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Description
Based on Howard Waldrop and Jake Saunder's "The Texas-Israeli War: 1999"

In 2013, world population, after bottoming out at under four hundred million, is once again on the grow. A number of the nastier plagues have burned themselves out, although the endemic diseases remain a serious drag on population growth, and many of the genetically engineered bacteria, fungi, and viruses, effective as they may have been as crop destroyers, lacked the millions of years of experience an evolved species has, and have been handily dispatched by competition from wild varieties. Seed banks are proving useful as varieties of grain too uncommon or exotic to have been targeted by bioweapons are grown in place of now endangered pre-war breeds.

For most of the human race, however, life remains hard, to say the least, the collapse in global trade (only very slowly picking up now) and the breakdown in global communications having precipitated many people into an essentially pre-industrial lifestyle, shortage of farming machinery and oil making back-breaking farming work the norm for millions of former white-collar workers and urbanites. Most governments are dictatorships or “governments of emergency” with no clear definition of when the emergency will end, and you can scarcely beat off the religious apocalyptics with a stick. Much of the globe, particularly in Africa, has no real government beyond the purely local level. Huge regions have largely returned to wilderness, and innumerable abandoned ghost towns litter the landscape.

Global society, whatever “social fabric” existed, has been badly frayed. After a die-off comparable to plague-afflicted native American societies, so many families have been almost wiped out that people have banded together with other survivors to make shaky, makeshift new clans to take the place of support structures no longer existing. All sorts of odd cults and societies and associations and gangs have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain, as people have sought something to take the place of loneliness and isolation. Even in the US, much of the country is run by various makeshift local associations, thanks to the lack of anything resembling functional local government surviving from the pre-war era. Some are good people: some are quite politically sophisticated: others are barely a step up from street gangs. (The Federal government, with far too much on its plate, usually looks the other way as long as basic order is maintained and mass starvation isn’t taking place). Warlord states are common, although one man’s warlord may be another’s tough, no-nonsense leader.

Massive population losses have badly impacted industry, due to the deaths of required skilled personnel, labor shortages, and decay of infrastructure and unused factory stock when there were no longer enough people to keep it maintained. Having a high-tech product dependent on a hundred different suppliers each producing vital parts has become rather impractical, and a great deal of simplification and combination have taken place. Industrial production has shrunk even faster than populations, and countries such as the US and Soviet Union are struggling to keep themselves from slipping technologically back out of the 20th century altogether. (They certainly haven’t made it to the 21st). The US aircraft industry, for instance, today is a delicate and fragile bud, a painfully limited net of centers of production building relatively tiny numbers of military and civilian planes simply to keep the equipment operational and maintain skills and employment. Air travel has been largely replaced by trains where tracks still exist: keeping 20 year old planes flying with the limited talent pool still available is risky, and the small current passenger air fleet tends to have third world-ish levels of fatal crashes. Of course, things are generally worse in what used to be the actual Third World, where people are often lucky if they can manage to maintain steam-age technology.

Long-range trade is slowly picking up, as people reinvent the coal-powered steamship-with-sails-on, but things are complicated by an abundance of pirates and a lack of standard exchange rates, along with the abundance of governments who will just vanish you and your boat.

WWIII officially lasted from 1992 to 2002, when General Shen crushed the last of the Chinese “independents” still fighting the US and the Treaty of San Francisco was signed, but after about ’95 it was mostly a matter of crippled men hitting each other with bladders, both sides too badly damaged to finish the other off, but unwilling to admit their incapacity. (And some small groups continued to fight the war with terrorist actions for years after, while some of the local conflicts touched off by the war are still grinding on).

This world had seen massive cutbacks in atomic arsenals (the world’s nations had gotten serious about nuclear disarmament after the US-Soviet Near Miss of ’81) , but also a violent “second wave” of red radical revolution in the 70s and 80s, with Mao’s successors in China (after his unfortunate “accident” of ’74) following a more technocratic but hardly less militant line: by the late 80s US-Soviet Détente had begun to move towards US-Soviet entente as the new Chinese regime modernized its military, far more successfully than under Mao, and came to largely take over leadership of the militant left worldwide.

Still, it was generally assumed that sanity would win out and the world would safely make it through the 90s, so people were rather flummoxed at the outbreak of war between the Chinese-Indian-Andean-Arab-South African-bits of Africa block (the Afrikaners allying themselves with China caught everyone by surprise, but in retrospect it made a certain insane sense the enemy-of-my enemy sense, and Mao’s second successor certainly was a few cards short of a full deck) and the US-Commonwealth-bits of Europe-bits of Africa-rest of South America/USSR-Warsaw Pact-bits of Africa-Cuba blocks.

If the whole thing seemed insane, it must be understood that the major figures in kicking off the apocalypse actually were insane, if only for a while in most cases. It was touched off by the Irish [1] (China’s newest allies) “liberation” of British Northern Ireland, the consequent intervention by the British army, and Ireland’s (in retrospect) strategically poor choice of releasing psychoactive war drugs in major British cities, leading to a drug-addled British overreaction in the form of its small nuclear ICBM force being discharged against Ireland, South Africa, and China.

(It wasn’t until later that it came out that the Irish leader had been convinced he was the reincarnation of Brian Boru).

