then, Manchuria is part of the Korean national homeland;
they deserve to live in free, liberated, democratic Korea. There are several
million Koreans in South Japan; and they are forced to live under a dastardly
imperialist puppet racist government. It's the least he can do to take Japan
into the Korean national fold, to liberate every single one of the Japanese
people. 

If his demands are not granted by the 20th, well...the subsequent special
effects demonstration is surprisingly competent for a nation without a native
film industry. Suffice it to say that a quarter of a million megatons will
leave quite the large hole, quite the large hole indeed. This applies, of
course, if anyone should attempt to slay the Korean lion while they retake
their national destiny. 

-Not a lot happens in Cagliari, one of the largest cities in the Republic of
Italy(Sardina). Independance has not been kind to Sardinia; Ciano's legacy of
moderately enlightened fascism has been replaced with a colorless, atonal
symphony of various colonels and generals and Presidents-for-Life, with little
to distinguish them. (Even body count; Sardinia's 7 governments since 1959
managed to kill about 10,000 people each. Sardinia is poor, Sardinia is
deadly.) 

Cagliari's only real distinction is a quiet one. This Mediterrean backwater is
the only city on Earth with Ambassadors and Ministers from every major nuclear
power; from Bokassa's France to Foss's America to Suslov's Soviet Union, and it
is here that a deal is struck. 

The Soviet Union and the United States are the only major powers with a
significant space-borne military, they will lead the initial strike; followed
rapidly by the Anglo-French contingent from local aircraft carriers; followed
in time by Scandanavians from Thailand and to complete the soup, a dash of the
People's Liberation Army. 

There's no time to organize beyond the designation of targets; there's no time
for Richard Harris' John Gould to go in and seduce someone's secretary. There
is, however, always time for death, and for totalitarian states and somewhat
unstable democracies to band together in its name. 

-Colonel Robert Kenneth Dornan finds himself back in the Saddle again on May
17. (His name for his favorite spaceplane, the one he flew over Buenos Aires,
is the Saddle.) Hastily prepped, hastily armed, all the American planes have
significant electrical problems. (John Harriman, Errol Flynn without the sex,
is forced to make an emergency landing on a very long strip in Venezuela after
dropping a total of 10 megatons on Taegu.) 

Dornan's problems are worse than engine flameouts; communications spectacularly
short out over the North Pacific, and then the bomb-releasing circuits
malfunction. That's never good for a man on a bombing mission. Dornan dipped
low, dangerously low, straining his craft's structural integrity to get a good
look at his target: Panmunjon. From his altitude, the vast ring of the GPRH is
just visible. And Robert Dornan does what must be done. 

The fiery streak through the sky is visible to the Chinese troops slowly
massing near the Yalu and the French carrier Darlan in the South China Sea, but
they are soon distracted by the subsequent blast. Dornan's own warheads are
triggered just as he slams into the GPRH at a velocity not attained by a living
man, well, ever, and they trigger their own. 

Detonating out of sequence, leaping up into the summer sky, for one glorious
instant,. Robert Kenneth Dornan is in the center of a five hundred megaton
explosion that kills a lot of Communists at local time 4:40 AM, May 17, 1970

For All Time Pt. 114 
May-September 1970

-In the end, there's not really a world-wide famine. The ~800 megatons dropped
on Korea aren't quite enough to lower temperatures in every crop zone in the
Northern Hemisphere, just enough to make for a very cold summer and truly
spectacular sunsets nearly everywhere. Some of the late 20th century's best
landscape photography is taken through the summer of 1970. 

Of course, it's not all fun and games. There are no deaths from immediate blast
effects like radiation or heat outside of the Korean peninsula (those Koreans
who survive the initial blast and those PLA soldiers unfortunate enough to be
in the initial occupation wave), but a dusty cloud of various degrees of
radioactivity settles on the fields of Siberia and eastern China, North and
South Japan.

Siberia and North Japan have the Soviet Union and CPSD to supply them with
food; and South Japan's great friend the United States is quick to keep them in
the pink. Times aren't exactly grand, but rationing is nothing new to any of
the countries involved, and only a few thousand of the poorest of the poor
starve to death in any of the countries involved. 

China, however, is a bit more problematic. With agriculture already in chaos
thanks to Lin's Cultural Revolution, and no semi-colonial empire to lean on,
they are hit hard. Still, it's not as if five million or so dead is much of a
worry in a nation with a vast population and rather bloody-minded government,
and if there are student riots, well, that's why they call them death squads.
(There is, of course, East Africa. With aid shipments from China low, Idi Amin
attempts to stage a triumphant return to Kampala. It doesn't go that well, what
with the purges and all, but Milton Obote finds himself riding an unstable
horse indeed.)

The United States mourns the death of Robert Dornan, planning to name the next
generation of military spacecraft after the dead pilot, and moves on. About the
only significant change (outside of a wave of South Japanese emigrants to
California) is to quietly put the kibosh on President Foss's hopes for a second
term. The US expected to defeat Korea, is glad to see it gone, but no one
wanted to kill  40 million-odd people. (Bodies of all kinds keep coming home
from Mexico and Argentina, though far less from the latter.) 

Great Britain, meanwhile, loses a Prime Minister. Harold Wilson's government
actually does survive the minor dustup about the body count of the Korean
Crisis, but the be-raincoated politician just can't continue running a nation
with so many dead, however (relatively) minor his involvement. 

Prime Minister Benn's first crisis comes from the Southern Hemisphere...

-Guyana is newly-independant, and the colonial war there has been a relatively
important story in the international pages of most newspapers. Most Americans
were glad to see the British out. On August 2, 1970, much of the world is
horrified when an East Indian nationalist group, backed by elements of the
Army, assasinates Prime Minister Winston Smith, the commander of the army, and
seizes Georgetown. 

