The Last World War: 2061 to 2065
The Interstellar Age, S01E10
Around one billion people—fully ten percent of Earth’s pre-war population—died as a result of the Third World War. More than every other war in human history combined.
Most of these deaths were the result of starvation, disease, and radiation poisoning, caused or exacerbated by the low-yield nuclear exchanges in India, Pakistan, China, and Russia, as well as the nuclear near-misses in Australia, India, and the United States. Many of these died in the months and even years after the war ended, extending the tail of its suffering, along with the lingering guerilla war carried on by Chinese augmechs until the late 2060’s.
Millions were killed in crackdowns, purges, and retaliatory massacres throughout Axis-occupied territory. Many millions more, soldier and civilian, died in combat—particularly in China in the last year of the war, with the massive battles between the Indian Army and the PLA in the west, and the brutal Allied campaign in China’s urban east, in which whole cities filled with millions of cybernetically controlled civilians had been leveled.
China’s population, having escaped much of the mass death which characterized the first eight years of the war, ended up suffering the worst in the last one: from all causes, almost three hundred and fifty million Chinese died, more than twenty percent of the pre-war population. The country’s population had already been stagnating before the war; this immense loss might prove a death blow to the nation, despite the roughly one billion people who still made it up.
The staggering scale of the suffering was not limited to the dead. Millions more had been displaced by the war, hundreds of millions wounded, or laid low by disease. Almost every country in the world bore the scars of the nightmarish decade—even the continent of Africa, which had mercifully escaped major combat, suffered from the war’s secondary effects. Around one million Africans had died as a result of the war, some fighting as volunteers or mercenaries with the two sides’ massive armies—and some in the African Union Expeditionary Force, which had seen combat in the Indo-Chinese Theater in the last six months of the war—the rest from starvation and disease as a result of disrupted global supply chains and nuclear warfare.
The task of recovering from a war of such horrific scale would dwarf everything that had come before it—even the war itself. Not only was physical reconstruction necessary in much of the world—rebuilding the cities, the land, and the bodies that had been ravaged—but emotional, mental, and cultural regeneration, all of which would be hard roads to travel. Almost two billion people in the Axis and occupied countries still had CCP-pattern cybernetic implants installed in their brains, which would either have to be surgically removed, or at the very least deactivated.
Shutting down these implants was a clear priority in the formerly occupied territories. But what about in the Axis nations themselves? That posed the post-war era’s first great moral dilemma. Even bolstered by fresh forces from the African Union, the massive, but combat-exhausted armies of the Global Democratic Alliance would struggle to occupy a nation of one billion hungry and devastated people—particularly if those people were non-compliant, or even hostile. That was to say nothing about the necessity of occupying Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and the other minor Axis partner states.
Meanwhile, there was a potential solution staring the Allies in the face. To mitigate the risks of that massive task, could the Allies make use of the CCP’s hated and feared behavioral control technology? Or would that be betraying the very ideals for which the war had been fought and won at such terrible cost?
Perhaps it was. But in the end, the Allied governments, with advice from their military commanders, decided that it was the only way to avoid the loss of all those things they had fought for. So, for the time being, the Allies retained control of the implant networks in the former Axis states, implementing as unintrusive a program of behavior modification as possible—simple prohibitions against using violence to resist Allied occupation and security forces, without attempting to instill loyalty to the new regime. Even this limited use prompted some protests from the more high-minded and idealistic among the Allied populations; but most were so exhausted by the war, and so fearful of the conflict resuming, that they accepted it without compunction.
While that measure obviated a potentially devastating popular insurgency against the Allies, it did not fully settle the war’s debts. Perhaps nothing could; but something needed to be done. In the countries that had suffered under Axis invasion and occupation—and amongst much of the former Axis populations as well—relief at the end of the war was intermingled with rage at those responsible for starting it. Countless millions cried out for justice, or for revenge.
Of course, those most responsible for beginning the world war were already dead. Chairman Shang of the CCP had been killed in the Battle of Beijing; his original Chief of Staff, Fang Wenyan, he had already executed for treason; his second, Bohai Liu, had taken his own life even as his master was being annihilated in an Allied orbital strike. Most of the other senior PLA and CCP members responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity had also been killed, executed, or committed suicide.
The headquarters, and most of the factories and labs, of GeneTech and EnHuman—the megacorporations responsible for developing transhuman technology for the PRC, thus in part creating the conditions that made the war possible—had been destroyed in Allied air and missile strikes in 2059 and 2060. The founders and original board members of both corporations had been arrested after the CCP took direct control of the companies in 2058, and were executed on Shang’s orders during a frenzy of such sentences in the dark summer of 2060.