Things got bit confused for a while. The Soviet briefly switched sides, before the counter-coup took place. Iran tried to conquer Iraq, apparently just because. Pakistan, sick and tired of having to play nice to India, switched over to the US side. The Chinese at one point decided the Indians were planning to betray them, and launched a deniable decapitation strike. Yugoslavia launched bioweapons at Turkey, apparently in revenge for the Field of Blackbirds. Albania invaded all its neighbors. The long predicted Second Mexican revolution broke out.

Fortunately (or not), the Oslo Disarmament Accords of ’83 had set up a schedule for massive nuclear cutbacks and the destruction of all bomb factories, and by ’92 the total number of missiles was small enough that they were not a civilization-ender in themselves: and after the rather genocidal British attack on Ireland, nukes were usually used carefully, targeting military installations, power plants, industrial centers, etc., rather than just trying to kill as many people as possible. Still, tens of millions died, and tens of millions more would die later from fallout from the bombs and destroyed nuclear power plants. (The denial-of-resources attack on the Persian Gulf used a mixed approach due to the size of the area, now spotted with regions of radioactivity and covered with lethal bacterial spores that will remain viable for a couple centuries to come).

The real killers were the many and varied diseases, the most effective being the anti-food crop bioweapons: famine in the end killed more people than the many lovely varieties of flu, anthrax, tularemia, etc. The major powers, deprived of atomic weapons, had simply put some of the billions freed up by the end of large-scale bomb building to perfect bio and chemo warfare, in some cases (seeing the writing on the wall) beginning even before the Oslo Accords. The investors, it is generally agreed, got their money’s worth.

Chemical weapons were used on a large scale as well, but usually only to a limited extent on civilian populations, unless they were caught in the crossfire when a city was being stubborn about being invaded. It was soldiers that got the joy of an amazing variety of chemical attacks, toxic or psychoactive, and had the experience of waiting to find out whether the new corrosive gas the enemy was using would be able to eat through the seals on their biowarfare suits.

Israel, one of a few nations that avoided being attacked by the major combatants in WWIII (the Soviet-Arab alliance having previously gone south, they were off the Soviet target list), was only lightly hit, with no more than 5% of its population dying from diseases making their way through its carefully sealed borders or random bio and chemo attacks from Arab states in their death throes and doing a bit of from-Hell’s-Heart-striking. The agricultural crisis and the collapse of trade crisis and the train of further crises following in their wake were not pleasant: the food crisis had the Israeli population for a while living on dribbles of real food supplemented with vat yeast cultivation and the nutrients derived from the chemical breakdown of trees and shrubs. Even under these circumstances, the Israelis welcomed and tried to rescue as many foreign Jews as they could: in the end only about 2 million made it to the Promised Land, death rates among Jews in Europe and the Americas being comparable to that of the general population. (A fair number of gentiles were also allowed in from their ruined lands, as long as they had skills the Israelis seriously needed: agricultural experts, biowarfare remediation experts, chemical synthesis…)

With things being the way they were, hardly anyone raised an eyebrow when they took part in some large-scale ethnic cleansing to provide room for the incomers (it’s not like most of the people they forced out died in the process, after all: they starved later and elsewhere). Israel currently includes a (mostly Muslim-free) Sinai, West Bank, and Gaza strip, along with a good chunk of Syria and some Lebanese lands, including some nice beach-front property.

With food to import being scarce and expensive, and the occasional bioweapon still floating around and striking Israeli crops at inopportune moments, (although an effort at diversification has helped) it remained hard to reliably feed everyone, however. More land was needed, and with their neighbors one great howl of misery interspersed with calls to Allah, it might be a good idea to locate that land somewhere more stable: eggs, baskets.
Israel has therefore purchased large amounts of land for agricultural settlements in various nations they feel they can more or less trust not to go whacko anytime soon: in most cases, what with the massive dieoff, there’s plenty of empty land to go around. The main form of payment has been mercenary work, the Israeli army being perhaps the only first-class military in the world still in good order when WWIII ground to a near-halt in the mid-90s. Of late technological assistance and training has been slowly displacing military wetwork, as other nations have recovered to the point where they can start to rebuild their shattered armies.

The Israelis have also occupied a number of little islands that had crashed back pretty much to the stone age without any trade or contact with the larger world, with local reactions varying from gratitude to bitter hate.

Perhaps due to an influx of American Jews after the US collapse, Yiddish has seen a revival in Israel, and indeed has become a sort of language of protest among the young, a sly mocking of the blood and soil pretentions of the older generation. Jews and Arabs and gentiles, there are now some 12.5 million Israelis, of which some 3 million occupy some 80,000 square miles of territory abroad. Predictably, even in the US, tensions exist: supposedly it’s just a 100 year lease a la Hong Kong, and will revert to the US at the end of the period, who knows what will happen between now and 2100? The government struggles to deal with angry Americans pissed off at Israeli “colonizers” – although there is a lot more square acreage per American than before the war, due to far fewer Americans, low productivity and the long-term contamination of land with fun stuff like Anthrax spores means that fertile and not too badly contaminated land such as that the Israelis received is at a premium.

A few neutral nations here and there survived attack, but none succeeded in maintaining quarantine and battling plague outbreaks (spore-carrying winds and insect vectors care not about official borders) with Israel’s military discipline, so death tolls were invariably high, with the Swedes second best with only a 20% die-off and the Sudanese winning the award for “most disorganized response”, if such a thing were to exist. A few minor Pacific island nations did OK due to isolation and the lack of Poi-targeting diseases, although their economies promptly collapsed with the end of communications with the outside world (some of them later suffered from invasions of often heavily armed first-worlders looking for a place of refuge).

