North America
"Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid."
Prelude to War (1981-1982)
The first twelve months of the Chang Administration were notable for their bloody indecisiveness. The public circumstances of Nixon's assassination traumatized the entire United States, but people who knew about Chang's tireless appetite for power rightly suspected her of involvement in the gutting of the Nixon Administration. Certainly President Elizabeth Chang was able to quickly fill the secretarial posts vacated by the assassinations with her own appointees, hand-picked by herself and her supporters. Although the ultimate outline of Chang's plans remain uncertain, most analysts argue that her ultimate aim was to transform the United States into a dictatorship of some kind, perhaps centered around a cult of personality, certainly based upon the exclusion of non-white Anglophones from all real power and upon xenophobic suspicion of the outside world.
Chang's plans, though, never came close to completion. For one, the United States military maintained a studied neutrality in the many local conflicts between local paramilitaries and the FBI's paramilitary forces, on the grounds of the destabilizing effect of military intervention in civilian affairs and the reluctance of many soldiers and officers to fire upon American citizens. States and territories opposed to President Chang and her administration's policies simply refused to obey her orders, or to allow the FBI to operate in their territories. Some governors even mobilized their state's National Guard units and refused to place them under Presidential control. Worse, even some of her supporters were defecting -- California's Democratic Governor Ronald Reagan renounced his "One Nation" affiliation after Chang's inauguration and invited Liberal Republican Jerry Brown to become his Lieutenant Governor, and might even have been preparing to run for President in 1984. The spectacular public gunfights and bomb blasts engineered by Chang's death squads did nothing to legitimize her regime. Although the FBI remained fiercely loyal to Chang, and the profound divisions that rent the US military even at the levels of the Joint Chiefs of Staff prevented military intervention, the inherent flaws of the Chang Administration would likely have led to its fall within a year. Unfortunately, Chang followed Nixon's policy of trying to engineer tensions in Asia with Communist China, hoping to unite the country behind her in a crisis situation created by the aggressive actions of the Indochinese Union.
The torments of the United States had major repercussions elsewhere in the continent. Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this was the Yucatecan declaration of war against Guatemala, in March of 1981, following a particularly heinous spree of government massacres of Maya. Although the Guatemalan dictatorship claimed sovereignty over a population twice as big as Yucatán, Yucatán's superior wealth and the civil war now waged against the Guatemalan government by Guatemala's Mayas -- not to mention explicit League support and Mexican arms -- helped the Yucatecans quickly push into the Guatemalan Highlands and the Petén rainforest. The Nixon Administration had invested an inordinate amount of attention on Guatemala, hoping to groom the country as the United States' proxy in Middle America, and on several occasions, President Chang tried to declare war against Yucatán. By this time, though, Congress' open hostility towards the Chang Administration and the general sympathy in the Constitutional Liberty and Republican parties for the Yucatecan war of liberation led to Congress' repeated vetoes of military action against Yucatán.
While the independent republics of the Caribbean and Central America mouthed loyalty towards the Chang Administration, and happily supported the United States' foreign-policy initiatives in Southeast Asia in exchange for continued military aid, Canada and Mexico tried to detach themselves from the impending chaos. Since 1980, Canada had been governed by a multiparty Government of National Unity, under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that hoped to protect Canada from the effects of a possible collapse of the United States while reinforcing Canadian links with the wider League of Nations. In Mexico, both the Partido Nacional and the Partido Federale agreed to suspend their partisan bickerings in favour of a common policy of favouring Mexican interests, and the unified Mexican Government resisted the blandishments of the United States to sign a treaty of alliance, even after Mexico was faced with the loss of trading privileges. (Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, as two small and isolated Anglophone countries located in the far northeast of the continent, were remote from the United States problem, but the large emigrant populations of both countries in New England and the growing American refugee population on Prince Edward Island necessarily made them concerned.)
News of the beginning of the Third World War did not surprise anyone in the continent: The inevitability of war in Asia, given the aggressive policies of the United States and its Manila Pact allies in Southeast Asia, had been accepted by all concerned North Americans, though that did not make the news any less unpleasant. Inside the United States, the rapidly-growing anti-Chang opposition began to worry about the possibilities of nuclear devastation; outside the United States, the other countries of North America feared being dragged into the war despite themselves. In March of 1982, these fears seemed to be confirmed when President Chang decided over the vociferous objections of her opposition to intervene in behalf of the Guatemalan dictatorship. Fortunately for the Yucatecans, the intervention was limited to a week of air strikes against their capital city of Mérida and an abortive landing of United States Marines before Congress forced the intervention's end. Despite vague warnings about the unhealthiness of continued Mexican and Canadian disengagement from the great battles of the war, President Chang was content to let the rest of the continent manage its own affairs -- she was too concerned with maintaining her control over the United States.