Meanwhile, most of the lower and middle ranking members of these two organizations could plead diminished capacity—and unlike after the previous world war, the plea of “I was only following orders” carried much more weight now, since officers and apparatchiks at these levels all had implants in their brains which meant they had, literally, had no choice but to obey. Some of these were still tried regardless, in the numerous war crimes trials that would follow the end of the fighting, but most were acquitted for that reason.
Still, some higher ranking PRC leadership had survived, and without any control implants conveniently absolving them of responsibility for their actions. Similarly, the high ranking members of North Korea’s ruling communist party had mostly survived the war, the sole exception being the last dictator of the Kim family, who had allegedly committed suicide in the war’s closing days, but may in fact have been assassinated. As part of the process of dismantling the CCP, the DPRK, and the PLA, these were put on trial starting in 2062, most in Hong Kong by a joint Allied tribunal, while others were extradited to the specific states where their crimes had occurred to stand trial there. Most were found guilty; some were executed, others sentenced to life imprisonment.
The highest ranking officer of the PLA to survive the war was Field Marshal Jin Tao, commander of the Eastern Army Group, and later of the defenses of Europe and Western China. Jin Tao had been the general officer most respected by his Allied opponents, both for his skill as a battle commander, and for the conduct of his armies in the field, which were far less prone to atrocity than those of his comrades. Furthermore, Jin Tao had surrendered his forces the moment the opportunity presented itself in early 2061, and even shed the blood of fellow PLA officers to make sure it stuck.
Nonetheless, as the last surviving PLA Field Marshal, he could not have hoped to escape a trial. Besides which, his forces had been responsible for many civilian deaths, particularly in Japan in 2054, when he presided over the destruction of Hiroshima and Okayama, and when his forces had followed their orders to launch tactical nuclear strikes against the Indian Army in Myanmar and Tibet in 2060. It was for these actions, as well as for the crime of making wars of aggression against the other states of the world, that he was tried in late 2062. But while he was convicted of this last charge, and sentenced for it to fifteen years in an Allied prison, he was acquitted on charges of crimes against humanity, when his defense team pointed out the many Chinese cities destroyed in combat, and the Allied use of tactical nuclear weapons against civilian areas.
Jin Tao would serve out his sentence without protest in Japan; by the time of his release, he had become a popular figure in the Allied memory of the war, much like Germany’s Erwin Rommel had after the Second World War—accurately or not, characterized as a relatively noble and unwilling, but highly effective, servant of an evil regime.
The situation was more complex in Russia and Iran. In the latter case, Iran’s civilian government had overthrown the Ayatollah’s regime on their own, and killed the men they claimed were responsible for joining the Axis, starting the war, and perpetrating the many atrocities against occupied civilians, particularly in Israel. But as with higher ranking members in the PRC and the DPRK, the pleas of total innocence from President Karimi and his followers rang somewhat hollow. After extended and bitter wrangling between the reconstituted government of Israel and the interim Iranian government, which the GDA had to step in to settle in 2063, Karimi and the other political leaders were put on trial in Tehran, while surviving generals and officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard suspected of war crimes stood trial in Tel Aviv.
Most of the latter were found guilty of the numerous massacres committed in Israel from 2054 - 59, and were executed. Karimi was found guilty of aiding and abetting the Ayatollah’s regime in starting the war, and in various crackdowns against occupied populations and the Iranians themselves during the revolt that helped end the conflict. But no evidence could be found that Karimi had personally signed off on any of the massacres. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but was released just after the conclusion of the First Contact Crisis in 2082. By then, his reputation had been largely rehabilitated; he was remembered in Iran as one of the heroes who finally toppled the Ayatollah’s regime, while his reputation in Israel, and the rest of the world, remained much more mixed.
Russia was the only Axis country whose head of state at the start of the war was still alive at its end. Viktor Lavrov had been a more-than-willing participant in the early years of the conflict, working closely with Chairman Shang on orchestrating the crises that precipitated it. Only once the war turned against the Axis did Lavrov begin to question Russia’s role, and only once defeat became inevitable did he make his sole contribution to peace: resigning the presidency rather than ordering a potentially apocalyptic strategic nuclear launch.