As the Benn government strongly considers intervention to keep order (and the
alliance) going, Venezuela acts. Success has made the Delgado government rather
foolhardy, and the President barely bothers to mention their invasion to the
Collective Security Organization before deploying "security troops" across the
border. 

As an embattled Washington and London react, Venezuelan troops move quickly,
with surprisingly little resistance, as if they had agents in-country in
advance. Fighting continues in the back country for quite some time after
August, but Georgetown falls on August 10, the capitol building taken by
General Francisco Tudjman and his Croatian Guards. 

There's no war, not quite, but there is something very close, especially after
a suspiciously quick referendum unifies Guyana with Venezuela in early
September. Delgado survives, but he loses a great deal of political capital;
the Special Relationship with the United States is over, and he'll have to
build his own nuclear carrier. 

As for Tony Benn, well, he slides his way into construction of the largest
bomber base Britian's Caribbean ally Jamaica has ever seen. (In Calgari,
negotiations continue apace.) 

-The French big story is, of course, the Declaration of Brussels on August 30,
1970, transforming the Kingdom of Belgium into the Liberal Social Republic of
Belgium. The new government is, oddly enough, not particularly beholden to the
CPSD; Vande Lanotte seeks his own path. If the theoretical ideals of
"Eurocommunism" soon fade a bit to the temptations of one-man rule, well, such
things happen. 

To Western Europe, though, Belgium has become Red; a tendril of Moscow flung
far west indeed. With the Belgian royal family fled to Paris and tens of
thousands of refugees fleeing into the Netherlands and the German Federation,
it's not a particularly outrageous idea. 

As Bokassa's army makes final preparations to move across the border, reports
arrive of rioting in Lisbon, and Portugual's state-owned television stations go
quiet with great speed. No one's quite paying attention to Africa. 

-On September 4, 1970, Sergeant Paul Dupin bursts into Ma-tan as Sarra, a
fragile oasis surrounded by desert deep in southern Libya. Dupin seems crazed
to the nomads and small Libyan garrison who are the sole occupants of the area;
he is the only survivor of a group of four French noncoms and has been alone
and almost entirely without water since crossing the Tibesti mountains in
northern French Equatorial Africa in August. 

Dupin recovers by the end of the month, and rapidly finds himself on another
odyssey; first to Tripoli and then to Jerusalem. He has a rather fantastic
story, and this has to go high up. Sergeant Dupin was a photographer in
civilian life, and managed to smuggle a small camera onto the factory floor and
steal an armload of papers (thanks to a colleague dead of thirst somewhere
outside Aozou. 

For All Time Pt. 115
October 1970-February 1971

-With all the events happening in Europe and elsewhere, most of the world 
misses the publication of "Immune Deficiencies in Military and Dependants" in
_The Journal of Bulgarian Medicine_ by Dr. Oleg Danylovich of Pechora, a city
in the Soviet Union near the Urals and the Arctic. 

Danylovich is recently discharged from the Red Army, a veteran of the Yugoslav
campaign and the war in Sudan, and his isolated retirement has given him time
to concentrate on a lingering puzzle. In the last decade or so of his army
service, he noticed a few dozen puzzling cases of soldiers and family members
getting sick; very sick. Healthy men wasted away to nothing and died of common
diseases, prostitutes in consortation with soldiers acquired a blotchy cancer
mostly found in elderly Italian and Jewish men and wasted away in turn. 

Very quiet consultation with other army doctors, men posted from Vladivostok to
Frankfurt, found similar cases; often with no apparant cause. A married soldier
recovering from a car accident seemed to have no connection to a male
prostitute, much less an officer's wife a thousand miles away. 

Oleg never quite dared to publish his findings while he was in the Army;
mysterious, unsolvable, fatal diseases simply did not exist in the worker's
paradise of Lazar Kaganovich and Mikhail Suslov, and those who suggested
otherwise didn't do so well. It's only now, in safe retirement, that he's ready
to take that step. 

(To be fair, he has little; no virus, no method of transmission, no potential
treatment. All he has is a puzzling pattern of symptoms (mostly made up of
other diseases) and a name. Sindrom priobretennovo immunodefitsita, syndrome of
acquired
immunodeficiency. Or SPID.) 

-As the Maghrebi journalist Jean Reno later wrote, "The Dupin Papers surprised
no one but a lucky few. We all knew. Oh, that we had acted earlier..." By early
October of 1970, newspapers from Jerusalem to Jacksonville, from Canton to
Canberra, have pictures of human beings being shot, skinned, dressed, and their
carcasses cooked and processed, along with a reasonably detailed accounting of
the 50,000 or so Frenchmen and Africans and how they came to die there. 

(The first effect, oddly enough, is the suicides. French statistics are
unavailable, but about 3,000 Europeans and Americans who'd visited France since
Bokassa came to power find they just can't live with the knowledge that they
ate human flesh. The most prominent dead American is explorer and adventurer
William Manchester.) 

The most visible effect of the revelations, though, are in France, rather
unsurprisingly. The officer class of the French Empire is a rather hardy breed
of men; they are supporters of Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, after all. But some
of them have limits, and some of those limits include working for a cannibal. 

And so, when deployed from the Belgian border to put down riots in Le Havre,
Nancy,  Limoges, and countless other places, (Started by the surviving
resistance members or family members of prisoners storming the temporary jails
used before the prisoners are shipped to Equatorial Africa), many French
colonels and generals say "Non!" 

Many do not, however, and soon French soldiers are shooting at each other...it
is an unpleasant winter in France, as the first volleys of the Second Civil War
spread over the  unhappy land. 

-Depending on one's perspective, it's an even more unhappy time in Iberia. On
October 5, 1970, the bullet-riddled body of Antonio Salazar is thrown from the
window of his Presidential Palace in Lisbon. The Portuguese officer class has
always been rather sympathetic to Communism, and the inspiration of Belgium has
motivated men long discontent with being told what to do. 