By the summer of 1982, the opposition to Chang took on a new sense of urgency as nuclear weapons began to be used by both sides. The cataclysmic regional exchange of the 28th of July, which caused almost one hundred million casualties across Southeast Asia and China, made it graphically clear to all Americans the consequences of a continued Chang presidency. The FBI coup against the Filipino government of Benigno Aquino caused uproar inside the United States, just like the continued mobilization of United States military forces worldwide -- and in space -- against the Siberia and the wider Soviet Union. The revelation on the 18th of August, by Speaker Callender, that Chang had had two abortions managed to destroy the support of conservative Democrats for her continued Presidency; together with Hosperger and the Constitutional Liberty-Republican coalition, they began to prepare to impeach Chang. On the 23rd, 75 Senators drafted a letter to Chang wherein they told their President that unless she resigned immediately, they would not only vote to impeach her but she stood a good risk of being tried for treason. On the 24th, the vote began for the impeachment of the President of the United States.
On August 25th the Republican Party withdrew its support for Speaker Callender and threw their support behind John Hosperger as Speaker of the House. Callender left the Capitol, never to be seenagain. On the morning of the 26th Hosperger had himself left the capitol under protection of the US Marshalls' service to Virginia. On that day, just as two-thirds of the Senators voted in favour of impeachment, the FBI attacked Congress. Although the Capitol Police put up a fierce resistance to the assault, in the end the Capitol buildings were a smoking ruin, and all those anti-Changist Congresspersons who had not managed to escape to the sympathetic state of Virginia were either dead or in detention. The news of the "Rotunda Massacre" horrified North Americans, and promptly created a constitutional crisis: Although the incomplete vote constituted legal grounds for the removal of Chang from the Presidency, the Chang Administration argued that the incomplete vote was not sufficient. At this point John Hosperger, following the death of the vice-president in the "Rotunda Massacre", became the acting President of the United States, and pro-Congressional Special Forces evacuated Hosperger from Richmond to the North Carolina mountains.
Moreover, this blatant abuse of power by the executive branch of the United States led many hitherto-loyal States and Territories of the Union to break with the Chang Administration, along with many elements of the US military still deployed in the continental United States. The first battle between loyalist elements of the US Army and a state National Guard took place outside of Arlington, in northern Virginia, as the state National Guard repelled the attempt by the US army to seize the Virginian capital of Richmond, where surviving anti-Changist Congresspersons had gathered under the protection of the sympathetic Democratic state government. The Chang Administration faced a very real possibility of a second Civil War in which it would find itself opposed by almost the entire United States and most of the US military.
In the end, President Chang, the FBI, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt that they had no choice but to risk a global thermonuclear war if they wanted to stay in power, and so they ordered the attacks on Siberian assets on the Moon and in lunar orbit beginning at 300 Greenwich Mean Time, on the 2nd of September. The rapid spread of the conflict from the Moon to Earth orbit, and the hard-fought United States' victory over the technologically and numerically inferior Siberian space forces, created a deadly situation over which the anti-Changist opposition exercised no control. After the end of the fighting in space, the League of Nations tried to mediate a ceasefire between the United States and the Sino-Siberian alliance, while the anti-Changist opposition tried desperately to overthrow the President before the global exchanges began.
Perhaps ironically, the terminal exchanges of missiles began with the Chang Administration's destruction of Congress' stronghold of Richmond at 200 GMT, on the 3rd of September, 1982. (Hosperger and some of his followers had already been evacuated before this attack by Special Forces loyal to General Marcus Kelly.) The destruction of Richmond precipitated the automatic launch by United States submarines positioned off the Japanese and Indian coasts, of thermonuclear warheads against major Siberian military bases. After a horrifically bloody secondary exchange between China and Indonesia that managed to blight both the Manila Pact and the People's Republic, and the Siberian decimation of United States military bases, the Chang Administration ordered a purely terroristic attack against Chinese and Siberian cities at 330 GMT, and within minutes the Siberian nuclear submarines positioned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean responded in kind.
On to: Recovery (1982 to present)