If he had hoped that this would be enough to save him in the post-war order, he was mistaken. While the Russian leadership had received promises that they would not be prosecuted by the GDA or any other international court in exchange for an armistice, the deal had made no provisions about any national courts. Just a few months after the war in China ended in 2061, the restored Ukrainian government charged Lavrov and most of Russia’s surviving general officers with war crimes, and crimes against humanity. In a gesture of goodwill—and under ambiguous, but significant pressure from the GDA—the new provisional government of the Russian Republic extradited these men to Ukraine.
The generals were all found guilty of a decade’s worth of war crimes and crimes against humanity, in Ukraine and throughout Europe. Some were even convicted of crimes dating back to the First Russo-Ukrainian War (2022 - 2027). Lavrov was additionally convicted of waging aggressive war. All were executed by the Ukrainians later that same year.
Prime Minister Anatoly Nabokov, who had taken over from Lavrov in 2058 and officially surrendered to the Allies, was similarly convicted of waging aggressive war. But no evidence could be found linking him to specific crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Russian Republic in 2063; but like his colleague President Karimi, he was released after the First Contact Crisis. Though, unlike Karimi, he was not seen as a hero by his fellow Russians, and died in obscurity a few years later.
Such was the fate of those responsible for the war. But what of the victors? The Global Democratic Alliance had won a total victory over their enemies; all the states of the Authoritarian Axis lay prostrate at their feet, much as the previous century’s Axis nations had at the feet of the Allies in 1945. Yet this time, the world’s victorious democracies did not have to look across an Iron Curtain at one more totalitarian super power, sharing in the ultimately incomplete victory. This time, it seemed, democracy and liberty had truly triumphed. And once again, people dared to hope that that triumph might be made permanent—that the Third World War might really, finally, have been the war to end all wars.
Yet, there was no guarantee that this would come to pass. True, the world’s last few authoritarian states—those that had remained neutral in the war—were small, weak, trembling at the unassailable might of the GDA; none could hope to resist the new order of the world. But the fact of being democracies of varying description was no guarantee that the states in the Alliance would agree on how the new world should be ordered. Indeed, beyond a basic commitment to democratic principles, a general agreement that another world war must at all costs be avoided, and a vow that transhuman totalitarianism must never again be permitted to rise from the ash heap of history, there was little that the Allies did agree upon.
Still, that might prove enough of a starting point for a new era of global unity. And so, even as they were drafting new democratic constitutions for the former Axis powers, the chief Allied governments convened to determine just how much unity the world could stand.
The United States, against all mid-century expectations, had once again emerged from world war as the Earth’s premiere superpower. The war had lasted so long that President Isaac Hanson, who had been inaugurated just before the start of the war in Europe, left office at the end of his second term a few months before the victory at Beijing in 2061. He was succeeded by his vice president, the even more bellicose, anti-Axis Andrea Winters, who won the election of 2060 on a promise to carry the war to victory against the PRC by any means necessary, and to ensure that they were prevented from ever again threatening world peace.
Having done that, she and her closest allies were now positioned to craft that peace. Those allies included India’s prime minister Chandra Ravel, Canadian Prime Minister Sanjay Levesque, President Braxton Brown of Australia, Japanese Prime Minister Otsuka Taro, and British Prime Minister Frances Nicholson. After its horrific ordeal in the war against Pakistan in 2052, India had emerged as the world’s second great power, while—in even greater defiance of pre-war expectations—Canada had become the third.
Even these powers had a wide range of expectations about the shape a new global unity should take—before the increasingly divergent wishes of smaller Allied powers like Brazil and the reconstituted European states, and the newer additions from the African Union, were taken into account. Some, like Japan’s Otsuka and Britain’s Nicholson, argued for the formation of some kind of federated global union state, which would hold worldwide elections for executive and legislative bodies, but whose powers over the domestic affairs of member nations would be limited.
Given what later occurred in Earth’s history, this might seem a prescient proposal; but in 2062, it was a completely impractical one. The world was still shattered from its wartime ordeal, and holding global elections of even the most basic kind would have been a chaotic affair at the very best. Besides which, many once-neutral nations, as well as some of the Allied powers—including, most crucially, the United States—had no interest in submitting to any kind of world government just yet, even one with limited powers.
Similarly, the proposal from India’s Ravel to simply transition the Alliance into a new United Nations—a forum for international dialogue and cooperation, which unlike its predecessor would not be corrupted by the membership of powerful authoritarian states—seemed not to go far enough. Even accounting for that change, the previous UN had lacked the teeth necessary to prevent global conflicts from erupting, or to manage the rise of totalitarianism and other threats to human freedom.