Even as the infant Liberal Democratic Republic of Portugal takes place and
fighting continues outside Setubal, Francisco Franco moves. The old Spanish
dictator has been eying his next-door neighbor with a rather jaundiced eye for
some time. (Salazar had been rather obviously going mad since his 1968 stroke.)
While he didn't expect this, per se, he expected Communists to do something
over there, so he makes _his_ move. 

-On December 2, 1970, Spanish troops cross the Portuguese border in the Tagus
and Duero valleys. They're really not very good; a third of the Army still has
Amsterdam Pact-era weaponry and hasty mobilization means another third has
Civil War-era material, but they're there, and they're moving toward the
capital of the newest Communist state in Europe. 

But Joao Olivares, the colonel who has temporarily won control of the Military
Revolutionary Council, has a little surprise for the Spanish Army. Everyone
knows of the Portuguese-South African treaty, but no one knows the South
African nuclear program was a shared project. 

Or that Portugal has the Bomb; two of which detonate under the spearheads of
the Duaro and Tagus armies on December 7, 1970. Olivares is playing a difficult
game, Portugal only has but a half-dozen bombs, and he can't use many on his
native soil for a host of reasons. 

That, of course, is what the air force is for. On December 10, even as Spanish
forces are desperately regrouping on the Spanish side of the border, virtually
all of Portugal's small surviving air force makes a raid on Madrid. Lots of
bombs are dropped. One of them is a nuclear weapon of about 100 kilotons. 

In a fiery instant, Francisco Franco and his fascist regime (and a million-odd
innocent people) are blown to fiery pieces. That does not, of course, mean the
war is over. It's a long, bloody two months before Portuguese forces are
outside Seville; Spain pulls off a chemical weapon attack against Lisbon that
kills tens of thousands, and Portugal drops a near-miss 50K weapon near Toledo
that kills hundreds of thousands. 

Just over two million people are dead on both sides, and Prince Carlos, invited
back to help rally the people (an effort that hasn't gone well; many cities not
even held by the Portuguese have succumbed to Communist rebellions of their
own) isn't about to let it go on. On February 2, he invites President Olivares
to a little demonstration of his own. 

For All Time Pt. 116-For Better Or Worse
March-May 1971

-The third of March is a dark and stormy night. Most of St. Louis's police
force, even those out walking the beat, are sheltering in the nearest nook from
the driving storm. It's the perfect cover for an articulate young black man
named Rudolph R. Moore.

Sometime around 3 AM, an anonymous yellow truck turns off Leonor K. Sullivan
Boulevard and drives onto the grounds of the St. Louis Arch Park, parking next
to the left leg of the arch. The driver, quite sensibly, hightails it out of
there, running down Route 70. 

The rain distracts and delays security long enough that one unfortunate man is
just going out to check on the abandoned truck when the several hundred pounds
of diesel fuel and fertilizer aboard detonate, ripping away most of the left
leg of the arch in a fiery rush of flame and metal. 

The collapse of the St. Louis Arch on the morning of March 3 (and the promise
of the African People's Militia to f*ck up motherf*uckers) is suddenly almost
the biggest story in American newspapers, bigger even than famine-wracked South
Japan's membership in the Collective Security Agency of the day before. (Though
not quite so big as the story of an American victory in the Yucatan that killed
fifty American soldiers and several hundred Maya. There's no particular
connection between the independence movement and the Maoists, but the American
media doesn't need to know that. Besides, there is shortly thereafter.) 

President Joe Foss is never one to back away from a fight, and he escalates
martial law, along with (reluctantly), the draft. Veterans of Argentina and
Mexico get switched back to the States, and at first it seems quite the
leisurely posting. After all, they're posted next to national monuments and
tourist attractions, and it's not as if they're denied leave. 

Until March 17 in Texas, when an explosion rocks San Antonio's Alamo after
closing hours. Only heroic efforts by the city save the outer walls at all, it
will be unusable for decades to come. Another three dead join the one casualty
of St. Louis, two security guards and a janitor. 

Previous terror incidents in America have been directed against people;
especially lately  between the various feuding militias of various racial
stripes that have degenerated into little more than criminal gangs by this
point. (Although, to be fair, it's more a matter of different rhetoric than
different behavior.) 

This new strain, though, seems directed more against the government itself, and
the very symbols of the United States. White citizens' groups, of course, know
just what to do about that. Kill some Negroes! All over the country, members of
the various Klan factions, the White Citizens' Council, and the Committee for
the Cleansing of America slip through the military presence near black
neighborhoods to do their work. In Detroit, a dynamite bomb at a crowded
church, in Chicago, it's as simple as machine-gun fire into private homes. 

(In the Deep South, of course, it's as simple as lynching! The
locally-recruited, nearly-all white Army units in the area are just a tad
biased, and let white mobs through their cordons while opening fire on black
crowds. The cycle that results is largely the one one might expect, though the
suicide bombing of a nightclub near Ft. Pillow, Tennessee on April 9 shows an
eye for history, unfortunately not equaled to that of the young white men who
open fire on a crowd of students at Howard University on April 21) 

Several thousand are dead by the beginning of May, and it's only getting worse.


-Things aren't going particularly well in Great Britain, either. Distracted by
the mounting crisis in France in early March, Prime Minister Tony Benn is a
step behind his wife Margaret (nee Robbins) as they go to the cinema to catch
the latest of George Lazenby's Shakespearean plays updated for a modern
audience. 

(He stars opposite Diana Rigg in "Romeo and Juliet", with the setting changed
to the gritty streets of exotic Cardiff.) It's a surprisingly on-topic choice
for a film; it's a Welsh nationalist who throws the grenade that kills Peggy
Benn quite spectacularly in front of her husband as they leave the theater. 

