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This is one HELL of a long alt history.....but it is worth it....wickedly good..

..

On June 9, 1953, Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker, Defense Minister Dalton Camp, Walter Zinn, and General Henry Crerar are among the crowd of Canadian dignitaries gathered aboard the Canadian destroyer Isacc Brock, currently in the Foxe Basin between Baffin Island and the Melville Peninsula on the mainland of Labrador.

Just before noon, they witness Canada's entry into the nuclear age when the fission bomb "CA-1" detonates on nearby Prince Charles Island. Three years in the making, the bomb detonates with the force of thirty thousand tons of TNT. Canada doesn't have much of a delivery system for the bomb, but B-36s built under license just after WWII, taking off from various parts of Canada (the Yukon, Newfoundland, and Ontario) can carry nuclear weapons to any potential enemies, so Diefenbaker is content.

CA-1 is a propaganda coup for his government; Canada's economy isn't very strong, and the main accomplishments of Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives have been the adoption of a new national flag and the emancipation (on a federal level) of Native Canadians. But the newly-named "Atomic Prime Minister" has a monument much like him, big and noisy and impressive, and he begins a new series of programs, including construction of nuclear power plants to replace coal. (Regrettably, like many of Diefenbakers' OTL ideas, he hasn't entirely thought the matter through.)

-President Kennedy congratulates Canada on their technological achievement, but quietly has the American radar bases in North Dakota, Alaska, and New England cast a slightly suspicious electronic eye on the Great White North. Canada is the first nuclear power that the United States shares a hemisphere with, and even the basic good relations between the two can't overcome Joe Kennedy Jr's suspicions, especially given Diefenbaker's unabashed Anglophilia. (Diefenbaker's rhetoric during the Sicilian Crisis even outmatched Churchill's.)

Kennedy privately urges Treasury Secretary Tobin and Commerce Secretary Daley to direct American foreign trade away from Canada; as much as can be done without actually hurting the US, at least, given the tight interconnectedness of the two nation's economies. If Diefenbaker wants nuclear weapons and likes the UK better than the US, fine, that's what he'll get. Kennedy also accelerates the development of federally funded power plants in the Northeast, in a plan to lower American dependence on Canadian electrical power.

Re-reads. Too long. Forget it Shep.

Illuminatus Primus wrote:Re-reads. Too long. Forget it Shep.

Not even when NUKES FLY AROUND?

The attacks come north of Palayan [Phillipines] on October 3, 1953, by carrier aircraft launched from the U.S.S. David Farragut. There are three of them, all clustered within a triangle ten miles on a side, a radio communications center, a munitions depot, and a road junction. All are actually well away from the front, in territory easily accesible and inspectable by the Huk forces. The attacks come within an hour of each other between 5:40 and 6:56 PM (EST), and the bombs detonated are 110- kiloton warhead per target. All are shattered beyond repair.

By 10 AM (EST) on the 4th, after the senior Huk leadership has had time to either inspect or receive reports of the damage, Joseph Kennedy Jr. addresses the United States and the Philippines live by particularly powerful and relayed radio. (The US gets the TV broadcast as well.) Kennedy announces the use of nuclear weapons in Luzon and promises destruction of all enemy targets, by nuclear weapons, by the end of 1953, until and unless the Hukabulahap surrenders.

He goes on: "There are those watching or listening to this broadcast, in Moscow or London, Beijing or Paris who may compare this to the unprovoked atrocities of the past administration. However, let me make one thing perfectly clear. The United States is no longer in the business of killing civilians without cause or purpose. The nuclear weapons used last night on the Communist bases in Luzon were used for the same purpose as the nuclear weapons used on Germany and Japan in the last war; to destroy the military might of the enemy and to show him the strength of our resolve. If you are prepared to call our actions on Luzon an atrocity, if you are prepared to call myself, Secretary Morse, or General Westmoreland warmongers or butchers, then you must call the destruction of Hitler and Tojo an atrocity, you must call Robert Taft, Secretary William Donovan, and General Omar Bradley warmongering butchers. I have seen the face of war, as have many of my viewers and listeners. It is a hideous, ugly thing, something no man, whatever his creed or color, should face. But if war must come, it must be fought with every weapon available, and it must end quickly."

