The Earth is still a divided world, but the major players have changed. The most powerful nation is still the United States of America, but it is now a quasi-religious state, inward-looking, intensely xenophobic and isolationist. There are three other significant world powers: the Union of Europe, the Chinese Federation, and the Group of 26, a group of developing nations linked in an alliance of trade and mutual defence. The United Nations underwent great changes during the Third World War (now generally called simply the War) and the place of the former Security Council has been taken by the World Security Committee, a group that controls most of the world's nuclear arsenals and has equal representation by all member countries.
Today there are about thirty or forty corporations whose wealth and power place them in the same league as many developing nations. All of them are conglomerates whose business spans many diverse industries, and most of them have small mercenary forces to back up their economic strength.
The ecosystems of Earth, already severely stressed by pollution, deforestation and other problems, have suffered further setbacks from the War and its consequences. While some recovery has occurred, the Earth of 2058 is still a drearier, sadder place than the world we know today. The population, from its 2030 peak of seven billion, has fallen to six.
The War's threat of the extinction of humanity, combined with the need to supplement Earth's resources, has led a group of nations, led by China and Europe, to attempt expansion into the Solar System. The establishment of three orbital stations around Earth, the opening of a permanent base on the Moon, and a series of exploratory missions to Mars, all in the 2040s, have led in 2058 to the preparation of a full-fledged Mars colonization mission. The players will be members of this mission: their job is to establish the first human settlement on Mars, and build the infrastructure to support future colonists.
Earth has changed in many ways. Between 2000 and 2020, it became increasingly obvious that the economy and ecology of the planet were under intolerable stress. Economic recessions, local "brushfire" wars, terrorism and environmental devastation continued to increase, despite the admittedly rather lukewarm efforts to curb them by the "developed nations." While the population of those nations had stabilized, or begun to decline, by the 1980s, their numbers had grown, while their standards of living, production of waste and consumption of resources had not. Furthermore, the populations of developing nations, most notably India, Indonesia, and the countries of central Africa, continued to soar. The final political Union of Europe in the first years of the new millennium created a wealthy, powerful super-state that further emphasized the gulf between rich and poor countries. The Jakarta Accords, by which several poor nations were selected to receive massive aid in return for draconian population control, merely served to embitter local populations against Europe and America.
In the second and early third decades of the new millennium, there was a belated attempt to stabilize the situation by the United Nations. After the democratic government of Indonesia had fallen to a military coup, fighting broke out across the archipelago. The UN sent first negotiators, then peacekeepers, and finally, after fighting had spilled into Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines, a "Transitional Authority" backed by the forces of the Security Council, to restore order. Essentially this act transformed Indonesia into a colony of the Security Council. Similar situations in Africa led to the creation of a UN Administrative Zone spanning the centre of the continent. Troubles in the administered reasons led to calls for reform of the UN, but the changes made were not calculated to ease tension in the Third World. In particular, the United States and the European Union, by threatening to withdraw all UN funding, secured the expansion of the permanent members of the Security Council (reduced to four members by the unification of Europe) by the admission of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and South Africa. This act instantly gave the permanent members a majority in the Council; in addition, since the new members closely matched the new G-7 (or Bloc of 6 as it was now known), the interests of the permanent members (with the possible exception of China) generally lay in mutual co-operation. Security in the Administrative Zones was tightened and conditions there rapidly worsened.
The breaking point, which sparked the Third World War, came in 2028. In February of that year, the terrorist organization Front Unifi<É> Africain detonated a nuclear device in United Nations Headquarters in New York. Much of the surrounding city was also destroyed, and the attack triggered a massive retaliation by the United States against The Gambia, thought to be the planning centre for the FUA. The virtual destruction of that nation, and incidentally of surrounding Senegal, however, was shown to be a horrific error when a second nuclear attack destroyed Washington. With the UN Headquarters in ruins, individual nations, notably the USA, France and Britain, chose to launch retaliatory strikes against Nigeria, Congo, Angola and Mali. The massive destruction and death that ensued brought on a series of uprisings throughout Africa and, following suit, Indonesia; the massacre of Security Council personnel; and the secession of 26 developing nations, led by India, from the UN. Across the developed world, clashes between groups of pro- and anti-UN demonstrators led to the imposition of martial law in the USA, the EU, and Canada, while in China the government wavered between camps a few days too long, and the Great Chinese Revolution began. The war broadened into Europe itself, as hundreds of thousands of African refugees tried to cross the Mediterranean and were met by armed force.
