Sixty Minute War

The War shown on the UNIVERSAL logo.

The Sixty Minute War was a catastrophic, apocalyptic war that took place thousands of years before the Traction Era: the events of the Mortal Engines Quartet and the Fever Crumb Series. It was a world-ending war for the Ancients, who barely survived in the following Dark Centuries.

Events

The War

There was likely a cold war leading up to the MAD exchange event and that the "sixty minutes" only refers to the actual exchange of WMDs. THe War itself was around 2116 (pre TE), but it had to be at least a 21/22 century War, considering the Old Tech found afterwards.

Before the War broke out, The Scrivener Institute developed early models of its Scriven humans 2.0 and mind uploading technology for Stalkers, placing these inventions inside pyramids designed to survive a nuclear impact. Should future humans such as Fever Crumb come across them, they were programmed to speak about teh oncoming war and what the inventions' purpose was: to create an advanced humanity that could survive the War's after-effects.

MEDUSA destroys San Francisco in an ancient recording of the War, here viewed in 2116.

When the War broke out, the American Empire and Greater China engaged each other in a MAD nuclear war, attacking each other with all their nuclear arnament. Targeting key infrastructure/population, Europe was first bombed with plenty of missiles and asteroids, and the Middle East was likely involved, as it was also bombed with atomic craters. The next countries to fall would likely have been Africa and South America. Possibly then, even more countries fell such as the combatants themselves: the US and then China, across the Pacific. Entire cities were even wiped off the map in massive nuclear craters, such as San Francisco. Perhaps the last areas to fall were concentrated at the poles, such as northern Europe, sparing the Pyramid Builders and the pyramids themselves from nuclear impacts, but spare shots such as Anchorage being obliterated were still seen. The final minutes of the War ended with the launching of the Slow Bomb asteroids, which hit the Earth up to a few decades after the War 'ended'.

'SIXTY MINUTES - WAS ALL IT TOOK, TO BRING HUMANITY TO THE VERY BRINK OF EXTINCTION.'

The surface of the Earth was obliterated by the impacts of exploding nukes and lasers (attacks and counterattacks), and later even asteroids. From space, the Earth had huge energy blasts and nuclear explosions spreading across the surface, destroying the surface of Europe and South America, and then the rest of the world such as North America and a few bombs in Africa. Volcanoes erupted along long-dormant crust lines, possibly the result of ODIN tearing into the ground. The Deccan Traps of India re-opened and resurfaced the country in large areas, and even South America's Andes had little eruptions. The Earth's crust itself was "shattered into a thousand pieces", with the continents soon moving everywhere, but the Earth's surface was temporarily rendered uninhabitable. It still was in some areas such as the Dead Continent, where the ground surface was quite literally glassed.

Effects

By its name, the war took only an hour to begin and end, presumably due to the unprecedented amounts of devastating weaponry deployed. The war ended millennia of human civilisational development, and caused near-total global destruction, depopulation or mutation of most life, realignment of the continents, massive geological upheaval, and destruction of several large landmasses, (one notable example being that the isthmus linking North and South America was destroyed by weaponised meteors) and the downfall of the human species.

The bombs utterly destroyed virtually every 21st-century city across the world.

Few people survived after the War - according to Tom Natsworthy's viewpoint in the London Museum, "The Ancients destroyed themselves in that terrible flurry of orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs called the Sixty Minute War." As told by Shrike, "Sixty minutes... was all it took to bring humanity to the very brink of extinction." This excepts a select few (either knowing that nuclear war was inevitable or foreseen, or hiding in bunkers), the surviving humans likely descended from them, such as the population of Anchorage. The impacts of the Slow Bombs further destroyed the Earth's shattered crust, killing almost everyone else remaining. The few survivors spread across the world, the surviving Africans and Chinese fled inland and eventually reorganised into the Anti-Traction League, centuries on. A nuclear winter soon followed the massive earthquakes that shook the planet during the early Dark/Black Centuries, reducing the human population to only a few wanderers.

Aftermath

The scientific and technical knowledge of most of humanity's advanced technology was lost during the conflict, and the world collapsed into a post apocalyptic state with the level of technology still not recovered to pre-war status centuries or millenniums later.

Following the war came a period of immense geological upheaval, as earthquakes, tsunamis, glaciers and volcanic activity swept across the world, volcanoes and ice sheets sprouted up in Europe and new seas (often closed off from the major oceans, as landlocked lakes) and mountain ranges were formed. It is uncertain whether this was a coincidence or unintended side-effect due to the immense energies released during the war, or if it was intentionally caused by some of the weapons employed. Ice Ages also frequently happened even centuries on, extending the ice sheets further than they ever did during the Ancients' last one. As a result, radioactive emissions also mutated various animals, such as Stalker Birds, Stalker Whales, hairyphants (mammoths), among others.

