World War Three

"The truth is much more complicated than you think."

This article is written from a Lore perspective. It contains spoilers and different reference materials might be contradictory.

“	[Humans] fought WWI with basic weapons, WWII with advanced weapons, and WWIII with fully automated ones. Who knows how far off we are from WWIV.	”

World War Three is the global conflict that engulfed mankind from 2045 to 2050 following the First Beilan Island Incident. It opposed NATO to a coalition of socialist countries led by the Neo-Soviet Union, and concluded with the defeat of NATO in Western Europe in 2050 (though the United States did not formally end the conflict until 2051).

Along with the Collapse Fluid clouds, the war destroyed most habitable lands and crippled nations. The political face of mankind was changed to a completely new state as superpowers were brought to their knees, eventually leading to the emergence of two superpowers in the aftermath: the Union of Rossartrism Nations Coalition and the Antarctic Union. The war bolstered the development of Tactical Dolls and autonomous heavy weapon platforms to replace a rapidly-decreasing quantity of manpower. If World War One is considered to be the first time electricity was weaponized on a large scale, World War Three is when autonomous technology made its place in mankind's palette for warfare.

World War Three was introduced early in the Girls' Frontline universe in the Secret Documents of Codename: Bakery Girl in 2013. It is seldom mentioned in the games, but was first explored in parts in the second Confidential Files in 2019, and much clarified in the third Files in 2026.

Background

The First Beilan Island Incident took place in Shanghai, China, in 2030. A large cloud of Collapse Fluid was released from an underground relics site and was quickly spreading destruction on Earth. Finger-pointing worsened already existing tensions in international political relations to the breaking point and populations were in desperate need of livable lands and resources, sparking the global conflict.

The spark that ignited the tense global political situation occurred in Germany. The 2035 Northern Lights Incident bathed Central Europe in collapse fluid radiations, including most of Northern and Eastern Germany. Southern Germany received most of the refugees, and when the German government decided to follow the neocolonialist movement of the EU instead of trying to rehabilitate the contaminated areas, violence started to brew between German citizens. Rumors of their political and industrial leaders leaving for the safety of Antarctica only worsened the situation. In 2042, the economic crisis in Ukraine led to an armed revolution in the eastern part of the country, and the Ukrainian Civil War broke out. When Kiev fell to East Ukraine, the EU finally intervened and mediated the split of the country during the Bucharest Agreement of June 2043, in an effort to stop a potential revolutionary wave in the rest of Europe. This was perceived by the Neo-Soviet Union as the EU encroaching on their territory.

When the German Liberal Democrats and Christian Democratic Union invoked the National Emergency Act and conducted political arrests to stop the Social Democrats from dissolving the Parliament, the German Civil War started on 14 November 2044. The opposite factions were supported by the EU-US alliance on one side and the Soviets on the other side. On 1 December 2044, Soviet airborne troops circled around the EU surveillance radars in Poland and successfully landed at Schönefeld Airport, which allowed them to provide tanks and other heavy weapons to the East Germans. Six days later, the EU rapid-response forces entered Berlin without resistance but soon found the barricades prepared by the Soviet Army on Straße des 17 Juni. When the US joined the conflict to back up the EU, World War Three began soon after. According to General Carter, the Neo-Soviet Union allied with the German Democratic Republic to defeat the “enemies of Europe” as the war started.

In the years leading to the war, many breakthroughs were made in the development of autonomous and semi-autonomous legged weapon platforms, able to bring heavy firepower to even the roughest terrains. When the United Nations collapsed in 2044, armies the world over scrambled to modernize their equipment with platforms reaching from 0.5 to over 10 meters tall and weighing from 10 to 35 tons from Sangvis Ferri, SIMATIC, Kirov Robotics, Chelyabinsk Mechanics, Lower Tajir Locomotive Works, Omsk Transport Machinery Plant and General Dynamics. Tactical Dolls struggled to find a place on the battlefields however, with even the most advanced Sangvis Ferri Ripper design failing to live up to military expectations.

As the world descended into violence, the two secrets factions born from the ideals of Raeder Rossartre prepared their plans for mankind's survival. Prometheans steered nations away from using Relic Technology during the war, as it would doubtlessly result in the complete destruction of mankind, encouraged the development of Tactical Dolls in prevision of post-war reconstruction, and pushed for the Neo-Soviet Union's victory in the war in keeping with the Heartland of the World-Island theory. Meanwhile, Beaconists selected important people to invite them to take shelter from the war in Antarctica. When the war broke out, Hollow City, the main relics site in Antarctica, declared itself an independent and neutral nation before sealing its entrances and isolating itself from the world. It remained untouched during the war.