Walter Walker has never liked Tony Benn much, but an assault on English
womanhood, especially the murder of a highly-placed lady, is more than he can
take. As the Prime Minister closets himself through the rest of March, blood
runs in the streets of nearly every city in Wales, and British soldiers find
themselves firing on British people. 

As such things do, it spreads, and the Prime Minister rouses himself enough to
put the commanders of peacekeeping forces in Scotland and Northern Ireland
under the overall control of General Walker. It's a dark and unfortunate time,
especially after Prime Minister Benn reemerges and refuses to speak of the
matter publically. 

Several hundred are dead in both sides from street fighting and snipers, and
with the car bomb death of the Mayor of Edinburgh on May 3, it's clear it's
only going to get worse...

-It's not getting worse in France by that time, of course, it's hard to get
worse than the Second Civil War. (Though later historians will make comparision
to the Hundred Years War or the wars of the Revolution, the Thirty Years War is
probably a more apt analogy.) 

On March 14, responding to alleged cross-border raids by French guerillas,
President Stutze of the German Federation mobilizes the Army and marches into
Alsace. In the vanguard, of course, are the thousands of Alsatian nationalists
driven out of the motherland when the Third Empire came to power. They, of
course, purge the enemies of Alsace quite enthusastically. 

Emperor Bokassa, quite glad to have an actual enemy to fight as opposed to the
multi-headed Hydra of rebellion, declares war on the German Federation on March
17 and moves the nearest Loyalist troops to combat the German threat. 

Just in time, on March 20, for the armies of the Republic of Brittany to pour
across the border. They're about as professional as the military of a young new
state is, but they have a goal, the Cotentin, and a leader. Maurice Le Pen is
nothing if not inspiring, especially when it comes to purging the enemies of
the people of Brittany. 

-This poses quite a problem for Mikhail Suslov. France's membership in the CPSD
would be good. Damn good, in fact; but he knows full well the consequences of
an invasion of Western Europe. (Nuclear weapons, and lots of them, distributed
freely over the USSR and associated states.) 

There's another solution, though, and the independence it suggests might be
enough to lure Portugal and Spain (Perhaps even edgy, stubborn Belgium) under
Moscow's benevolent wing. On April 11, 1971, the General Secretary of the
Social Republic of Italy mobilizes Italy's armed forces and positions them on
the border with France over the public protests of the CPSD.

A week later, over a storm of faux protest from Moscow, elements of the Italian
army slip across the border...

For All Time Pt. 117
July 1, 1971

Pope JOHN PAUL I is slowly getting used to Manila Cathedral. On a papal visit
to the Philippines when the Iberian War broke out, he watched in horror as
Portuguese armies were driven almost to the gates of Toledo before being driven
back, then the horror grew as Toledo's western suburbs were destroyed in a 50
kiloton nuclear blast by a particularly dirty Portuguese atomic bomb. 

Catholic nations over the world have offered him shelter, from King Carlos'
government in the Republic of Spain (Balearics) to Delgado's Venezuela. But
he's not about to flee, the Catholic Church isn't about running to the nearest
shelter when times get tough. Nor is it about living in an officially
areligious state, so the continuing invitations from the Social Republic of
Italy and the People's Republic of Spain are right out. (He considers Canada
carefully, but decides there are just too many Protestants, despite the
similarities to lost St. Peter's.) 

With the near-collapse of British power in South Asia, the MAHATHIR goverment
in Malaysia has gone with nearly the next best thing, Ernest Manning's Canada.
Soon, soldiers like General PHILIP MCNAIR and Colonel JOHN TURNER are training
Malaysian soldiers on the newest weapons to fight (mostly Chinese) Communist
insurgents, while an army trained for desert warfare in Africa finds itself
learning a little something about the jungle. 

And eying Thailand with a mistrustful eye, and getting the same right back. The
Nordic Council has been suspicious of Canadian intentions for a long time,
especially after the spectacular failure of Gerald Bull's space-gun, and their
acquiring of a strategic nation right on Scandanavia's Asian flank (Thailand)
doesn't help matters. 

Lieutenant ALEXANDER ZHIRINOVSKY is one of thousands of young Russian soldiers
volunteering to join the Italian Liberation Force occupying Nice and the
surrounding areas of war-torn France. The Suslov government has shown a firm
hand with these young men, many of whom are officially AWOL from the Soviet
military, sending the returnees to hardship postings like the Black Sea or the
coast of the Serbo-Croatian People's Republic.[1]

AKIRA TAKARADA is one of South Japan's youngest post-war Prime Ministers, and
certainly her boldest. Takarada's Reform Party rose to power after the minor
post-Korean famine brought down the ruling Progressive Conservatives[2], and he
has taken steps to move into the American sphere, discouraging the development
of an independent nuclear deterrent, encouraging Japanese migration to the
United States, and (very, very quietly) allowing President Foss to station
nuclear-equipped bombers at the great American base outside Yokohama. 

Attorney General WILLIAM REHNQUIST hasn't had a particularly enjoyable term in
office. The growing problem with black nationalist terrorists (an attack on the
Golden Gate Bridge on the last day of May was averted only by the early
detonation of the warehouse in which the dynamite was stored) is matched only
by the growing problem with white supremacist terrorists (the attack on the
Golden Gate was to be a retaliation for an attack by off-duty policemen on
Mississippi Valley State University, an all-black campus, that killed eleven.)

Too, President Foss isn't helping matters much. Deeply frustrated by the
failures of his foriegn and domestic policy (the wars in Mexico and Argentina
continue to quietly simmer, with perhaps 20,000 dead in both conflicts.), he
has found solace in football, cheering on his beloved Cowboys as they dismantle
the Green Bay Packers at the very first Superbowl.