China is a dreadful mess, the official government having essentially imploded by ’97 but various factions continuing the war against the US and USSR semi-independently. General Shen, leader of the most powerful faction, put an end to that by 2002, but several large chunks of the country remained under the control of local commanders which acknowledged his leadership but continued to run their local fiefs almost as independent countries (the major state function being the extortion of food from starving peasants). As of 2013, the central government still only nominally rules over a few large areas where the local Big Men are sitting atop sizeable arsenals of unused bioweapons and therefore must be treated carefully.

There are currently only about 64 million Chinese, and unlike OTL, a majority live in the north: the US-developed anti-rice bioagent exceeded all expectations in its success in destroying the staple of southern China.

Russia is Russia, having gone back to blood-and-soil nationalism as a unifying agent rather than a faded Socialism. They currently have a border with the Chinese a little west of Lake Baikal, not having the energy to reclaim the rest of Siberia: they have also largely abandoned the chaotic mess of Central Asia. Large parts of Romania, Hungary, and Poland, on the other hand, have been annexed for their resources and less damaged areas of agricultural land. (Not entirely annexed, since the rump nations provide a useful location to shove troublesome locals over the border. It’s pricey to ship them all the way to Siberia). Rump Poland is having another famine this year: western Europeans aren’t happy about accepting hungry refugees from the east. US Poles and Hungarians and such might have protested under other circumstances, but currently have too much to worry about themselves.

Britain, having started the war while stoned out of its gourd, is internationally isolated and struggling to keep its much reduced population housed and fed. Ireland is a charnel house, and Scotland is getting antsy about the ever-receding end of the State of Emergency.

Europe was hammered, but with few nuclear weapons and the main battlefields rather far off (the Arab League’s invasion of Malta nowithstanding) they didn’t suffer any worse than the US or USSR. Unfortunately, the “feed our own first” attitudes of government rather badly damaged the solidarity of the EC nations, political authority has splintered badly. The flow of refugees from deeply messed up North Africa has been tempered by the end of regular boat and plane travel across the Med, but enough make it across in makeshift rafts and boats to be energetically oppressed on arrival.

There has been something of a religious revival, both conventional and weird: the Germans had to call on Israeli mercenaries to crush the Death-Cult, while a charismatic new Pope has created a New Holy League of ultra-Catholic nations to “restore Christian civilization.” (He’s the fifth since the war started: they kept dying for a while there, and keeping the House of Cardinals stocked led to some unorthodox selection choices: one of them is only seventeen).

Currently what was the EC is divided into the Batty Catholics, the Batty Leftists (the French Neo-Marxists mix Marxist ideas with some ideas drawn from Sarte, Mao, and according to some baffled observers, possibly the Dada movement: the Greeks have Creepy Nationalist Collectivism down to a T, and the People’s Republic of Padania seems to have an identity based less on Marx than on loathing for the old Italian Republic and particularly the South), the Central European Block (mostly-reunified if depopulated Germany and its Little Buddies), and the Nordic Block. The UK, like the cheese, stands alone. There remains (some) free trade and some mutual cooperation, but for now the EU ideal is dead as the Dodo.

The ingenious Germans found a way to make food out of coal. It still tastes awful. They are currently considering an Anschluss with Catholic-radical ruled S. Austria, but 1. That would bring them in conflict with the Papacy and the Holy League nations 2. Rile up their own Catholics and 3. That sort of thing always leads to trouble down the road.

Although the situation isn’t as bad as in Africa, there has been considerable political fragmentation in Latin America: Mexico, after a period of extreme fragmentation, is now down to three governments, although El Norte is still hotly disputed - the US government has sent (inadequate) forces to occupy and patrol the border area until things settle down. Central America is fairly warlord-ish, and although Brazil is theoretically still one country, the capital effectively controls only about a third of the nation’s area. Argentina is a dictatorship of Orwellian thoroughness, which got through the bad years through some very extreme methods (due to an unfortunate clerical error, several thousand white South African refugees arriving in Argentina got put on the wrong train and were made into sausage.)

The Arab League was ground to powder and has collapsed into pieces. Attacking Europe when your’ nearest major ally is some thousand-plus miles off probably is not a good idea. Leftist secularism has generally been replaced by Islam, as people take comfort in simple, pre-industrial answers in a collapsed world. There are exceptions, of course: the Ba’athist Lower Egyptian regime is trying to create a new totalitarian society from scratch, and all those orphans and people who have lost all that was meaningful in their lives are anything but a hindrance. The expelled Palestinians have carved out a state of their own in what was Jordan and NW Arabia, but it hasn't made them happy.

As mentioned, sub-Saharan Africa is a mess, although a functional Marxist government rules most of South Africa, after a six year struggle which ended with the last of the white population pushed into the sea and the black adult male population cut by another 60% after famine and plague. There is no oil to be had outside Nigeria (refineries are technologically tricky), although various ingenious efforts have been made to derive substitutes from vegetable products (most of which kill car engines quite fast). A civil war is ongoing in what was Ethiopia over the ownership of the Ark of the Covenant, between the top warlord and another one who claims to be the reincarnation of Menelek II. The population drop, between high birth rate, local resistance to disease, and out-competition of lab-bred nasties by natural equivalents, has not only bottomed out as elsewhere but begun to grow a bit faster than planetary average: although most modern facilities have collapsed, the population at least is still aware of basic sanitation and precautions re disease, and warlords generally make short work of anyone suspected of being a plague carrier.