-Shortly after Kennedy's broadcast, American carrier bombers and ground artillery begin a large-scale bombardment of Huk-controlled territory with chemical weapons, mostly mustard gas. Chemical weapons are nothing new in warfare in the mid-20th century, they saw moderate use in WWII and heavy use in the Indochine War, the Italian Civil War, Operation COPPER, and essentially every major conflict since 1945.

The US has never used them to this extent, however, and they're actually outrunning existing stocks, they've only six months of heavy fighting's worth left in the entire American arsenal. Kennedy's government isn't being stupid; they have to show force ...because they're running one of the larger bluffs in American military history.

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On August 1, 1954, [The Premier of the USSR] makes a rare move; a televised address, from his office, to the people of Yugoslavia and Greece. If they do not remove their leaders by the middle of the month, he will do it for them, by the most terrible means known to man. Tito and Markos take their gamble and bet that if Joseph Stalin only used nuclear weapons once in wartime, the old shoemaker from Kiev and Turkestan will do no such thing. And if the Red Army does invade, well, they've won guerilla wars before. They issue a blistering reply.

-Kaganovich knows that for all Sudoplatov's security services are good, they're not that good, and anything the Soviet Union has will eventually get out to the West. Better to release the information publicly, and in a way to impress the other Soviet client states: this is what happens when you go up against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, when you break treaty and cause a war. Too, he has to prove to the world that he's as tough as Joseph Kennedy Jr....and more power. Markos is next on his list, if he resists, but Tito is the center, the focal point of the conspiracy.

Two weeks after Tito and Markos dare him to do his worst, he does. At 8:45 AM local time, a high-level Soviet bomber detonates a 10-megaton hydrogen bomb in the skies over Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Roughly 500,000 people live in the relatively densely packed Croat city. Much of it is on the flat flood plain of the Savo River. Most people are on the street, going to work.

On May 2, 1956, Admiral Francois Darlan dons his full dress uniform. Commander of the French armed forces, head of state, head of government, hero of World War II, he shines with medals like the sun as he watches it set over Paris. His family is in Tahiti; they've been vacationing there for quite some time. It's safe, after all, and he takes care of his own.

And himself. His intestinal cancer (oddly one of the few diseases safer for the elderly than the young) has been getting worse and worse; the drugs have begun to impair his faculties, but the constant pain does so even worse. There are no treatments, and he thinks of old friends who died slow, painful deaths. No, that's not for him. No one will humiliate l'admiral.

Just before sunset, Admiral Francois Darlan puts his service pistol in his mouth and blows the back of his head off.

For All Time Pt. 73

May-September 1956

-Admiral Francois Darlan's government, built on efficiency and order as it is, survives him easily. His chief of staff and designated successor, General Raoul Salan, alleged hero of Algeria, takes the reigns of power by the end of the week; May 9, 1956. Conscious of his image, he addresses the nation live on the radio and infant television, announcing "A New Hundred Days, but these shall last forever, for the glory of France."

Salan knows full well that Darlan's death was a suicide; he'd been close to the old admiral and knew of his despair over his failing health. The remnants of the French free press is calling for new elections, though, and there's only one way to silence them. Hunt the murderers of the National Hero.

Beniot Franchon is dragged from his prison cell and guillotined publicly on May 12, while Maurice Thorez (in his Romanian exile) says a prayer of thanks that he got out when the getting was good. In Salan's first 100 days, perhaps five thousand opposition politicians, newspapermen, anyone who had too noisily criticized the government are publicly executed, all in the central square of whatever city they live in, most of them after public trials by Jo Ortiz, Salan's favorite civilian.