Belligerents

This is a list of known belligerents. The full list is not known.

Active belligerents

• NATO
  • United States
  • European Union (since the NATO members are usually listed as “the US and the EU” (美军和欧盟), all active European belligerents are assumed to be members of the EU even if they're not explicitly stated to be)
    • France
    • United Kingdom
    • Italy
      • Lybia (Italian colony)
    • Germany
• Neo-Soviet–Chinese–Pan-European coalition (no official name)
  • Neo-Soviet Union
  • China
  • Pan-European Union
  • German Socialists in exile

Belligerents of uncertain political status

• NATO allies
  • Zaire: Used as a transit point from North America to the Asian theater.
  • Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg): These countries were an active theater during the last year of the war, but their political affiliation is unknown. As Western European countries, they're assumed to be affiliated with NATO.
• Soviet allies
  • Yugoslavia: The NSU supported the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia during the war.
  • Moldova: NATO troops conducted a bloody attack in Chișinău during the war.
  • Bulgaria: Soviet planes took off from Sofia during Operation Tradewind.
  • Greece: Soviet planes took off from Athens during Operation Tradewind and the country was considered under Soviet influence after the war.
  • Georgia: Soviet signal corps supported Operation Tradewind from Tbilisi.

Neutral states

• Switzerland: Acted as a neutral party during secret negotiations between the US and the NSU.

Phases one and two

World War Three began in 2045. The exact date differs between reference materials:

• The first Confidential Files (part. 2) state the date as April 15th. This date is reused in ^RF Lee-EnfieldLee-EnfieldLee-Enfield's second Neural Upgrade story.
• The second Confidential Files (part. 2) state the date as March 2nd.

The first phase of the war began with the launch of the first nuclear ballistic missiles. However, satellite communications had been lost in many parts of Earth and missile systems became widely imprecise and easy to intercept due to guiding interference. Soviet secret nuclear submarines in particular reacted to the loss of communication and observation of saturation launches by launching their own nuclear missiles. They quickly lost control of them and failed to strike major cities, but created many radiation zones. The saturation strikes during the first part of the war failed to cause major damage, but effectively heightened international tensions.

The second phase of the war saw nations vie for stratospheric airspace to conduct plane-based nuclear strikes. Assaults against enemy defenses relied on strategic bombers carrying nuclear cruise missiles, with intense sea and air battles taking place to intercept these bombers. Eventually, most armies were left without fleets and planes, and with many devastated cities.

NATO command was based in Bristol. Details of 2049 operations suggest that the NATO order of battle involved leaving the Western front in the Low Countries to the European Union troops while the American troops handled the German front. At some point, the US opened a frontline in China with their Asian Expeditionary Force. They apparently started to invade from the Guangxi region in Southern China, setting up a puppet government.

In just the second year of the war, the American population started suffering the consequences of the war in their daily lives as cheap staple foods and supplies of meat, eggs, and dairy were no longer guaranteed. The prices of essential goods rose from between 380% to 1500% between 2044 and June 2050 due to hyperinflation and shortages in the US. With all professional troops shipped out to the frontlines, national military agencies all relied on conscripts with poor discipline, which directly led to the explosion of violence of the North American Civil War at the end of the war.

The Battle of Chișinău, in Moldova, occurred at an unspecified date. 30,000 NATO troops, mostly British, attacked the city to seize its resources. After civilians were evacuated, the Soviet command gave a no-retreat order, leading to a bloody victory against the attackers.

Thanks to National Security Advisor Bel Ackerman secretly opening diplomatic lines with the Neo-Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs through Swiss channels, the US had opportunities to negotiate a ceasefire in 2047-2048, but they did not go through with it, apparently due to meddling from the CIA.