MARGARET THATCHER's mourning for her husband Dennis, lost in a minor,
unimportant skirmish as British forces evacuated Guiana (a mourning made worse
by the way the Labour government just stood by and let Venezuela take over)
isn't so much ended as it is suddenly changed by Prime Minister Benn's
announcement of July 1, 1971. 

In consultation with Labour  and Conservative Party leaders, mindful of the
assasination of his wife, Benn's announcement is thus. On December 1, 1971,
Wales, Scotland, and England will vote seperately on their political future.
Union, independance, or "association"? 

As Northern Ireland (and indeed, many of the more conservative areas of the
rest of the UK) go quite mad at this announcement, Margaret Thatcher rises from
her widow's weeds on a new mission. Labour's not going to let another country
be dismantled on her watch, no sir. 

[1] It's a clever sham, y'see.
[2] Limited post-war reconstruction coupled with some serious economic
turbulence in the 1950s and 1960s has kept Japan from being a one-party state
dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party. In its place has been a party system
with all the stability of OTL's Italy.

For All Time Pt. 118
July-October 1971

-On July 2, 1971, Maghreb President Paul Rassiner gives the order and the great
processing plants of northern Equatorial Africa go up in a great blaze of
nuclear fire. (The unhappy inmates of those appalling places have mostly
outright disappeared, whether into the deserts of northern Chad or the mass
graves prepared by fleeing Bokassaist troops.)

While only three bombs (totaling around 200 kilotons) were used, it's still
quite a gesture by a nation with only a dozen nuclear devices to begin with.
Rassiner is facing a new wave of migration from the north, the ongoing war is
multisided and bloody, with all sides simply ejecting inconvenient or
potentially disloyal population groups, and quite a few are aiming for good old
North Africa. 

Rassiner, never a man to worry much about morality but a French patriot
nonetheless, has found a use for the refugees, especially those old enough to
fire a weapon. The purges and massacres of Muslim Algerians of his predecessor
have given way to "resettlement", hundreds of thousands of non-assimilated
Algerians driven south, below the 30th parallel, with their homes in the hands
of ethnic French. Rassiner promises independence for the Algerians, but that's
more of a convent way to not actually feed the people driven into the desert. 

-In the end, the shadow of Oliver Cromwell falls a long, long way. It's clear
to keen observers in the summer and early fall of 1971 that _something_ is
going on with the military, what with the sudden occupation of elements of
British telecommunications and transportation by various Army and Navy units in
turn between July and October. However, paranoia on both sides coupled with
tight media control by the state ensures that rumors of General Walker flying
to London to confer with the Queen, Anthony Parsons' near-simultaneous
conferences with the Naval High Command, and then Tony Benn's personal visit to
Walker's Cardiff headquarters remains just that, only rumors. 

In the end, the British public knows only a few things for sure. General Walter
Walker accepts command of the British garrison occupying the Socotra islands
off the coast of unhappy Aden on September 15, a variety of particularly
aggressive Conservative backbenchers resign, and a few dozen elite soldiers of
the Army and Navy are reported killed by friendly fire in exercises off the
Orkneys. And finally, after a great deal of debate, Queen Elizabeth II
announces that she will abdicate the throne in favor of her son Andrew on the
20th anniversary of her accession, February 6, 1972. 

The referenda in Scotland, Wales, and England will go on, as Walker's
successors begin the slow task of patching up relations between the British
Army and men and women who may not be Britons anymore come December. [1] 

- Carel de Wet was elected on a platform of "peace in Africa", and Greater
South Africa's new President intends to do just that. On August 3, 1971, South
African tanks rumble across the border from Chingola into the former Belgian
Congo. De Wet's goal centers around money dressed up in ensuring security.
There are a lot of valuable industries in the southern Congo, most of them left
abandoned to precarious safety in the hands of Belgian corporations switched to
new ownership or local governments. 

South African control of those rubber and mining industries would be very
profitable, continung their domination of most of the economy of sub-Saharan
Africa, and South Africa's government has been conditioned to think in favor of
domination in the decades since the acquisition of Portugal's colonies and the
mergers with the various Rhodesias. 

But South Africa's people haven't been thinking only that way, no indeed, and
soon South African students are (very, very carefully) taking to the streets to
protest the government's continued involvement in foriegn affairs and
colonialism abroad at the expense of South Africans, Afrikaaner and English
alike. 

The government has ways of dealing with that, true, but not so many ways to
deal with mobilizing East Africa...

[1] Unir snvgu va Purg, Xney. 

For All Time Pt. 119
October-December 1971

-On October 9, 1971, a street mime bows low before Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa
and detonates the several dozen kilograms of plastic explosives and nails
strapped to his back. More than just the Emperor and four bodyguards are
shredded by the blast, the already shaky authority of the French central
government collapses quite spectacularly.

A war that began as an uprising against a creatively evil despot has now become
a multi-sided struggle, with local commanders struggling for dominance and
attempts at government collapsing within a matter of a few weeks.  There is the
remnant of the Imperial government, with authority over northwest and central
France down to about Poiters, a faction of former naval officers running an
area centered around Bordeaux, the Lyons Liberation Government, and perhaps a
half-dozen others. 

The rest, of course, is dominated by the foriegners. The People's Republic of
Spain clings to the French Pyrenees and French Basque country, Lepenist
Brittany continues its slow march down the Loire valley, while the German
Federation's drive into the Champagne-Ardennes gains ground by the week. Only
Belgium and Italy are more circumspect, under pressure from Great Britain and
the Soviet Union, respectively; Belgium hasn't moved much beyond the Lille
area, while Italy is content with the home of that first great people's
revolutionary, Nice. 

Great Britain herself has been mulling Continental intervention for quite some
time, but Tony Benn doesn't trust the Army, not even slightly, not until a lot
of highly-placed officers are put in a position where they can't risk
governmental stability again, not ever. Not to mention, of course, watching the
Conservatives quite carefully indeed...