Some would call it a Second Reign of Terror, if they weren't dead or terrified for their lives. Even after the Hundred Days are over, Salan still moves, but now abroad. He detonates three atomic bombs in Algeria and French West Africa each, concentrating them against civilian targets, specifically food distribution centers. (This is a bit of a risk, France's specifically-controlled nuclear arsenal is only a dozen bombs and the half-finished "Charles II" in the Sudan desert.)


.......

7/4/1959 Yokohama, Japan - Various

Certainly the most famous photograph of the late 1950s is Frank G. Powers' Rex coming in for a landing at the last American base in the Far East, the engines that carried her on her flight of thousands of miles at an altitude just above sub-orbital still glowing with a kind of nuclear fire. The Extremely High-Level Bomber project has succeeded, somewhat. The Rex and her three compatriots can carry a bomb-load of a ton on a good day...that is, if bombs suitable had been built.

The picture, of course, does not include the radiation plume that followed the Rex from Nevada to Japan, nor the dead fish, nor the upswing in cancer patients in California and Japan. Still, for better or for worse, the world has entered the Space Age, sort of.

Of course, a variety of events that would prove important later aren't caught on film. In late 1959, an anonymous Soviet advisor to rebel forces in the Congo returns home, broken in health after being badly wounded in an ambush. Only a blood donation from a clinic deep in the jungle saved his life, and so even as he descends into morphine addiction and alcoholism he (he will be transferred through several posts in Poland and Bulgaria before finally recieving a Kremlin desk job) donates a pint every three weeks to his local blood bank.

Intresting

As the campaign goes on, President Kennedy suddenly finds himself having to telegraph the same congratulations he extended to John Diefenbaker a few years earlier. On August 4, 1960, on an uninhabited rock in the Cook Islands, Australia and New Zealand jointly enter the nuclear age when a 50-kiloton warhead detonates to the cheers of onlookers aboard local Anzac vessels.

The decidely unlikely alliance of Walter Nash and Robert Menzies has produced a nuclear weapon and program, soon Anzac vessels armed with nuclear weapons are docked at the major ports of the various Australian and New Zealand allies in the vast Indonesian archipelago, even the less-than-popular People's Republic of Java.

***********

On March 1, 1961, Maurice Challe declares the war in Algeria over. It's not quite over, of course, anymore than the Philippine Insurrection was in 1907, but significant, organized, actually threatening resistance to the French government and colonists is over. Perhaps fifty thousand French soldiers have died in the years of fighting since the end of World War II, making the Algerian War the bloodiest colonial war of the late 20th century.

The key to French victory has been famine, the kind deliberately caused by the Darlan and Salan goverments and encouraged by the use of tactical nuclear weapons on food distribution centers in the heartland of Algeria's Muslim population. (France has used far more nuclear weapons than any other nation on Earth as of 1961.) Perhaps a third of Algeria's Muslim population of seven million is dead of hunger, with a million dead of combat on top of that, with a third of the remainder fled into the various independent nations surrounding Algeria. Some have even slipped across the border into French West Africa, to join a struggle for independence that's doing a bit better than theirs.

***********************************

On October 3, 1961, the Supreme Court is discussing the constitutionality of a new state income tax leveled by the state of Kansas in 1960. There are legitimate legal issues; questions of the state unfairly penalizing various private businesses (under pressure from the administration, the Kefauver Court has defended businesses against the encroaching government like no Supreme Court since the "Nine Old Men" of Hoover's day), and that's essentially the only reason why the nation's highest court took the case. The plaintiff's chief attorney is a rather dislikeable man named Fred Phelps, and he had filed hundreds of briefs on every imaginable subject from his tiny Topeka office before this one happened to get past the appellate courts.

Still, they've all seen worse in their careers on the bench or in politics, and the ultimate 6-3 decision has far more to do with the fact that Kansas' grocery warehouses really aren't hurt that badly by a tax of a few percentage points on their annual revenues than the odiousness of Fred Phelps, the former vacumn salesman. Hugo Black, one of the last great relics of Rooseveltian liberalism, delivers the decision himself as the sun begins to set outside. His words are clear, calm, and remarkably concise.

