Thank you!On the way 🙂 This is the list of the Canadian Prime Ministers we decided on for the TL:
1) John A. MacDonald
July 1, 1860 - May 22, 1871 [1]
2) Georges-Etienne Cartier
May 24, 1871 - September 6, 1873 [2]
3) Alexander MacKenzie
September 8, 1873 - May 16, 1881
4) John Thompson
May 18, 1881 - August 14, 1890 [3]
5) Wilfrid Laurier
August 16, 1890 - October 6, 1911
6) Robert Borden
October 9, 1911 - July 10, 1920
7) Arthur Meighen
First term: July 10, 1920 - December 29, 1921
Second term: June 18, 1926 - September 19, 1926 [4]
8) William Lyon MacKenzie King
First term: January 1, 1922 - June 16, 1926
Second term: September 22, 1926 - August 7, 1930
Third term: March 12, 1937 - June 18, 1947
9) Richard Bedford Bennett
August 7, 1930 - May 19, 1933
10) Thomas Crerar
May 19, 1933 - March 12, 1937 [5]
11) Louis St. Laurent
June 18, 1947 - September 25, 1958
12) John Diefenbaker
September 25, 1958 - April 22, 1963 [6]
13) Lester Pearson
April 22, 1963 - April 20, 1968
14) Pierre Elliott Trudeau
April 20, 1968 - September 15, 1974 [7]
15) Robert Stanfield
September 15, 1974 - June 14, 1984 [8]
16) Edward Seaga
June 14, 1984 - October 11, 1988 [9]
17) Jean Chretien
October 11, 1988 - May 15, 1996 [10]
18) Avril Phaedra "Kim" Campbell
May 15, 1996 - June 27, 2000 [11]
19) John Gilbert "Jack" Layton
June 27, 2000 - August 19, 2009 [12]
20) Peter MacKay
August 19, 2009 - June 26, 2017
21) Justin Trudeau
June 26, 2017 - present [13]
[1] John A. MacDonald retired from office owing to the Pacific Scandal, but unlike OTL he did not attempt a political comeback
[2] Georges-Etienne Cartier doesn't here suffer from Bright's Disease until much later in life, and here remains in politics long enough to be Thompson's Foreign Minister during the Philippines War
[3] MacDonald's not making a political comeback and Cartier's age allows numerous younger members of the Conservative Party to rise in the ranks, and John Thompson rises all the way to become prime minister
[4] Arthur Meighen's short second term is a direct result of the King-Byng Affair, which also directly leads to the Statute of Westminster
[5] Thomas Crerar and his Progressive Party pull off a truly stunning victory in the 1933 elections at the nadir of the Great Depression, and usher in an era of minority governments. Crerar loses his Prime Ministership back to King in 1937 but remains (along with a number of his cabinet ministers) in the government until 1947
[6] John Diefenbaker has a reasonably-successful time as Prime Minister but his crushing 1957 electoral victory is the very last Canadian parliamentary majority government
[7] Pierre Trudeau rises to power with great fanfare but the economic difficulties of Canada in the early 1970s and the growing divisions in his party mean his second government is short-lived before he falls to the widely-respected Stanfield
[8] The government that resulted from the first elections under Canada's new electoral system elected Nova Scotian Robert Stanfield to the Prime Minister's office. Stanfield's first cabinet is also notable in that it saw a former Prime Minister (Diefenbaker, in this case) become a cabinet minister under another Prime Minister
[9] Seaga was the first Prime Minister from the Canadian Caribbean, and his time as PM was the end of his long list of achievements in Canada, including being instrumental in Canada's Constitution in 1972
[10] Chretien was Pierre Trudeau's right-hand man and one of the best negotiators of Canadian politics in the 1970s and 1980s. He defeated Seaga and Ed Broadbent in the 1988 elections and was victorious again in 1992 before falling narrowly to Campbell in 1996
[11] The first female Prime Minister
[12] Having resuscitated the Progressive Party from its 1990s nadir, Jack Layton proved to be just as charismatic as so many Prime Ministers before him and re-established the Progressive Party as a capable governing party, turning Canada's evolving two-coalition system into a three-coalition system and establishing the first multi-party governments since World War II
[13] Pierre Trudeau's son proves to have all of the charisma of his father half a century before, and an ability to align multiple parties into a working government
The Three Amigos (Collaborative TL Between Joe Bonkers, TheMann, and isayyo2)
- Thread starter Joe Bonkers
- Start date
Thanks for the catch, Ming. I edited that. 🙂
We haven't got everything sorted out, but I can say:
- Canada operates multiple full-sized fleet aircraft carriers from World War II onwards, with the modified Audacious-class carriers built during the war rebuilt with angled decks in the mid-1950s and replaced with the Commonwealth Aircraft Carrier Project carriers in the 1970s. One of the old carriers was preserved in Vancouver, the other two were scrapped.