Phase three

The third phase of the war was a series of incredibly violent ground combats for the control of habitable land. Many of these areas were left devastated by combats. The Assault Artillery combat exoskeletons originally developed to fight ELIDs saw widespread use during ground combat due to the technical achievements in Tactical Doll technologies, deployed as "motorized infantry brigades" (摩托化步兵旅), used concurrently with autonomous main battle tanks and robotic assault platforms. Even mountain units had access to effective autonomous mobile mortars, howitzers and troop carriers mounted on four- and six-legged frames, effectively nullifying the traditional terrain advantage. These units could be organized into company-level armored assault formations under the direction of a single command vehicle, and just a few experienced tank commanders could lead an entire tank regiment. Robot platforms shot and even rammed each other in a renewal of traditional cavalry of sorts. Only the rapid depletion of available ammunition slowed these hypereffecient armies. By the third year of the war, this brutally effective mean of conventional warfare had depleted most of the resources of all armies, including reserve forces. Aside from Dolls, drones also earned a major place in the arsenal of the belligerents.

2047

Due to the Neo-Soviet Union's Ministry of Defense lack of trust in combat Dolls technology, Sangvis Ferri and IOP were only ordered transport Dolls to serve on supply lines for the first two years of the war, totaling over 10,000 units. By May 2047, manpower shortage on the frontlines and the United States' landing in Europe convinced the ministry to order combat Dolls for field testing. Sangvis Ferri used the Ripper as the base for the specialized Jaeger and Vespid models, while IOP doubled down on their all-purpose CSD frame by building a new military spec variant, able to operate many types of weapons instead of specializing. The ministry planned to test the Dolls on various frontlines before deployment against the US military in Germany, but when the US launched an armored assault campaign in August 2047, the Battle of Seelow Heights which lasted until September 2047, they had no choice but to bolster their defense lines with barely tested combat Dolls. Few of the 8000 units survived the campaign, but they nevertheless crushed the armored assault with startling efficiency, convincing the ministry to invest into combat Dolls. The test deployment of T-Dolls at Seelow Heights was retrospectively considered the earlier point of inflection that led to the end of the war.

As early as November 2047, the Soviets deployed Tactical Dolls to the Lybian front.

2048

Eager to find their own technological edge, the United States launched the Aurora program in South America in 2048 to find military applications for ELID creatures.

When NATO pushed back the Soviets from the Low Countries, the Soviets destroyed every transportation infrastructure they could, including the ports of Rotterdam and the Hague, to prevent NATO from establishing optimal supply lines. Fearing the Soviet long-range strike capabilities, NATO supply ships still used the damaged ports rather than pushing to Wilhelmshaven. In the winter of 2048, NATO and the NSU-PEU alliance deployed 300 brigades along the front lines of Northeastern Germany, but couldn't mount any significant offensive due to the cold weather. NSU-PEU victories on the ground had forced the NATO North Sea navy to abandon the Baltic Sea to the Soviets. While NATO had the advantage in terms of vehicles, the Soviets had the advantage of a shorter supply line, and NATO troops had to requisition local sources of food to survive the winter, causing around 50,000 civilian deaths from famines across Western Europe.

2049

In January 2049, socialist German engineers who had chosen exile after the Palace of the Republic Murders in 2044 met with Soviet and Chinese engineers in Astrakhan (to the Northeast of the Caspian Sea), where the former Soviet Union and Russian Federation had based their research on Ground Effect Vehicles (GEVs). Their goal was to create a small fleet of combat and transport GEVs, which would be manned by Sangvis Ferri T-Dolls for deployment on the Mediterranean front.

The stalemate in Europe spread to the Mediterranean and Asian fronts in spring 2049, with the Soviets blockading Malta and the coasts of Italy while the People's Liberation Army led a bitter war that prevented NATO from progressing into China farther than Chengdu. With the puppet regimes of South America sustaining them and the violent quelling of anti-War movements while the NSU and China were running out of uncontaminated land, the US believed a war of attrition would eventually turn in their favor.

On 1st April 2049, Soviet troops started focusing on securing their positions and entrenching rather than mounting offensives. On 22 June 2049, NATO launched a renewed offensive and reclaimed Cologne, Eindhoven, Tilburg and Stuttgart, but found it impossible to break past the second defense line, heavily fortified and manned by newly deployed Tactical Dolls. This made NATO realize that they could no longer rely on the strategy of patiently depleting the enemy's manpower, and needed to utterly crush the main Soviet force in one go to break the stalemate. This was exactly what the Soviets hoped: forcing NATO to pull out of secondary fronts and commit all of their power to Europe.