Perhaps the only credit that can be given to the Security Council countries (or "the North" as they began to be called) during the War is that after the first panicked retaliatory strikes, they never again employed strategic nuclear weapons. What is certainly true is that they used every conventional means at their disposal to avoid conceding any of the demands of the Group of 26. The fiction was maintained that the War was simply an "anti-terrorist police action" on a larger scale, and that no nation-states were actually at war. This reasoning was used to block any attempts by the G-26 to negotiate with the Security Council.
The second phase of the War began when biological weapons, including a virulent strain of anthrax, common typhoid, and several diseases that were never identified, were launched from the Middle East against eastern Europe. The epidemics that followed were probably the deadliest since the seventeenth century. Even before they spread beyond Europe, thirty million had died; in the world at large, hundreds of millions more were to die in the next decade.
It was probably the plagues that were the decisive element in preventing the War from being a victory on the part of the North. By sweeping away the best part of a generation in Europe before the EU had time to react, the epidemics crippled the North's capacity to fight. The USA could not fight a war on twenty fronts, and was furthermore facing incursions on its own borders from Mexico and the Caribbean. But at the same time, victory was denied to the South as well as the plagues spread. Armies in the field were devastated as surely as city populations at home. The numbers of casualties of the terrible 30s can only be guessed at; however, the most conservative estimates suggest that actual combat during the War killed thirty million. Seventy million civilians were killed in the cities bombed and sacked in the same period. And the initial wave of epidemics carried off a further hundred and ten million. But worse was to come.
The nuclear attacks in America and Africa, and the massive conventional bombardment that the War brought to every continent, brought on a limited nuclear winter in the second half of 2035 - the Black Year - causing massive crop failures and consequent famine, exacerbated by the destruction of food delivery systems. It was around this time that the War trailed to an utterly inglorious close as exhausted nations lost their capacity to fight. By 2036 organized combat had ceased.
Over two hundred million had been killed in the War; nine hundred million died in the Black Year and the famine- and disease-haunted Time of Tears that followed. The epidemics returned again and again, and the world's medical infrastructure, even in the rich countries of the North, had simply not been designed to deal with such a catastrophe. Effective prevention and treatment existed for anthrax and typhoid, yet the demand so far exceeded the supply or the means of production that little or nothing could be done for nine-tenths of the sufferers.
By the time the terror receded in the early 2040s, over a billion people had died. The world order was changed forever: the United States could no longer be considered either an economic or a military superpower; China had emerged as a democratic state; Europe had lost a third of its population, and the developing countries of the South were richer in political influence and poorer by hundreds of millions of lives.
The Valetta Agreement, signed by 149 countries in March of 2041, swept away the old structure of the United Nations and replaced it with one that represented all countries equally. All signatories agreed to place 30% of their militaries under direct UN command. The Security Council was abolished, and the World Security Committee that replaced it had two Northern permanent members - the USA and Europe - and two Southern - China and the Group of 26. Twenty-one other countries, selected by rotation every year, served as the balance of the Committee.
The old treaty blocs, such as NATO and SEATO, continued to exist, and were joined by others, most notably the Altai League, but the transformed and strengthened UN was now the most important player on the world stage. The UN forces were powerful enough to match any individual nation, and so far, the peace has been kept.
The only powers that profited in any way by the War and its aftermath were the multinational corporations. Their influence had been growing in the last few decades of the twentieth century, and by the time of the War many of them had achieved power surpassing that of some nations. The governments of the world's nations tried to some degree to restrict the corporations' power, but the very structure of the nation-state meant that a corporation merely had to relocate beyond that nation's jurisdiction to escape such measures. A growing strategy was the use of "flag of convenience" nations: a corporation would establish its headquarters in some small developing country with loose trade-control laws, paying off the government, making use of cheap local labour, and escaping the more rigorous laws of its true "home" country.
During the War, most corporations realized that their position was delicate. Some supported their headquarter nations; some supported the North; but the majority remained neutral in order to continue doing business with everyone concerned. A great many corporations disappeared during the War: some were nationalized by desperate governments, some went bankrupt in the face of the economic devastation wrought by the conflict, and a few grew enormously stronger through profitable deals or actual paramilitary take-overs of their host nations.
The years of rebuilding after the War have been remarkably quiet ones.
The destruction wrought in the 2030s was the greatest disaster in human
history, and even now, twenty years later, full recovery has not been achieved.
Most nations have had neither the resources nor the will to engage in further
conflict.