- The Commonwealth carriers are CVNs, sized between the CVA-01 and the American supercarriers but being capable of operating all of the largest aircraft. Built in the mid-1970s and overhauled in the late 90s and early 2000s. As of the 2022 their replacements are under construction.
- Canada was the first country to drop a nuclear bomb (on Kiel in 1944) and has maintained a nuclear capability ever since. Canada originally used free-fall bombs from heavy bombers but developed suitable cruise missiles in the late 1950s, before the Americans supported Canada getting the same deal as the Brits for the Polaris missiles. Canada built four SSBNs in the 1960s and 1970s, these submarines being taken out of service after the end of the Cold War. The missiles were originally mounted on propeller-driven heavy bombers and fighters, but the RCAF acquired examples of the Handley-Page Victor in the 1960s. Combined with the SSBNs and their tankers, the RCAF has a huge nuclear punch. The first generation of missiles were replaced Victors were replaced by the B-1 Lancer in the 1990s, while the SSBNs weren't replaced as a result of the end of the Cold War. Today, Canada's nukes are small enough to fit on Tomahawk and Taurus missiles, and free-fall bombs in Canadian service use a GPS guidance system similar to the OTL JDAM to allow lob-toss deliveries with high accuracy.
- Canada built the Avro Arrow (which became a standard interceptor for much of the Commonwealth) and used it until the end of the Cold War. The CF-100s were retired in the 1960s by the Arrow, while the standard new fighter-bomber for the RCAF starting from 1965ish was the F-4 Phantom, built with Canuck-spec Spey turbofans, gun armament and improved electronics. They (and the Blackburn Buccaneer off of Canada's carriers) played a substantial role in Vietnam. The Phantom wasn't finally retired until the end of the Cold War.
- Canada's air forces learned about the value of long-range attacks during the Vietnam War and acquired the rights to make the F-111 in 1971 in response, building over 200 of them between 1973 and 1980. It ends up being a key part of Canada's Air Force well into the 21st Century, helping establish the idea of deep strike operations in the RCAF.
- The Commonwealth includes a lot of joint military programs besides just the carriers. The (British-Canadian) Challenger 2 tank is in the Canadian Army for this reason, as well as having co-developed APCs with Singapore (the Terrex to the Singaporeans, known as Tyrannus in Canada), IFVs with the UK (the FV510 Warrior, though with a few choice modifications) and gun-armed AFVs with South Africa (the Rooikat, which is named the Werewolf in Canada for its highly-advanced night fighting systems). Canada's Army in modern times values fast-moving firepower, which is why the FV510 is due to be replaced by a wheeled IFV, and the Rooikat is the most recent example of the wheeled fighting vehicles Canada has been using for infantry fire support since the Panhard EBR of the 1950s. The Tyrannus and Rooikats of the Canadian Army use the same model of Robinson diesel engine (though the version in the Rooikat is more powerful) and a lot of different vehicles in Canada use a lot of similar systems and sub-assemblies.
- Canada, Mexico and Australia all helped the US foot the bill for developing the AEGIS Combat System in return for them being able to use it, resulting in Canada buying AEGIS ships starting in the mid-1980s. Though classified as destroyers, these ships, known as the Fraser Class, are monsters - two Mark 41 and two Mark 48 VLS systems, four 155mm guns in twin turrets, four individual 76mm guns, twin Goalkeeper CIWS units, Harpoon missiles and Poseidon tiltwing ASW aircraft - all on the largest escort hull the RCN had ever built to that time.
There is much more, but I gotta work out with the guys in the meantime. Hope that helps!
Last edited:
Ming777
Monthly Donor
I believe you actually had the RCN operate improved Audacious class carriers in WWII Would probably still be replaced in the 70s.
I see the F-4 Phantom IIs and CF-105 Arrows being relegated to Specialized roles by the 90s.
Otherwise looking good.
You're correct, it was Mexico that built Essexes. Minor detail but I'll fix it.
The Arrow, yes. The Phantom II not sure. We haven't really decided what would replace the CF-105 in the RCAF. I can say that Canada gets AWACS much earlier than OTL (built on Vickers VC-16 airframes in the mid-70s) and the RCAF is an active developer of modern AWACS systems, along with Canada's electronics industries.