Starting 1st June 2049, the US started the withdrawal by sea of their Asian Expeditionary Force from China. Seizing the opportunity, the PLA launched massive attacks starting 2 June 2049. By 7 August, the PLA had pushed the US back to the Southern coast of the country, but it would take until 29 August before the last American troops departed and the PLA reconquered the entirety of their territory. A few leaders of the AEF would be sentenced to capital punishment in 2075 for war crimes on the Asian front.

In August 2049, the Neo-Soviet Army test-flew the GEVs in the Caspian Sea. As the NATO offensive of September 2049 began, the engineers were given six months to finalize the T-Doll crews. The first amphibious landing exercises were held in Baku in October 2049.

Throughout August, Soviet intelligence picked up on NATO's next grand operation in Europe, which would involve 300 brigades along the entire frontline from Southern Germany to Brussels. IOP and Sangvis Ferri increased Tactical Doll production in preparation for this offensive, and 40 motorized infantry brigades were deployed and ready for battle by 1st September 2049. The major NATO offensive began on 18 September 2049, and the Soviets were forced to shrink the frontline in the Low Countries on 3 November and the German frontline on 10 November. At the end of November 2049, NATO command decided to focus its efforts on an Eastward offensive starting at Nuremberg, intending to trap the Soviet Western and Central Groups into a pocket.

But on 29 November, after amassing troops throughout the month, the Soviets launched Operation Antitrade (“西风带”行动). Assisting the Soviet Western Group, 60 motorized infantry brigades made of Tactical Dolls, fine-tuned based on data from previous battles, crushed the NATO forces in the Ruhr and the Netherlands with their unrelenting combat efficiency, while the Central and Western Soviet Groups prevented NATO forces from rushing in reinforcements. By 23 December, the Soviets had made significant advances into Belgium and captured Luxembourg on 5 January 2050, breaching NATO's in-depth defense and opening a straight line to Paris to threaten NATO's supply lines on the West coast of Europe.

In late 2049, a bomber of unspecified affiliation carrying Collapse-technology enabled ordnance crashed near Jahodná, in Eastern Slovakia, during Operation Fimbul. The region became heavily contaminated and inhospitable within three years.

2050

In January 2050, Soviet troops found a mass grave containing the corpses of prisoners of war with missing organs, a war crime committed by a small group of US soldiers, and used the incident for their propaganda. One of the criminals, Kevin Hawkins, would be captured and confess on 15 April. He was recruited as a spy by the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs using his war crimes as leverage.

After the Soviet breach through th Low Countries, the French government hastily ordered its Southern troops to move North, as Paris was only defended by the Versailles reserve battalion. British paratroopers were urgently dispatched from London but could only arrive by the morning of 8 January, while two Soviet motorized infantry regiments reached Paris on the morning of 7 January 2050. Northern Paris fell rapidly, but the Soviets were stopped in the 4th arrondissement by the blockade of the Seine river. Receiving news of the impending arrival of the British paratroopers, the Soviet troops elected to withdraw from Paris during the night of 7 to 8 January and turned their attention towards Brussels, Antwerp and the coast of Belgium to secure their advance. Despite victories over other French detachments, the Western Group decided to retreat into occupied Netherlands and Northern Germany to reinforce their Central Group when the US captured Cologne on 22 January 2050, shifting the frontline back to Düsseldorf.

Estimating that the Soviet salient was losing steam, NATO decided to focus on dividing the two Army Groups to destroy them more easily. With previous operations in the mountains of Thuringia in 2048 having proven disastrous, NATO targeted the Ruhr as the region where they would destroy the main Soviet forces. While launching diversionary offensives Eastward towards Leipzig and Kassel, the US concentrated most of its 50 brigades on a Northward vector towards Duisburg, breaching Soviet defenses at Düsseldorf twice. The Soviet Central Group failed to relieve Western Group with an offensive through Sauerland in 15 February. On 26 February, the Soviet Western Group fell in Düsseldorf, and on the Low Countries front, the Soviet troops retreated into the Netherlands, allowing NATO to retake control of Antwerp and Brussels on 5 March and of Luxembourg on 9 March. By 15 March, most of Belgium was retaken by NATO, who now firmly believed that a final offensive to separate the two Soviet Army Groups would sign the end of the war. On the shores of the Caspian Sea, the GEV engineers were hurriedly finalizing their fleet.