(The general collapse of travel in tse-tse fly areas aside from foot, bicycle, lovingly tended wood-burning locomotive, and the occasional lunatic in a hot air balloon has at least greatly slowed the spread of AIDS compared to OTL).

Conflict still wracks the Indian sub-continent, although most of the equipment used by this point resembles stuff that would be familiar to veterans of the 1857 revolt (plus Molotov cocktails). The neutral south is fairly quiet, the locals being more concerned with where their next meal is coming from than Maoism or religious fundamentalism of either the Hindu or Muslim variety, and hope the north will exhaust itself before paying close attention to them.
Afghanistan, never invaded by the USSR in this world, after a massive population drop is not doing too badly in the 18th century.

The crazed, black slime-oozing cannibals roaming SE Asia aren’t actually zombies: they’re much more contagious, for one thing.

Australians are still finding dried-out Indonesian corpses in the northern deserts: with the collapse of centralized government back home and the corresponding disruption of supplies, the Indonesian “occupation forces” slowly died on the vine, although a few regional Indonesian regimes supply enough of a trickle for a few half-starved pockets to hang on: the Aussies plan to finish them if Indonesia ever looks like it’s going to get its act together. New Zealand came through the famines better than other places, although by now the locals are sick of mutton. (And they still don’t know why anyone would waste one of their limited stock of atom bombs on Christchurch.)

Japan, somewhat to their surprise, managed to beat off two Chinese invasion attempts, although they lost Hokkaido. The destruction of their food supply was more of a problem, given that there was nowhere to flee where things were not as bad or worse, but the Japanese submitted to the government triage program with typical acceptance of the inevitable and a well-internalized commitment to not make waves. All in all, the inevitable reduction of population was carried out with much greater efficiency and far less violence than the Argentine program, and the recycling program yielded a far more refined product.

Soylent Green is Japanese.

The US, population 28 million (not actually too bad by world death-toll standards), is slowly recovering. The last stubborn Chinese holdouts were supposedly rooted out of the Alaskan wilderness by 2005. In theory the whole country is once again united, although re-conquered Texas is still restless, and admittedly the West Coast is currently almost as self-governing as the Chinese warlords, although they have been polite enough to not actually declare independence and just ignore federal officials rather than imprison them. Large areas where low density populations had previously kept afloat mostly thanks to an advanced infrastructure, good internal communications, a steady flow of all sorts of goods and services, etc., have become depopulated: starving plains farmers unable to get much in the way of support with everyone else in the same mess have migrated (when oil shortages allowed them to) to areas where more dense populations and urban industrial areas have helped keep a tenuous modernity alive. Large chunks of the Rocky Mountain west have become essentially no-man’s land. A couple Indian nations have declared their independence, or at least autonomy. And then there’s Utah…

Communications are bad: very limited oil supplies mean that transportation of goods by truck isn’t economically possible, and the trains – retrofitted to run again on coal and wood – cannot reach many areas due to the condition of the railways, which are only slowly being extended and repaired. Even where they haven’t been abandoned outright, large pockets of the country are almost out of communication with the rest of the nation save for a few still functional modern radios, river rafts, and foot runners. (Horses were mostly hit by the plagues or eaten during the worst years: the few that remain are too valuable for farm work to risk on the dangerous roads). The government tries to distribute components for simple crystal whisker radios to improve communications, but it is hard to get them where they are needed, even in the better off parts of the country.

On the positive side, production is up both in artificial fertilizers and pesticides (highly toxic, yes, but nobody gives a shit about baby birds under present circumstances), although, again, distribution to about 50% of the country remains problematic. The construction of hermetically sealed greenhouses has also helped, and productivity is also up simply because people have abandoned those lands too badly contaminated with long-lasting lethal spores, bacterial and otherwise. Although most of the population survives through back-breaking labor in conditions little advanced on a mid-19th century level of existence, there are still national elections of a relatively democratic sort, although voting is spread over a rather longer period due to the amount of time it takes to get election news out to the boonies, and voting results back.

Technology is – or rather was - more advanced in this world, having taken huge strides forward in several fields between 1973 and the war that it did not in our world. Laser tech is far ahead: the most advanced tanks are equipped with laser cannon that can cut a regular tank open like a tin can (said high-tech tanks use a mix of smoke and variably reflective hull plating to minimize the effect of laser fire from enemies). Atomic power plant miniaturization is quite advanced, with nuclear airplanes able to circle the world multiple times without stopping and the larger tanks running on atomic piles (unfortunately, manufacturing capacity for such is currently waaay down). And of course, by 1992, biowarfare technology was far ahead of OTL, to this world’s misfortune. (Some promising avenues opened up in cancer research, alas, were lost due to the war).

Rocket technology was ahead before the war, ICBMs being both easier and cheaper to manufacture than OTL, with relatively poor countries such as India, South Africa or China able to send multiple warheads full of spores or viral fogs to any spot on Earth. In spite of this at the outbreak of WWIII, nobody had been to Mars yet (it’s a long way by rocket), and manned space travel is currently pretty much beyond anyone’s capacities now: the varying national space stations have been abandoned due to inability to resupply (the last US space personnel were taken down to Earth in a Soviet capsule, the US not having any functional rocket launch capacity left at the time).

[1] The IRA was no more successful in the north than OTL, but rather more so in the south, where with the aid of certain rabidly nationalist factions they successfully pulled off a coup and the establishment of a left-ultranationalist regime in the early 80s.