Before the last echoes of his words die, before Black can even turn to exit the room, Fred Phelps, bigot and racist, at once an anti-Semite and white supremacist (a rare combination in a world where blacks and Jews speak a kind of nearly-open racism between each other), the unsuccessful lawyer who has waited years for the chance to get past Supreme Court security and strike a blow for his very Aryan-looking God, pulls out a revolver and fire three times, not at all wildly. The red drapes are suddenly redder.

-The South roars to life with celebratory parades; Hugo Black has been a traitor there for years, even more so than Kefauver. The former Klansman's turn to liberalism on racial issues once on the Court took a lot of people by surprise; and it wasn't a very pleasant one for his supporters in Alabama, or in the rest of the South. President Kennedy just manages to avoid attending one during his national tour at Mississippi, for all that he didn't think much of the old Southern populist, he's horrified at the very first assasination of a Supreme Court Justice.

Reluctantly, Kennedy delays his national tour indefinitely, returning home to Washington within the week. Taking the advice of FBI Director Purvis, Attorney General Pepper, and following the precedents of past administrations, Kennedy declares martial law in the District of Columbia, calling in troops from Fort Meade to keep the peace.

Fred Phelps's already tenous hold on the universe has slipped even more in custody, his stories about the "Army of the One White God" has every judge in America watching their backs. Kennedy has just had time to nominate John Connally (acceptable to both conservatives and Southerners, plus it helps please Texas) to replace Black when the fan is well and truly struck.

-The black community's reaction is surprisingly muted at first; Black was respected by moderates, but moderates are a minority in 1961; to some he was simply paternalistic and out of touch, to others he was something worse, a hypocritical c******. But the mixture of white triumphalism and those few moderates willing to mourn Hugo Black publicly soon produces that thing so familiar, black and white mobs clashing in America's major cities. Before the middle of September, the radicals have gladly joined their brethern on the streets, before the end of the month, the riots have exploded all through America's major cities again. As with so many riots, by the end of the month, few of the people robbing and looting and brawling have ever heard of Hugo Black.

President Kennedy's horror is the only thing that mounts faster than the national rage; yes, this will make re-election in 1964 ever so much easier. This will not be the Kennedy legacy, he vows, his term will not end the way his predecessor's did, on a wave of violence and hate. Still, he must take measures, and he declares martial law in the riot-torn areas and cities. American soldiers have now spent nearly as much time policing their own cities as they have fighting wars after World War II; and they go into the situation thinking they know what they're about.

But this is a new type of disturbance for the new decade, both groups are organized. The White Citizens Councils in nearly every state are armed, militant, and ready. (Especially the New York chapter; while Ariel Sharon is viewed as something like a devil to his counterparts in Mississippi and Alabama, in an enviroment where the head of International Communism is pretty well openly Jewish, he is good at what he does.) While they are, of course, a minority, they provide a hard, professional edge to the white mobs that rampage across the tracks in Birmingham, Columbia, Atlanta, and help whip up the same in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

African-Americans are organized well too, though, the ecumenical mergers (especially the bridges built to the Islamic community) have given the leadership of various militant civil rights groups: King's African Ecumenical Council, Malcom X. Little's People of the Book, and countless others an edge of organization and unity absent earlier in the decade. Too, there are more geniune fanatics now, and while no one is quite willing to emulate Cassius X and his suicide bombing of a Chicago synagogue on November 17, he is soon the idol of every young, mad black man.

Thus it is that when blood runs in the streets, darkening the snows of November and December 1961, it comes from Southern white bigots, Jewish gangsters/ politicians (the two are inextricably linked in many places at this point, it will take the politicians of a later generation, one raised in the United States, to untangle that noose), Black Muslims, Black Christians, National Guardsmen...and, of course, the primary victim of any civil disturbance: Innocent people.

Hum...it only runs up to post-Korea and stops.

It's interesting, though.

Ohh, this is For All Time, the ultimate dystopia. Now it all becomes clear

(Though Shattered World is close - that's one nasty WW2)