-A variety of factors come together on December 1, 1971 to produce the results
of the Kingdom Vote. The Welsh vote for confederation surprises no one beyond
the most extreme Unionists and Liberationists; very little can overcome the
centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence between England and Wales, but
there is still the very recent memories of British troops firing on rioting
Welsh crowds to consider. 

Confederation means Britain and Wales will keep a common currency and have  no
real trade barriers between them. Too, Cardiff and London will maintain a
unified foriegn policy, with Wales at least theoretically following the larger
nation's lead. Finally, they agree to cooperate on criminal matters, with both
signing broad mutual extradition treaties. 

But that's about it; Wales will have its own army, own police force, their own
code of laws, and they will maintain their own Parliment and Prime Minister. If
the vote had happened a few months later, they might have gone for keeping
things as they were, as it is, the interim Welsh government quietly persuades
London to keep the Royal Navy bases in Wales so thousands don't lose their
jobs. 

Scotland's vote to stay in the United Kingdom is rather unsurprising, the
circumstances of the last few years are only enough to make it a close vote
indeed. (Nationalists will charge voter fraud for decades to come, and while
there were certainly some irregularities on the tallies from Aberdeen, they
don't seem to be enough to account for that extra seven hundred and thirty-five
votes.) Benn's offer to encourage and protect Scottish economic and cultural
practices is enough to overcome any lingering reservations about Great Britain.
(A similiar offer wasn't enough for Wales.) 

And then the English vote tally comes in. By a margin of 37% to 35% to 28%, the
people of England vote for independance from the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland. This was not particularly expected. 

-On December 12, 1971, Private Jamey Sheridan[1]  stumbles into Methodist
Hospital in downtown Brooklyn, suffering from a high fever and hacking cough.
Sheridan, a 1969 draftee, has spent most of his military career posted to a
military facility in Seattle, but is one of the many American soldiers
transferred to guard first national landmarks (in his case, Fanieul Hall in
Boston) and then sent home for Christmas. 

As Brookyln doctors watch, Sheridan's flu turns quickly into pneumonia, then
into death, just before the end of 1971. At first, it seems just an unfortunate
accident, a young man dead of a natural cause. Until, of course, the first few
cases arrive from Sheridan's Brooklyn apartment. Meanwhile, in Boston, visitors
to Fanieul Hall have been checking into hospital with a hacking cough and high
fever, along with soldiers posted to Seattle's vast military complex, airport
personnel in Boston and New York City...[2]

[1] Get it?
[2] 80% or so of the Sheridan Flu cases are just that, the flu. 20% or so turn
into pneumonia, and of those, around 75% die. It's slightly more infectious
than the standard strain of flu. And you thought I'd forgotton Linus Pauling. 

For All Time Pt. 120
December 25, 1971
A Christmas Montage

MOSCOW: 

"...Minister of Justice Chernenko sharply rebuffed attempts by Western
journalists to corrupt the work of the Ministry today, announcing that the
executions of economic criminals under the 1937 labor laws will proceed as
scheduled on the first of January. This marks the second great victory for the
Minister and General Secretary Suslov this year, when efforts from the
government broke the infamous diamond smuggling scandal of the
Brezhnev-Kirilenko faction in March." [1]

LOS ANGELES

"...Julie Andrews dismissed charges by conservative critics that her
Christmas-released musical comedy _Patton_ was disrespectful to American troops
deployed in South and Central America, saying "Patton is a tip of the hat to
all the brave men who served their country in World War II." The 2 hour MGM
epic, starring Joel Grey as the late general and Andrews as his "military muse"
is second at the box office this Christmas Day, behind Marlon Brando's _The
Dark Ring._" [2]

LONDON

"...Prince Edward declined to comment on rumors that he would accept the
English Crown upon her independence from the United Kingdom on March the first
of next year, calling speculation on the matter "premature." In a related
story, Prime Minister Benn confirmed statements made by Home Secretary Castle
that he would continue to serve as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and
England until the interim elections scheduled for the beginning of April,
blasting Conservative members who called for new elections as "traitors and
cowards who seek to stir a revival of the disorders and bloodshed of the last
few years.", pointing to Unionist riots in the Midlands as an example of the
Conservative future. Opposition leader Maudling replied with a blast on
Labour's "dissolution of Great Britain and dissolution of British democracy",
promising to hold a new referendum upon the formation of a Conservative
government." 

WASHINGTON: 

"Treasury Secretary Rhodes announced today that the government's economic
program for 1972 and beyond would give every American consumer "the kind of
present they really deserve: an end to the inflation imposed on the United
States by the economic errors of the Kennedy administration." Rhodes is
considered a front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1972,
along with Vice-President Hal Warren, Illinois Senator Charles Percy and
California Governor Rock Hudson." [3] 

HANOI

"...In response to prevarication by the government of fascists and capitalist
running dogs in Beijing, General Secretary Truong Chinh[4] promised that any
Chinese incursions along the borderline established on 7/11/1953 would be dealt
with the full vigor of the peoples of the United People's Republic of Indochina
and her allies in the Council of People's and Socialist Democracies." 

KASANGA, EAST AFRICAN FEDERATION

"...War has come to East Africa, I say again, war has come to East Africa. At
approximately 9 AM yesterday, President Amin ordered air strikes on a Greater
South African military convoy on the shores of Lake Tanganiyika that he claimed
was preparing to cross the lake and enter East Africa. In response, Prime
Minister de Wet has closed South Africa's borders and begun a program of air
strikes against cities in..."

For All Time Pt. 122
1975-1976

-With the new militarization of the Chikatilo regime, some weaknesses must be
opened in the previously sealed walls of the CPSD border. While Chikatilo isn't
enamored of the idea of his subjects...err, comrades, getting away, hey, the
border patrol is a lot of money that could be better spent on things more
useful to the still-reeling Soviet bloc. 