Description
Based on Howard Waldrop and Jake Saunder's "The Texas-Israeli War: 1999"

In 2013, world population, after bottoming out at under four hundred million, is once again on the grow. A number of the nastier plagues have burned themselves out, although the endemic diseases remain a serious drag on population growth, and many of the genetically engineered bacteria, fungi, and viruses, effective as they may have been as crop destroyers, lacked the millions of years of experience an evolved species has, and have been handily dispatched by competition from wild varieties. Seed banks are proving useful as varieties of grain too uncommon or exotic to have been targeted by bioweapons are grown in place of now endangered pre-war breeds.

For most of the human race, however, life remains hard, to say the least, the collapse in global trade (only very slowly picking up now) and the breakdown in global communications having precipitated many people into an essentially pre-industrial lifestyle, shortage of farming machinery and oil making back-breaking farming work the norm for millions of former white-collar workers and urbanites. Most governments are dictatorships or “governments of emergency” with no clear definition of when the emergency will end, and you can scarcely beat off the religious apocalyptics with a stick. Much of the globe, particularly in Africa, has no real government beyond the purely local level. Huge regions have largely returned to wilderness, and innumerable abandoned ghost towns litter the landscape.

Global society, whatever “social fabric” existed, has been badly frayed. After a die-off comparable to plague-afflicted native American societies, so many families have been almost wiped out that people have banded together with other survivors to make shaky, makeshift new clans to take the place of support structures no longer existing. All sorts of odd cults and societies and associations and gangs have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain, as people have sought something to take the place of loneliness and isolation. Even in the US, much of the country is run by various makeshift local associations, thanks to the lack of anything resembling functional local government surviving from the pre-war era. Some are good people: some are quite politically sophisticated: others are barely a step up from street gangs. (The Federal government, with far too much on its plate, usually looks the other way as long as basic order is maintained and mass starvation isn’t taking place). Warlord states are common, although one man’s warlord may be another’s tough, no-nonsense leader.

Massive population losses have badly impacted industry, due to the deaths of required skilled personnel, labor shortages, and decay of infrastructure and unused factory stock when there were no longer enough people to keep it maintained. Having a high-tech product dependent on a hundred different suppliers each producing vital parts has become rather impractical, and a great deal of simplification and combination have taken place. Industrial production has shrunk even faster than populations, and countries such as the US and Soviet Union are struggling to keep themselves from slipping technologically back out of the 20th century altogether. (They certainly haven’t made it to the 21st). The US aircraft industry, for instance, today is a delicate and fragile bud, a painfully limited net of centers of production building relatively tiny numbers of military and civilian planes simply to keep the equipment operational and maintain skills and employment. Air travel has been largely replaced by trains where tracks still exist: keeping 20 year old planes flying with the limited talent pool still available is risky, and the small current passenger air fleet tends to have third world-ish levels of fatal crashes. Of course, things are generally worse in what used to be the actual Third World, where people are often lucky if they can manage to maintain steam-age technology.

Long-range trade is slowly picking up, as people reinvent the coal-powered steamship-with-sails-on, but things are complicated by an abundance of pirates and a lack of standard exchange rates, along with the abundance of governments who will just vanish you and your boat.

WWIII officially lasted from 1992 to 2002, when General Shen crushed the last of the Chinese “independents” still fighting the US and the Treaty of San Francisco was signed, but after about ’95 it was mostly a matter of crippled men hitting each other with bladders, both sides too badly damaged to finish the other off, but unwilling to admit their incapacity. (And some small groups continued to fight the war with terrorist actions for years after, while some of the local conflicts touched off by the war are still grinding on).

This world had seen massive cutbacks in atomic arsenals (the world’s nations had gotten serious about nuclear disarmament after the US-Soviet Near Miss of ’81) , but also a violent “second wave” of red radical revolution in the 70s and 80s, with Mao’s successors in China (after his unfortunate “accident” of ’74) following a more technocratic but hardly less militant line: by the late 80s US-Soviet Détente had begun to move towards US-Soviet entente as the new Chinese regime modernized its military, far more successfully than under Mao, and came to largely take over leadership of the militant left worldwide.

Still, it was generally assumed that sanity would win out and the world would safely make it through the 90s, so people were rather flummoxed at the outbreak of war between the Chinese-Indian-Andean-Arab-South African-bits of Africa block (the Afrikaners allying themselves with China caught everyone by surprise, but in retrospect it made a certain insane sense the enemy-of-my enemy sense, and Mao’s second successor certainly was a few cards short of a full deck) and the US-Commonwealth-bits of Europe-bits of Africa-rest of South America/USSR-Warsaw Pact-bits of Africa-Cuba blocks.

If the whole thing seemed insane, it must be understood that the major figures in kicking off the apocalypse actually were insane, if only for a while in most cases. It was touched off by the Irish [1] (China’s newest allies) “liberation” of British Northern Ireland, the consequent intervention by the British army, and Ireland’s (in retrospect) strategically poor choice of releasing psychoactive war drugs in major British cities, leading to a drug-addled British overreaction in the form of its small nuclear ICBM force being discharged against Ireland, South Africa, and China.

(It wasn’t until later that it came out that the Irish leader had been convinced he was the reincarnation of Brian Boru).

