causes of the great global wars

The Great Global Wars arose primarily because of the unbearable resource constraints brought about by global warming :

- people flooded out of low-lying regions such as Bangladesh, looking for new places to live;

- famines arising from droughts more extreme than ever in recorded history;

- deforestation and desertification spreading throughout Africa, Asia and South America.  

As these terrible events began to spin out of control in the late twenty-first century, the developing countries that were most vulnerable to disaster began to fight each other for access to basic resources – water and arable land.

GEOPOLITICS OF THE GREAT GLOBAL WARS

At this time, there were two major power blocs in the world – the United States and China.   Naturally, each developing country gravitated to one or the other power blocs to support them in their battles for survival.   The two power blocs used the various battle grounds as proxy battles for world domination.  

However, this dynamic was very different from the so-called Cold War that had occurred between the U.S. and the Soviet Union more than a century earlier.   Because of the extreme resource constraints the developing world was facing, there were no holds barred in these wars.   Countries that had developed nuclear bombs were ready to use them.  

There was one element, however, which replicated the Cold War of the twentieth century – the concept of mutually assured destruction, or MAD.   China, the U.S. and the European Union had one unwritten rule – that no matter how severe the battles, no matter how high the stakes, they would not permit the use of nuclear devices on their own territories.  

By that time, all three regions had developed their own proprietary missile defense systems that would have intercepted nuclear missiles.   In the end, there was no need for those defenses.   No-one would take the chance of a mistake.  

The end result was that devastation was brought to Africa, Central and South-east Asia and, to a lesser extent, South America, while the northern regions of the world were largely untouched by the wars.   Untouched, other than experiencing the continual fear of annihilation, the horror of watching the extreme suffering elsewhere in the world, and the massive economic disruptions caused by the global turmoil.

NUCLEAR DESTRUCTION

The missile defense systems of the United States, Europe and China kept those areas relatively safe from the devastation that the rest of the world suffered during the Great Global Wars.

Meanwhile, seventeen nuclear devices were detonated over the seventeen years of madness in the 2090's and 2100's.   These nuclear explosions directly caused the deaths of as many as twenty million innocent civilians in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

In total, the death toll from the Great Global Wars was measured in the hundreds of millions - more deaths than all the combined previous wars in recorded history.

aftermath of the great global wars

SPHERES OF INFLUENCE 

By the early twenty-second century, the world had exhausted itself.   The conclusion of the Great Global Wars led to a long period of geopolitical stability, which has lasted all the way to the late 22nd century, the time of the PEPS hearing.

By this time, different "spheres of influence" are dominated by the regional great powers: the Americas dominated by the United States in conjunction with Brazil; Africa dominated by Europe; Asia, with the exception of India, dominated by China; and the Middle-East dominated by the Arab Federation.

reversal of global warming

There was a grotesque irony in the nuclear devastation caused by the Great Global Wars.  

In aggregate, they caused a mild version of what was known as a 'nuclear winter' – a cloud of particulate matter that dimmed the force of the sun and cooled down the globe.  

The irony was that the global warming of the twenty-first century had begun a cascade that was careening out of control, and caused the onset of the Great Global Wars.   Unchecked, it would likely have led to the end of life as we know it on this planet.  

The nuclear bombs set off in Great Global Wars immediately put a halt to the cascade of global warming, and bought several more decades for the modern world to develop the sustainable non-polluting sources of energy that they use in the late 22nd century.

galt

Of all the after-effects of the Great Global Wars, the Global Aggression Limitation Treaty, or GALT, was probably the most important.

The United Nations became reinvigorated, and was given global policing power, with a full time, large, multinational army.  

The underlying legal basis of this new peace was GALT, the foundation of which was the principle that genetic enhancement would only be permissible when it subordinated the "aggression" and "doctrinal belief" gene-sets.

This led to the new generation of d3 humans that controlled the world by the late 22nd century.

[Read the address given in 2117 to the G26 nations by the Chairman of the UN Governing Council, Sr. Juan José Gonzalez, in the wake of the devastation caused by twenty years of global war.]