Operation Tradewind (“信风”计划) was launched on 15 March 2050, aiming to storm Rome and Paris from the Mediterranean to force Italy and France out of the war. With the support of the vehicle forces, paratroopers would seize airfields in Italy, and use them to strike Marseille and open the way into Southern France. It was a gamble for the NSU and PEU, who were both suffering from a shortage of manpower. The main assault force traveled to the Black Sea along the Don and Volga. On 20 March, Operation Warm Tide (“暖潮”行动) began with the mobilization of the Black Sea Fleet. On 24 March, the main assault force, made of six GEVs, a tank company and a motorized infantry battalion, landed in the Basilicata region of Italy to seize the port of Taranto, with the assistance of a signals unit based in Tbilisi in Georgia and air support launched from Sofia in Bulgaria and Athens in Greece. NATO forces in Italy were so unprepared for such a swift and effective strike from the sea that the southern half of Italy was captured in one day. On 26 March, faced with the unrelenting progress of the GEVs and their Doll crew, Rome surrendered and the NSU-PEU forces quickly seized the airfields they needed to conduct the bombing of key targets in Southwestern France. Toulon, Marseille and Montpellier were hit on 27 March. With the EU troops still mobilized on the Low Countries front, there was no chance for France to react. On 30 March, the Black Sea Fleet captured Toulon while planes landed without any resistance. By 3 April 2050, Toulouse fell and Lyon was besieged. It would take less than two weeks for the Soviets to reach Paris.

The French government was indecisive about fighting to the last or surrendering to cut their losses like the Italians. The American troops in Germany feared that the Soviet advance in France would cut their supply lines and pincer them, but they couldn't divert their own troops. D.C. instead chose the radical solution of deploying nuclear ATACM missiles from Besançon. On 4 April 2050 at 19:56, Lyon was razed by American missiles without coordination with the other members of NATO, killing countless soldiers from both sides and fleeing civilians. The missile launch from Besançon was filmed by locals and French public opinion disavowed NATO. The French president was impeached and France declared peace on 5 April 2050, expelling all NATO forces from the country and cutting their supply line. On 10 April 2050, Federal Germany also surrendered.

EU troops in the Netherlands and American troops in Germany refocused their efforts into breaking through the Soviet blockade in the Ruhr and linking up before retreating from continental Europe, but American forces were much too spread out, as far as southern Germany. Despite a general mobilization of air assets to provide support on 15 April 2050, only 20 American brigades managed to complete the withdrawal to the UK, while only 10 EU brigades managed to escape the Soviet assault on Brussels. The war essentially stopped in Europe at this point as Britain abandoned the fight (it is not specified whether they officially signed an armistice, but it is likely).

The effectiveness of their T-Dolls during Operation Tradewind was a consecration for Sangvis Ferri and IOP. Sangvis Ferri's Jaegers Tactical Dolls had been the favorite model earlier in the war due to IOP's CSD series being unreliable, but with the help of former 90wish researchers, IOP's ACD-series, used during the Nordic campaigns, came to be the most used Tactical Doll model during the war, with 11,730 units produced.

Late in the war, a CSD-119A T-Doll serving with Britain's 6th Royal Dragoons, who would become known as ^RF Lee-EnfieldLee-EnfieldLee-Enfield over a decade later, refused an order to shoot civilians during Operation Black Forest, causing the catastrophic failure of the operation. She was court-martialled on 13 November 2050, marking the first publicly scrutinized case of Doll disobedience, but details of the trial were scarce due to the sensitive nature of the order and the Doll was actually allowed to return to service. The Black Forest case slowed down the adoption of T-Dolls by state armies.

Conclusion

The effects of Operation Tradewind were censored in official American media and mainstream platforms like 4chan and Reddit, but shared in political activist circles through encrypted messaging (and even exotic, old and unregulated methods like radiofax) by concerned citizens and foreign agents seeking to destabilize the US. In the first days of May 2050, US forces in Western Europe started surrendering without order. On 3 May, images of the surrenders started reaching the American public, acting as the spark that would soon detonate the American powder keg and cause the North American Civil War. The United States' Asian Expeditionary Force had stopped in Kinshasa in the allied Republic of Zaire as a staging location during their return to America, but the start of the Civil War left all but the force's top commanders stranded. Going back by their own means meant taking the risk of being sunk by the Soviet fleet and being charged with disobedience back home. Left in the hands of its Lieutenant General, the AEF resolved to start a new life in Zaire.