Things got bit confused for a while. The Soviet briefly switched sides, before the counter-coup took place. Iran tried to conquer Iraq, apparently just because. Pakistan, sick and tired of having to play nice to India, switched over to the US side. The Chinese at one point decided the Indians were planning to betray them, and launched a deniable decapitation strike. Yugoslavia launched bioweapons at Turkey, apparently in revenge for the Field of Blackbirds. Albania invaded all its neighbors. The long predicted Second Mexican revolution broke out.

Fortunately (or not), the Oslo Disarmament Accords of ’83 had set up a schedule for massive nuclear cutbacks and the destruction of all bomb factories, and by ’92 the total number of missiles was small enough that they were not a civilization-ender in themselves: and after the rather genocidal British attack on Ireland, nukes were usually used carefully, targeting military installations, power plants, industrial centers, etc., rather than just trying to kill as many people as possible. Still, tens of millions died, and tens of millions more would die later from fallout from the bombs and destroyed nuclear power plants. (The denial-of-resources attack on the Persian Gulf used a mixed approach due to the size of the area, now spotted with regions of radioactivity and covered with lethal bacterial spores that will remain viable for a couple centuries to come).

The real killers were the many and varied diseases, the most effective being the anti-food crop bioweapons: famine in the end killed more people than the many lovely varieties of flu, anthrax, tularemia, etc. The major powers, deprived of atomic weapons, had simply put some of the billions freed up by the end of large-scale bomb building to perfect bio and chemo warfare, in some cases (seeing the writing on the wall) beginning even before the Oslo Accords. The investors, it is generally agreed, got their money’s worth.

Chemical weapons were used on a large scale as well, but usually only to a limited extent on civilian populations, unless they were caught in the crossfire when a city was being stubborn about being invaded. It was soldiers that got the joy of an amazing variety of chemical attacks, toxic or psychoactive, and had the experience of waiting to find out whether the new corrosive gas the enemy was using would be able to eat through the seals on their biowarfare suits.

Israel, one of a few nations that avoided being attacked by the major combatants in WWIII (the Soviet-Arab alliance having previously gone south, they were off the Soviet target list), was only lightly hit, with no more than 5% of its population dying from diseases making their way through its carefully sealed borders or random bio and chemo attacks from Arab states in their death throes and doing a bit of from-Hell’s-Heart-striking. The agricultural crisis and the collapse of trade crisis and the train of further crises following in their wake were not pleasant: the food crisis had the Israeli population for a while living on dribbles of real food supplemented with vat yeast cultivation and the nutrients derived from the chemical breakdown of trees and shrubs. Even under these circumstances, the Israelis welcomed and tried to rescue as many foreign Jews as they could: in the end only about 2 million made it to the Promised Land, death rates among Jews in Europe and the Americas being comparable to that of the general population. (A fair number of gentiles were also allowed in from their ruined lands, as long as they had skills the Israelis seriously needed: agricultural experts, biowarfare remediation experts, chemical synthesis…)

With things being the way they were, hardly anyone raised an eyebrow when they took part in some large-scale ethnic cleansing to provide room for the incomers (it’s not like most of the people they forced out died in the process, after all: they starved later and elsewhere). Israel currently includes a (mostly Muslim-free) Sinai, West Bank, and Gaza strip, along with a good chunk of Syria and some Lebanese lands, including some nice beach-front property.

With food to import being scarce and expensive, and the occasional bioweapon still floating around and striking Israeli crops at inopportune moments, (although an effort at diversification has helped) it remained hard to reliably feed everyone, however. More land was needed, and with their neighbors one great howl of misery interspersed with calls to Allah, it might be a good idea to locate that land somewhere more stable: eggs, baskets.
Israel has therefore purchased large amounts of land for agricultural settlements in various nations they feel they can more or less trust not to go whacko anytime soon: in most cases, what with the massive dieoff, there’s plenty of empty land to go around. The main form of payment has been mercenary work, the Israeli army being perhaps the only first-class military in the world still in good order when WWIII ground to a near-halt in the mid-90s. Of late technological assistance and training has been slowly displacing military wetwork, as other nations have recovered to the point where they can start to rebuild their shattered armies.

The Israelis have also occupied a number of little islands that had crashed back pretty much to the stone age without any trade or contact with the larger world, with local reactions varying from gratitude to bitter hate.

Perhaps due to an influx of American Jews after the US collapse, Yiddish has seen a revival in Israel, and indeed has become a sort of language of protest among the young, a sly mocking of the blood and soil pretentions of the older generation. Jews and Arabs and gentiles, there are now some 12.5 million Israelis, of which some 3 million occupy some 80,000 square miles of territory abroad. Predictably, even in the US, tensions exist: supposedly it’s just a 100 year lease a la Hong Kong, and will revert to the US at the end of the period, who knows what will happen between now and 2100? The government struggles to deal with angry Americans pissed off at Israeli “colonizers” – although there is a lot more square acreage per American than before the war, due to far fewer Americans, low productivity and the long-term contamination of land with fun stuff like Anthrax spores means that fertile and not too badly contaminated land such as that the Israelis received is at a premium.

A few neutral nations here and there survived attack, but none succeeded in maintaining quarantine and battling plague outbreaks (spore-carrying winds and insect vectors care not about official borders) with Israel’s military discipline, so death tolls were invariably high, with the Swedes second best with only a 20% die-off and the Sudanese winning the award for “most disorganized response”, if such a thing were to exist. A few minor Pacific island nations did OK due to isolation and the lack of Poi-targeting diseases, although their economies promptly collapsed with the end of communications with the outside world (some of them later suffered from invasions of often heavily armed first-worlders looking for a place of refuge).