Like that big statue of him in every major Soviet bloc city, not to mention the
camp-factories along the Arctic Circle where the munitions for a new age are
being turned out and thousands of traitors are being disposed of daily. 

So an odd hundred thousand or so Soviets and other CPSD citizens slip out into
the west; France is desperately poor but needs labor to rebuild, and the German
Federation is happy to take in Volga Germans and other co-ethnics. The
remainder manage, by various hooks and crooks, to slip into the United Kingdom,
England, and even the distant United States, where the McGovern administration
is battling for its life. 

Between the war and inoculations and such, a fairly large percentage of the
refugees have taken donations from the Soviet blood bank system, which, with
truly heroic donations from inmates, has stayed functioning even through one of
the more destructive wars in history. 

Like many war refugees throughout history, they find their bodies make a
currency acceptable anywhere. 

-Despite some rather interesting personal differences,  Prime Ministers Enoch
Powell and Michael Foot have organized a customs and trade union in the British
isles. Ardors have cooled with the new borders, granting self-government for
the various nations formerly in the United Kingdom, and the prospect of trade
and profit can sway the hardest of heads. 

Things have largely settled down in matters musical, too, a big-toothed
American named Bobby O. is playing the piano in London while his sister sings
the blues in Edinburgh, but Britain's own musicians, men like McCartney and
Jagger, women like Richards and Hall, are just as big in the Continent (well,
mostly Scandanavia) and the US as their foriegn counterparts are back home.
It's a nice exchange.

-Gough Whitlam is a national hero to much of Australia, at once the victor of
several wars in the blood-dimmed pool that is Indonesia and the man who pulled
Australia out of several others that just weren't going the right way. 

With the shenanigans in the United Kingdom bringing apparant royal authority to
an all time low, it is perhaps an inoppurtune time for Governor-General
Randolph Churchill to stick his nose into the constitutional crisis besetting
both the Australian Senate and the nation. But, hey, he's an inoppurtune sort
of guy. 

It's a very interesting year in Australia and Whitlam only has to call out the
Army once. But, by God, he stays in power through that interesting year, and
one heck of a precedent has been set for Australian constitutional government.
Indeed, the victory of the Republicans in the referendum in December comes
almost as an afterthought.

-For such a tumultous election, 1976 is marked by some darn low voter turnout.
Liberal Republicans just don't _like_ California Governor Charles Manson, and
they form the biggest defections to the John Anderson-Eugene McCarthy third
party ticket that year, pushing several New England states into the independent
camp. 

Manson's opponent, however, has mass appeal; a former minister and inspiring
speaker, he does well in the South, but as an advocate of urban reform he does
well in the big cities and in black voters. The middle class is a bit less
optimistic, and he IS a member of George McGovern's party, but the two men are
certainly barely speaking to each other, and it's not as if Joe Foss' time was
much better. 

Election eve is surprisingly quiet, with only a few scattered bombings of
polling places by various political action commitees. Jim Jones carries the
South, New York State, and even (with the help of third parties) Manson's own
California, and with it, the election. 

For All Time Pt. 123
Messiah
1976-1977

-Charismatic, articulate, and absolutely ruthless, Charles Manson has built a
strong, unified regime in California. Backroom influence has put his cronies in
high office in the state National Guard and in the bureaucracy, and the order
he has brought to an always turbulent state has made a lot of street-level
Californians loyal to him. 

Of course, he has more than his share of enemies, and enough people sucked it
up and walked past the "peacekeeping" National Guardsmen outside the polling
places to vote for Jones to give the state to the Democrats. Still, Manson is
unquestionably the most powerful man in California. With Jones in the White
House, Manson is given to meetings with old comrades like New Hampshire
Governor Lyndon Larouche, the highest-ranking ex-Trotskyite in the US and the
only state governor with similar power in his own state.

-The rather anemic federal response to such things is surprising; President Jim
Jones, meanwhile, has been quite ruthless in going after militants of all
stripes. His credentials among black voters means that Jones, and perhaps only
Jones of American politicians of his day, can round up the associates of R. Ray
Moore and place them in the federal "agricultural projects" in southern Nevada
and eastern California while awaiting trial. And perhaps only a former
Disciples of Christ minister could send troops to arrest Byron de la Beckwith
and similar cretins without provoking too much disturbance in the South. 

No one much cares about the internees, beyond a few isolated liberals. Nuclear
terrorism and the destruction of Philadelphia, for all that it was
Argentinians, has made Americans just not care what's done to terrorists and
friends and well-wishers of same. Bob Woodward's attempted expose of the Death
Valley farm is quietly quashed. Two weeks later his commission is called back
up.

Jones is a bit more pragmatic with Jewish and other Middle Eastern militants;
the collapse of most Middle Eastern governments has finally opened a window of
opportunity in Palestine as the surviving governments struggle just to stay
afloat. Ariel Sharon and Meir Kahane, veterans of years of battle in the US,
are among the many who slip across the sea to ports in the Maghreb, and then
further east through Libya. 

-The energy crunch of the late 1970s has gone unnoticed by most people; the
loss of the Middle Eastern oil fields to nuclear bombardment by the Soviets
could have knocked Western Europe and the United States for one hell of a
tailspin. Only the Kennedy-era nuclear power plant system, privatized under
Goldwater, has kept the American economy going with no more than a sputter. 

(Which has, of course, been lost in the spiraling tide of inflation. The dollar
has bred like _rabbits_ for the last twenty years, and it's only getting worse.
President Jones' price freezes of October don't so much solve that problem as
they replace it with several more.)