On 9 May 2050, NATO General Schultz was forced to sign the documents of the surrender in Europe, and the Neo-Soviet army started the military occupation of Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg, which had suffered the most damage during the war, to supervise their military and political reconstruction. But because the Soviet Union's central cities suffered considerable damage in the initial strategic nuclear strikes of the war, the NSU was mostly still focused on rebuilding its own country, which allowed the budding URNC to establish early diplomatic relations in Western Europe. The Italian government, which was already under Soviet influence, was rebuilt fairly quickly, while the political situation in Germany was much more complicated. European Liberation Day (欧洲解放日) was set in May (probably 9 May).

Aftermath

The influence of the Neo-Soviet Union now spread "from the Yellow Zone of Yekaterinburg to the English Channel". As the PEU and China has established full control over the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, they turned their efforts towards supporting the development efforts of uncontaminated land in the Middle East and Africa. The development of Dolls during the war was a boon for a world that had ruined its own industrial and survival infrastructures, and its population: while the official number of people dead or missing during the war was 1.95 million, it is estimated that 20 million civilians died from the rationing of food, energy and medicine between 2045 and 2050. Though the NSU and the PEU were considered the victors of the war, the equivalent of 3000 divisions had been killed in the intense and devastating combat, and no nation was left with enough troops and ordnance to carry any further offensive. Both the “victors”, the United States and other surviving nations were left with no other choice but to resume uneasy diplomatic talks. Nations agreed to restrict their dominions, at least until they could rebuild their armies.

The complete collapse of the US economy in early July 2050 bolstered left-wing guerilla groups within occupied South America to launch offensives and retake major cities from the puppet governments installed by the Americans, plunging entire countries in the hands of warlords for years. This led to the interruption of the Aurora program in August 2050, which was on the verge of a breakthrough with the discovery of Shrike cells. Plans to merge the Aurora unit with Federal Germany's National Special Defense Technology Development Group were dropped when the latter was disbanded.

On 29 June 2051, the federal government of the United States at long last negotiated the terms of the ceasefire in Europe with the NSU, having left its troops stranded in Great Britain for over a year due to the Civil War. The US lost their political control and commercial assets in Europe in exchange for shipping back home the 14 combat brigades and attending support apparatus that had been left stranded in Great Britain since they had been routed. By replinishing their military force on the homeland, the US hoped to crush the separatist states that emerged with the North American Civil War into submission, though indirect NSU intervention ended up miring the country in its Civil War for 20 years. As a result of the delay between the actual cessation of combats and the signature of the American ceasefire, different sources use either 2050 or 2051 as the end year of the war.

By 2051, the Soviet occupied Europe and 369 millions people. Some supplies were sent to relieve Europe by the Siberian Lifeline, but it was limited as the NSU was not ready to support Europe at the expense of its own citizens. When the URNC started its agricultural expansion in West Africa, it considered it not only its humanitarian mission but also a diplomatic outreach towards the NSU.

In Europe, Yellow Zones had mostly been spared by the devastation of the war, as combat concentrated on important logistics and communication hubs and armies made an effort to limit exposure of their dwindling forces to ELID. Social order was preserved due to continuous support of governments to their Yellow Zone settlements, so they wouldn't be recruited by enemy nations. But after the war ended and the Neo-Soviet Union increased its influence on the European continent, unrest emerged in many coastal Yellow Zones of Central and Western Europe, where anti-Soviet sentiment was prevalent. Former NATO conscripts returned to their homes, bringing with them bad rumors about the Neo-Soviets and the Pan-European Union, and increasing isolationist sentiment. As both the white and black markets became flooded with the military equipment left behind after the sudden collapse of NATO, these anxious populations armed themselves against a potential Soviet retaliation.

The Soviet victory was not good news for the Yellow Zones concentrated on the coastal areas of Central and Western Europe, who didn't have good relations with the NSU. The sudden collapse of NATO led to a flood of conscripts returning to their home regions with bad rumors about the Soviets, and military equipment poured into Yellow Zone settlements fearful of Soviet retaliation. However, the occupiers' priority was to restore the industrial capacity and workforce in Europe. Despite resistance in the NSU against export of grain to a starved Europe and demands to return prisoners of war, POWs were essential in the restoration of European infrastructure by 2053. But chaos returned when the Soviet army left the public security and social control over Europe to PMCs, organized crime and the black market reemerged and corruption went rampant in PEU governments without the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, leading to the European Yellow Zone Purges.