China is a dreadful mess, the official government having essentially imploded by ’97 but various factions continuing the war against the US and USSR semi-independently. General Shen, leader of the most powerful faction, put an end to that by 2002, but several large chunks of the country remained under the control of local commanders which acknowledged his leadership but continued to run their local fiefs almost as independent countries (the major state function being the extortion of food from starving peasants). As of 2013, the central government still only nominally rules over a few large areas where the local Big Men are sitting atop sizeable arsenals of unused bioweapons and therefore must be treated carefully.

There are currently only about 64 million Chinese, and unlike OTL, a majority live in the north: the US-developed anti-rice bioagent exceeded all expectations in its success in destroying the staple of southern China.

Russia is Russia, having gone back to blood-and-soil nationalism as a unifying agent rather than a faded Socialism. They currently have a border with the Chinese a little west of Lake Baikal, not having the energy to reclaim the rest of Siberia: they have also largely abandoned the chaotic mess of Central Asia. Large parts of Romania, Hungary, and Poland, on the other hand, have been annexed for their resources and less damaged areas of agricultural land. (Not entirely annexed, since the rump nations provide a useful location to shove troublesome locals over the border. It’s pricey to ship them all the way to Siberia). Rump Poland is having another famine this year: western Europeans aren’t happy about accepting hungry refugees from the east. US Poles and Hungarians and such might have protested under other circumstances, but currently have too much to worry about themselves.

Britain, having started the war while stoned out of its gourd, is internationally isolated and struggling to keep its much reduced population housed and fed. Ireland is a charnel house, and Scotland is getting antsy about the ever-receding end of the State of Emergency.

Europe was hammered, but with few nuclear weapons and the main battlefields rather far off (the Arab League’s invasion of Malta nowithstanding) they didn’t suffer any worse than the US or USSR. Unfortunately, the “feed our own first” attitudes of government rather badly damaged the solidarity of the EC nations, political authority has splintered badly. The flow of refugees from deeply messed up North Africa has been tempered by the end of regular boat and plane travel across the Med, but enough make it across in makeshift rafts and boats to be energetically oppressed on arrival.

There has been something of a religious revival, both conventional and weird: the Germans had to call on Israeli mercenaries to crush the Death-Cult, while a charismatic new Pope has created a New Holy League of ultra-Catholic nations to “restore Christian civilization.” (He’s the fifth since the war started: they kept dying for a while there, and keeping the House of Cardinals stocked led to some unorthodox selection choices: one of them is only seventeen).

Currently what was the EC is divided into the Batty Catholics, the Batty Leftists (the French Neo-Marxists mix Marxist ideas with some ideas drawn from Sarte, Mao, and according to some baffled observers, possibly the Dada movement: the Greeks have Creepy Nationalist Collectivism down to a T, and the People’s Republic of Padania seems to have an identity based less on Marx than on loathing for the old Italian Republic and particularly the South), the Central European Block (mostly-reunified if depopulated Germany and its Little Buddies), and the Nordic Block. The UK, like the cheese, stands alone. There remains (some) free trade and some mutual cooperation, but for now the EU ideal is dead as the Dodo.

The ingenious Germans found a way to make food out of coal. It still tastes awful. They are currently considering an Anschluss with Catholic-radical ruled S. Austria, but 1. That would bring them in conflict with the Papacy and the Holy League nations 2. Rile up their own Catholics and 3. That sort of thing always leads to trouble down the road.

Although the situation isn’t as bad as in Africa, there has been considerable political fragmentation in Latin America: Mexico, after a period of extreme fragmentation, is now down to three governments, although El Norte is still hotly disputed - the US government has sent (inadequate) forces to occupy and patrol the border area until things settle down. Central America is fairly warlord-ish, and although Brazil is theoretically still one country, the capital effectively controls only about a third of the nation’s area. Argentina is a dictatorship of Orwellian thoroughness, which got through the bad years through some very extreme methods (due to an unfortunate clerical error, several thousand white South African refugees arriving in Argentina got put on the wrong train and were made into sausage.)

The Arab League was ground to powder and has collapsed into pieces. Attacking Europe when your’ nearest major ally is some thousand-plus miles off probably is not a good idea. Leftist secularism has generally been replaced by Islam, as people take comfort in simple, pre-industrial answers in a collapsed world. There are exceptions, of course: the Ba’athist Lower Egyptian regime is trying to create a new totalitarian society from scratch, and all those orphans and people who have lost all that was meaningful in their lives are anything but a hindrance. The expelled Palestinians have carved out a state of their own in what was Jordan and NW Arabia, but it hasn't made them happy.

As mentioned, sub-Saharan Africa is a mess, although a functional Marxist government rules most of South Africa, after a six year struggle which ended with the last of the white population pushed into the sea and the black adult male population cut by another 60% after famine and plague. There is no oil to be had outside Nigeria (refineries are technologically tricky), although various ingenious efforts have been made to derive substitutes from vegetable products (most of which kill car engines quite fast). A civil war is ongoing in what was Ethiopia over the ownership of the Ark of the Covenant, between the top warlord and another one who claims to be the reincarnation of Menelek II. The population drop, between high birth rate, local resistance to disease, and out-competition of lab-bred nasties by natural equivalents, has not only bottomed out as elsewhere but begun to grow a bit faster than planetary average: although most modern facilities have collapsed, the population at least is still aware of basic sanitation and precautions re disease, and warlords generally make short work of anyone suspected of being a plague carrier.