Recovery

North America was reduced to a radioactive, lifeless wasteland, along with much of eastern China. The surviving Chinese fled into the Himalayas and formed a new civilization that would later become Shan Guo, leading nation of the Anti-Traction League. Africa escaped much of the devastation and parts of the continent became the center of another new civilisation though it was weakened by the Traction Cities centuries later.

After the war

This destruction led to the so called "Black Centuries" (named for the dark skies caused by nuclear clouds, associated strongly with, and even causing, death from the fallout), an era presumably similar to the historical Dark Ages (but far less livable, with surviving human populations literally attempting to survive disastrous earth-storms, lack of food, and poisoned air. One of the first organised civilizations was the Raffia Hat Civilizations, in the early Dark Centuries. The Electric Empire and the Blue Metal Culture were two examples of very advanced post-war civilizations, but were likely wiped out by the cold of the Ice Ages, due to nuclear smoke in the atmosphere). Meanwhile, the surviving Ancients attempted unsucessfully to preserve their relics of information (except in a select few places, such as the pyramids of The Scrivener Institute, later cared for by the so-called Pyramid Builders, before later being abandoned.) Any surviving books, cars and trains, electronic computers and screens, and other objects slowly became unreadable or deformed over time. The people themselves were left to wander, such as snowmads and the population of Anchorage, both a leftover from a near-miss or non-targeted area from the War.

During this period, barbaric nomad tribes wandered Europe, sometimes on moving castles, an example for later settlements - after this period (at least 10,000 years later), Nicholas Quirke transformed London into the first of the Traction Cities and this led to the rise of Municipal Darwinism and the Traction Era.

The Downsizing

A pyramid built before the War, intending to survive it.

The nature of the War itself was largely forgotten - referred to as the 'Downsizing', a cataclysmic event that was apparently applied to reduce the Ancient's sophistication and population (according to some groups of people that refused the War as a human-induced conflict). It was only discovered that this was a human-made war, not a natural cataclysm, when Fever Crumb found a pyramid that housed the Scrivener Institute, where their Remembering Machines recalled and endlessly spoke about the immediate aftermath of the War. From that, she concluded that two 'ancient empires' (the countries of US and China), had a short (but destructive) nuclear war, and that the Slow Bombs would begin to fall in the coming years.

They only remembered that intermediate time period, however, and did not recall anything else besides various molecular chains (too complex to be understood by traction-era people, as was the rest of the facility), used to create the Scriven in preparation for the Black Centuries. The information was then passed down to further work for later historians, to start to understand the Ancient world.

Weapons

Particle compressing weapons, quantum energy weapons, biological weapons (tailored virus-bombs), conventional nuclear weapons (orbit-to-earth atomics) and even asteroids, some deployed upon orbital platforms, were utilized to great extent. More esoteric weapons may also have been used or at least developed: the American Empire is mentioned in passing to have possessed weaponry capable of somehow drawing power from parallel universes, though this is an traction-era rumour from a world many years after the War itself destroyed civilization so it might not be accurate. Whatever was actually employed has survived in legend/recorded tale/intact itself as being powerful enough to have "made the gods quake in fear" and was capable of projecting at the very least megaton-level firepower (like a Slow Bomb) given that the few weapons actually seen in action regularly destroy entire cities with single shots, such as San Francisco being wiped out in 2116.

Several items featured in the series are deadly relics of the conflict, including a directed-energy weapon called MEDUSA (Military Energy Department, United States of America) which is later mounted upon the Traction City of London. This weapon (and the computer that controls it) was recovered by a group of explorers from an ancient military base on the American continent. It is a key element of the plot in Mortal Engines.

Another featured weapon was the device known as ODIN (Orbital Defence Initiative), another ancient American weapon consisting of a particle cannon mounted on a satellite in Earth's orbit. ODIN is a key element of the plot in Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain, as several major organizations (particularly the Green Storm) attempt to gain control of the device to destroy their enemies. Other Ancient orbital weapons mentioned in passing are the Diamond Bat, Jinju 14, and the Nine Sisters, although these take no part in the plot and are not described beyond their name. It is implied that they are likely to have fallen out of orbit or to have ceased functioning during the long millennium/s between the Sixty Minute War and the rise of the Traction Cities. Slow Bombs were also mentioned by the Remembering Machines, described to be gravity-boosted asteroids, but the only other evidence of them is the craters left, which were looked upon with fascination afterwards.

Gallery

Art

The ODIN firing.

Slow Bombs and green energy beams hitting an ancient city.

Film Screenshots

The MEDUSA quantum energy weapon, shown in use during the Sixty Minute War, destroying ancient San Francisco in mere moments.

The city in 2116, only seconds before its destruction (viewable centuries later, on Goggle Screens - the later equivalent: )

The MEDUSA energy beam hitting the city. (Its laser is more visible if seen in-person: )

The effect of the sky color from the charge.

The MEDUSA hits the city in a loop GIF.

MEDUSA as portrayed in the film, mounted on St Paul's Cathedral.

MEDUSA's Target scanner.

References

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