The Ross Barnett Memorial Nuclear Power Facility (located near the site of
OTL's Barnett Reservoir) has had a rather unhappy history. Privatization found
no corporation in Mississippi with the expertise and cash to buy the state's
big reactor complex, and Mississippi pride forbade selling the plant to an
out-of-state company. 

The plant is manned by an interesting combination of hired nuclear employees
(mostly those who've left jobs at other plants, Mississippi just doesn't have
the money to pay the same wages as New York or Iowa) and physics grad students
from the many fine universities of Mississippi. 

The President himself is supposed to visit on July 5, and so the plant begins
making certain tests before his arrival. After all, security is extremely
important these days. On May 25, the evening crew begins the last test;
determining how long the turbines will spin and what power will be supplied in
the event of a main electrical failure. It isn't the first time this has
happened. 

Automatic shutdown mechanisms would interfere with the examination, so they are
of course shut down. As the coolant supply decreases, the power output
increases, until finally a nuclear engineering grad student tries to shut down
the reactor. 

The fuel elements ruptured and the resultant explosive force of steam lifted
off the cover plate of the reactor, releasing fission products to the
atmosphere. A second explosion threw out fragments of burning fuel and graphite
from the core and allowed air to rush in, causing the graphite moderator to
burst into flames.  

There is some dispute among experts about the character of this second
explosion, seeing as how there weren't that many talkative survivors in the
plant. The graphite burned for twelve days, causing the main release of
radioactivity into the environment. 

It's a very interesting year in Mississippi. When it's over, the evacuation
zone includes the city of Jackson. A vast population of Mississippians has been
unsettled, perhaps 200,000, with many exposed to rather high levels of
radiation, more as dolomite leaks down the Pearl. As the "Pwits" fan out across
the United States, hurried examination of several other nuclear plants across
the US, particularly the Three Mile Island and Delmarva plants, reveal similar
design problems. 

It's a sticky situation, and now nuclear power plants are guarded by the
military as hostile crowds, remembering the few thousands dead in Mississippi
(a number that grows, particularly among firemen and engineers who rushed to
the burning plant) and not wanting to join those ranks. Counter, pro-nuke
demonstrations tend to be mobbed even by private citizens. 

Among the dead out in southern California after an encounter with a resettled
group of Pwits is a doctoral candidate named Jerry Pournelle. As nuke plants
are shut down by panicky state governments or collapsing corporations, the
energy crisis really begins...

For All Time Pt. 124
1977-1978

-The northwest Pacific is a cold place, but warm things begin to happen as 1977
turns into a new year. Andrei Chikatilo is instinctively isolationist, his
mental horizons are narrow for all that they are Hobbesian, but he knows Soviet
authority over North Japan, and the alliances with the People's Republic of
Sumatra and her associate states are still a crucial part of their presence in
the Pacific. (And about the only one, really.) 

Detente has been mostly the rule since the days of Lazar Kaganovich (now
quietly brooding in his Grecian exile), but Jim Jones has a vision for the
future that doesn't include that sort of thing. Ground forces are still tied up
keeping the peace in the United States, a double agent named Bill Rodham
recently foiled a plot to blow up the New Statue of Liberty, but the US Navy
can go anywhere the ocean can.

Where Chikatilo sends mostly outdated bombers, Jones sends US aircraft carriers
and orbiting space planes, and just publically enough to get noticed in both
the United States and Soviet Union. For Jones, it is a distraction for the
people from the economic freefall in the United States, for Chikatilo,
well...perhaps he needs to put Americans on the list. 

Jones continues to pour the limited national defense budget into the various
high tech programs; plans for a lunar orbiter are scheduled for the mid-1980s,
and the navy still needs more aircraft carriers and the army more space planes
and jet bombers to keep a close, close eye on the Reds. 

As for the regular army, well, he can only do so much. They're probably not
going to be that needed in the struggle to come, and since they're reasonably
successeful in their peacekeeping duties...

-And the American economy continues to need a parachute, with the dollar
continuing to gallop down the inflation road. Shaky for years, the Barnett
disaster has served as a catalyst for something unpleasant indeed. 

Artificially lowered farm prices keep even the most unfortunate urban poor from
starving; but the loss of their crop sends thousands of farmers streaming into
the cities looking for work, where they find no real jobs at all. The energy
crisis spawned by the closing or removal from the grid of several
poorly-designed nuclear power plants sends brownouts and blackouts rocketing
across the American power grid, the three weeks New Orleans spend without
electrical power in late summer of 1978 are very interesting indeed. 

California is a rare exception; Charles Manson isn't a terribly good
administrator, but he is decisive: out-of-state refugees are met with state
troopers on the interstates and California's reliance on native petroleum
supplies keeps the local energy crisis to a minimum; California even escapes
much of the national gas rationing. 

His national popularity continues to grow, and Manson is talked about by many
for the Republican Party nomination in 1980. 

-On September 12, 1978, Vice-President Daniel Patrick Moniyhan is stepping up
to the podium in Casper, Wyoming when a Canadian emigre named Jean Chretien
steps out of the crowd and shoots him through the head. His subsequent suicide
in FBI custody will raise all sorts of awkward questions in the next
administration, but for now, all there is is a dead body. 
 
French-Canadians settled in the United States are mostly assimilated, but there
are sporadic (and oddly well-planned) acts of violence against them throughout
New England. Coming as it does in a time of poverty and violence, the reaction
from their community can be expected. 

(Fortunately, Prime Minister Conrad Black is skilled enough at diplomacy to
prevent too much of a reaction from the Canadian people.)

President Jones takes the oppurtunity to formally open the Red Desert
detainment facility in Wyoming, this one holding several dozen French-Canadians
in the US illegally in Massachusetts. As all are foriegn nationals, there's
obviously no need for them to have certain rights that citizens have. 

Expansion of those regulations to citizen detainees, as opposed to federal
prisoners, takes very little time at all.