(The general collapse of travel in tse-tse fly areas aside from foot, bicycle, lovingly tended wood-burning locomotive, and the occasional lunatic in a hot air balloon has at least greatly slowed the spread of AIDS compared to OTL).

Conflict still wracks the Indian sub-continent, although most of the equipment used by this point resembles stuff that would be familiar to veterans of the 1857 revolt (plus Molotov cocktails). The neutral south is fairly quiet, the locals being more concerned with where their next meal is coming from than Maoism or religious fundamentalism of either the Hindu or Muslim variety, and hope the north will exhaust itself before paying close attention to them.
Afghanistan, never invaded by the USSR in this world, after a massive population drop is not doing too badly in the 18th century.

The crazed, black slime-oozing cannibals roaming SE Asia aren’t actually zombies: they’re much more contagious, for one thing.

Australians are still finding dried-out Indonesian corpses in the northern deserts: with the collapse of centralized government back home and the corresponding disruption of supplies, the Indonesian “occupation forces” slowly died on the vine, although a few regional Indonesian regimes supply enough of a trickle for a few half-starved pockets to hang on: the Aussies plan to finish them if Indonesia ever looks like it’s going to get its act together. New Zealand came through the famines better than other places, although by now the locals are sick of mutton. (And they still don’t know why anyone would waste one of their limited stock of atom bombs on Christchurch.)

Japan, somewhat to their surprise, managed to beat off two Chinese invasion attempts, although they lost Hokkaido. The destruction of their food supply was more of a problem, given that there was nowhere to flee where things were not as bad or worse, but the Japanese submitted to the government triage program with typical acceptance of the inevitable and a well-internalized commitment to not make waves. All in all, the inevitable reduction of population was carried out with much greater efficiency and far less violence than the Argentine program, and the recycling program yielded a far more refined product.

Soylent Green is Japanese.

The US, population 28 million (not actually too bad by world death-toll standards), is slowly recovering. The last stubborn Chinese holdouts were supposedly rooted out of the Alaskan wilderness by 2005. In theory the whole country is once again united, although re-conquered Texas is still restless, and admittedly the West Coast is currently almost as self-governing as the Chinese warlords, although they have been polite enough to not actually declare independence and just ignore federal officials rather than imprison them. Large areas where low density populations had previously kept afloat mostly thanks to an advanced infrastructure, good internal communications, a steady flow of all sorts of goods and services, etc., have become depopulated: starving plains farmers unable to get much in the way of support with everyone else in the same mess have migrated (when oil shortages allowed them to) to areas where more dense populations and urban industrial areas have helped keep a tenuous modernity alive. Large chunks of the Rocky Mountain west have become essentially no-man’s land. A couple Indian nations have declared their independence, or at least autonomy. And then there’s Utah…

Communications are bad: very limited oil supplies mean that transportation of goods by truck isn’t economically possible, and the trains – retrofitted to run again on coal and wood – cannot reach many areas due to the condition of the railways, which are only slowly being extended and repaired. Even where they haven’t been abandoned outright, large pockets of the country are almost out of communication with the rest of the nation save for a few still functional modern radios, river rafts, and foot runners. (Horses were mostly hit by the plagues or eaten during the worst years: the few that remain are too valuable for farm work to risk on the dangerous roads). The government tries to distribute components for simple crystal whisker radios to improve communications, but it is hard to get them where they are needed, even in the better off parts of the country.

On the positive side, production is up both in artificial fertilizers and pesticides (highly toxic, yes, but nobody gives a shit about baby birds under present circumstances), although, again, distribution to about 50% of the country remains problematic. The construction of hermetically sealed greenhouses has also helped, and productivity is also up simply because people have abandoned those lands too badly contaminated with long-lasting lethal spores, bacterial and otherwise. Although most of the population survives through back-breaking labor in conditions little advanced on a mid-19th century level of existence, there are still national elections of a relatively democratic sort, although voting is spread over a rather longer period due to the amount of time it takes to get election news out to the boonies, and voting results back.

Technology is – or rather was - more advanced in this world, having taken huge strides forward in several fields between 1973 and the war that it did not in our world. Laser tech is far ahead: the most advanced tanks are equipped with laser cannon that can cut a regular tank open like a tin can (said high-tech tanks use a mix of smoke and variably reflective hull plating to minimize the effect of laser fire from enemies). Atomic power plant miniaturization is quite advanced, with nuclear airplanes able to circle the world multiple times without stopping and the larger tanks running on atomic piles (unfortunately, manufacturing capacity for such is currently waaay down). And of course, by 1992, biowarfare technology was far ahead of OTL, to this world’s misfortune. (Some promising avenues opened up in cancer research, alas, were lost due to the war).

Rocket technology was ahead before the war, ICBMs being both easier and cheaper to manufacture than OTL, with relatively poor countries such as India, South Africa or China able to send multiple warheads full of spores or viral fogs to any spot on Earth. In spite of this at the outbreak of WWIII, nobody had been to Mars yet (it’s a long way by rocket), and manned space travel is currently pretty much beyond anyone’s capacities now: the varying national space stations have been abandoned due to inability to resupply (the last US space personnel were taken down to Earth in a Soviet capsule, the US not having any functional rocket launch capacity left at the time).

[1] The IRA was no more successful in the north than OTL, but rather more so in the south, where with the aid of certain rabidly nationalist factions they successfully pulled off a coup and the establishment of a left-ultranationalist regime in the early 80s.