For the next ten years, all countries faced problems with reconstructing their infrastructures and accommodating surviving civilian population. The philosophy of Rossartrism eventually became widely accepted as the best thought system under the circumstances. Nation-states that were mere shells of their former power reduced their domains to select large cities and industrial regions, paying the numerous emerging PMCs like Griffin and Kryuger to provide security services and find resources and shelter for the rest of their population. With the new demand for military ordnance, arms manufacturers new and old reaped large benefices. Localized conflicts continued to emerge. Specific Doll models were developed to tackle problems such as astronomical research, impeded by the great amount of low-orbit debris, and the need for aerial navigators able to pilot without a functional satellite coverage or most automated systems, which were no longer usable due to Collapse particle clouds. With the research on renewable energy effectively halted by WW3, Dolls were also used to rebuild the petroleum-related infrastructure thoroughly destroyed during the war and provide much-needed energy.

The Warsaw Pact used prisoners of war to clean up the battlefields and the mighty autonomous tanks used to wage destruction during the war were converted into agricultural machines. Protests erupted in Western Europe in the spring of 2051 over the lack of food, which were controlled by hiring PMCs organized by Eastern European veterans operating under the Soviet International Military Cooperation Bureau. Deployed in Europe and the new colonies in Africa, the PMCs faced the consequences of the abrupt end of the war: the diffuse lines of battle had led to the abandonment of a lot of military hardware, which found its way to the black market and into the hands of non-state actors opposing the PMCs. The military Tactical Dolls market picked up again as PMCs searched for new sources of manpower.

Besides successful businesses, international organizations such as Interpol, the Endangered Species Conservation Society, the Frise International Joint Scientific Research Association, the World Astronomical Research Union, the International Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the International Health Organization and various international regulatory financial institutions were active during the 2050s, many of them independent versions of organizations once federated under the United Nations. The UNs were eventually re-established in 2062 and the Union of Rossartrism Nations Coalition was officially formed in 2064 in order for the Rossartrists to increase worldwide cooperation and meet the harsh economic and labor requirements for mankind to recover from the war.

A considerable amount of various data was lost during the war, including the fate of the two subjects from the Black Lily and White Rose project, Lily and Rose, and ELID vaccines research. Some historical musical creations have become either lost or prohibitively difficult to access: Nirvana's album Nevermind couldn't be found in full on the internet. Several species of plants and animals went extinct or near extinct after the Beilan Island incident and the war, including storks, flamingos, penguins and humpback whales. Even deer and squirrel sightings have become a rare occurrence. The size of trees had also been affected. Cultivating many sorts of fruits has become impractical due to climate and soil quality issues, leading to the creation of replacements such as a new pomegranate cultivar imitating the taste of other fruits.

References

General List of Characters (Minor Characters) · List of Locations · Timeline · Rossartrism · Eurosky Low-Emission Infectious Disease · Epiphyllum · GAVIRUL Technology Assault Artillery · Automaton · Bee Sting · Collapse Technology · Doll · Magrasea · Neural Cloud · Nirvana · OGAS · Parapluie virus · Pike · Purification Project · Relic Technology · Remolding Pattern · Shrike · Weight Bearing Events Beilan Island Incident · Northern Lights Incident · World War Three · North American Civil War · Operation Couatl · European Yellow Zone Purges · Incident Zero · Butterfly Incident · Safe House 3 Raid · Plan Parapluie · Great Retreat · Paldiski Incident · Project Valkyrie and Project Cocoon · Fireworks Incident · Battle of the Dead Sea · Battle of Frankfurt · Cloud Crisis · Operation Xyster · First Antarctic War · Second Antarctic War Factions 90wish · Antarctic Union · China · Doll Community · Fox Sisterhood · France · Free States of America · Germany · Global Rescue Foundation · Griffin & Kryuger · KCCO · NATO · Neo-Soviet Union · Pan-European Union · Paradeus · People's Coalition of the West Coast · Sangvis Ferri · Underground Brokers · URNC · United Nations · United States · Varjagers · Zaire Corporations 16LAB · 42LAB · B.R.I.E.F. · Cyber Media · Galatea Corporation · Girard Group · I.O.P. · Mangi Security Service · Orlog Conglomerate · Svarog Heavy Industries · Ultilife · Universal Anything Services · WAVE · Minor Corporations