Ultimately, a joint compromise proposal from Canada’s Levesque and Australia's Brown won this early stage of global negotiation. In this formulation, the Global Democratic Alliance would remain just that: an alliance. It would simply be made permanent, like the old pre-war NATO, rather than a wartime exigency. Technically, no new treaties would even have to be signed; the member nations’ various legislative bodies would simply have to enshrine the existing treaties in law as permanent fixtures of national policy. New nations could be added to the Alliance by the same process, while those who did not wish to formally join would be permitted to remain neutral—at least in theory. In practice, all global incentives and pressures would virtually force the remaining neutral nations to join over the next decade and a half, or else be left increasingly far behind as the rest of the world moved on.
Nor was the new GDA simply an expansion of the old NATO and similar treaty organizations. Over the course of the war, the Alliance had gradually integrated the military command structures and diplomatic corps of its member states to a degree never before achieved. Trade policy had even begun to be coordinated by the end of the war; this all meant that the post-war GDA would, in effect, be a sort of world government in all but name. It was simply that its powers would be limited almost entirely to military and foreign affairs, and it would remain subject to the domestically elected governments of its member states.
Furthermore, in addition to its joint military command structure, the GDA already included a standing forum for the ambassadors of the member states to meet and hash out political and economic issues, and occasionally to resolve bilateral disputes between members over non-military policy. This would have formed the basis of the New United Nations in the Indian proposal; now, it would serve a similar purpose as a global diplomatic forum, but backed up by the joint military might of the Alliance.
As an international compromise, and as a tentative first post-war step, this would do. At least, it would be sufficient to stave off any further interstate armed conflict for the foreseeable future. The existing member states of the GDA ratified the new, permanent alliance by 2065. Over the next few years, most of the world’s remaining neutral states would also bow to the increasing, passive pressure of the GDA and join. The former Axis states, once their post-war democratic governments were functioning with at least a modicum of stability, were also permitted to join the Alliance, starting with the Iranian Parliament in 2069, the Russian Republic in 2071, and finally the Chinese Federation in 2072.
This was the beginning of a new era of unprecedented global peace and unity—but it was not the beginning of the end of history. Long before ink had even touched paper on the last two treaty ratifications, cracks had begun to appear in the façade of world peace—cracks which were merely the surface expressions of deep divisions between the victorious democracies. This was not entirely unexpected; in the decade after the war ended, the world was still reeling from its devastation, and the new global order was still new. It was only natural that it would chafe under the strain of reconstruction. With time, and great effort, the cracks might be plastered over, the divisions beneath them gradually healed.
Or perhaps, they would continue to widen. Perhaps the cracks would become fissures, then gulfs—then these might become unbridgeable. The bonds of the Global Democratic Alliance were not forged of iron; they would hold only if the governments, and people, of the world believed they could, and should. If that belief waned, they would break—and the world might once again descend into animosity, chaos, and war.
But what no-one on Earth in the post-war period could have guessed was that the crucial events which would determine the viability of world peace would not occur on Earth at all. For though we did not yet realize it, humankind was not alone in the universe. We were not even alone in our own Solar System. For years, alien minds had been regarding Earth with a range of emotions and intentions: pity, fear, curiosity, and others which we would neither recognize, nor understand.
As the Third World War was coming to an end, some of these minds decided that the time to make their presence known had finally come. And neither Earth, nor humanity, would ever be the same again.
POST-SCRIPT
Thank you for listening to The Interstellar Age Season One! This foray into podcasting was an experiment for me, but a rewarding one. I hope you enjoyed the series as much as I enjoyed making it. If you did, make sure you leave a review on your preferred platform, and subscribe so you get notified when Season Two arrives!
On that note—there will be a hiatus between Seasons One and Two, most likely of a few months. I have the first few episodes of the season written, but I’m currently busy recording and producing the audiobook for my upcoming novel set in this universe, Lessons of War, which will be debuting on Kickstarter this April, and releasing this summer. As I’m very much a one-man-band, I can only manage producing one audio product at a time, and right now the book has to take priority.
Once that’s finished, I’ll be able to jump right back into creating The Interstellar Age Season Two: Not Alone. This will be a big departure from the (largely) more grounded near-future of the first season, leaning increasingly into the sci-fi elements. It was always my intention to have the history of this universe, and thus this podcast, evolve gradually from a very recognizable version of our own present, to a much more advanced, classic sci-fi universe, charting every step of the way. I hope you’re ready for that ride!
In the meantime, if you’d like more information on my work, head over to www.dylanmcfadyen.com. There you can pick up a couple of free books, and sign up to get updates on my future releases, including this podcast.
Thank you again, and see you in the future!
Wow.