Thank You. 🙂
Welcome to the 1980s
By 1981, the wealth and social development of the Amigos nations had reached places that had once been almost unimaginable just a generation before. The 265.2 million citizens of the United States, 63.6 million citizens of Canada and 129.4 million citizens of Mexico lived lives that were among the best on Earth, courtesy of over 30 years of economic growth that, while hampered by the Energy Crisis and slowed by the stagflation of the early to mid 1970s, had resulted in wealth beyond meaning for so many that it was hard to see it as anything but the norm. The Baby Boomer generations who had become the backbone of the Third Great Awakening in the second half of the 1960s and who had been so many of the Born For This Generation were now rapidly becoming a majority in many companies as the World War II veterans increasingly began to head for retirement, and with this had come many shifts in the way of living and doing business alike.
Nowhere was the former point seen more than among the ranks of the LGBT community. All three Amigos had legalized all forms of homosexual activity in 1966 (Canada), 1968 (Mexico) and 1971 (United States, though many US states were well ahead of Washington on this front), the community had been able see many of their taboos broken in the 1970s, and many of the events of the early 1980s ended this forever. The February 1981 Bathhouse Raids in Toronto (and the shameful outing of those arrested in the raids by the Toronto Sun newspaper) ended up ultimately giving rise to the Gay Pride Movement in Toronto, which ended up being a complete backfire for those who were homophobic - no one arrested in the Raids was ever convicted of criminal charges, the Sun and the Toronto Police Service paid out a $154 million settlement to those who had been wronged and the Pride Parade by the late 1980s had become a Toronto institution. It was a similar story in San Francisco after the murder of ground-breaking San Francisco city councillor Harvey Milk by former San Francisco police officer Dan White in 1978 - when White's trial resulted in a lenient sentence under a fear-of-gay-men defense in May 1979, it touched off one of the worst riots in post-World War II San Francisco, where two people died and $3.5 million in damage was done, and was then retaliated by the San Francisco Police Department three days later where over 80 people were seriously injured by the SFPD in a series of massive police raids, three of whom later died of their injuries. This event resulted in the San Francisco Police Department being re-organized under federal supervision in 1981-84, and the events in San Francisco and Toronto ended up causing a wave of Gay Pride events in the 1980s, which most famously led to the Night Of The Rainbow in Guanajuato, Mexico, on August 4, 1984, where a Gay Pride protest that bumped into police units ended up being swamped by local residents who supported the protesters, and turned the whole scene into a massive display of people who supported the LGBT community in Mexico. When the following year on August 4 a second equally-huge event happened in Guanajuato, the Night became a regular event. (Today the Night Of The Rainbow in Guanajuato is one of the world's premiere LGBT-themed events.) Even among the religious over the 1980s the views of homosexuality steadily improved, primarily as more and more LGBT communities came alive and more people began to see who they really were, which dramatically reduced the fears of them, with one of the more famous advancements in this regard being connected to many churches, a great many of whom in the late 1970s and early 1980s openly opened their doors to people who were LGBT, adding to the acceptance of them - indeed, many who consider themselves part of the Born For This Generation consider the massive erosion of homophobia in the 1980s in the Amigos to be one of their most proud actions.
Canada's Constitution in 1972 had given wide latitude to what could be considered a constitutionally-protected right of expression, and in September 1984 sexual orientation was added to this, and an explicit constitutional amendment was ultimately done to this effect, that amendment being written into law in 1995, though for many in Toronto the greatest sign of their success in their fight was the Toronto Sun's editorial on February 7, 2001 - twenty years to the day after their infamous outing of those arrested in the Bathhouse Raids - admitting to a "profound moral failing" in their actions in 1981, hoping that their transgressions could be forgiven but stating quite openly "If some cannot forgive the staff at this newspaper for the sins committed against them on February 7, 1981, we understand and are willing to accept their anger, as we need only think of how we would feel had it been us who had our lives harmed by others, who were hatred for nothing more than who they fell in love with." Likewise, the White Night Riot and the massive gay pride parades that exploded in many places in the United States in the 1980s led to further court challenges, leading to morality laws with regards to sexual relations between consenting adults being considered unconstitutional in the Evans v. MacArthur decision on August 19, 1986, a date that is indeed celebrated by a sizable portion of the United States' LGBT community as "Our Liberation Day".
The 1980s saw the very last gasps of public bigotry begin to disappear forever. Helped along by the Second Act For The Advancement of Native Americans in 1982, the United States and the state of South Dakota returned a vast section of the Black Hills back to the Lakotah tribes of the region (who consider the region sacred), ending a land dispute that had simmered for nearly a century, while the United States elected its first Hispanic Vice-President when Robert Kennedy's Vice President, Texas Senator Henry Gonzalez, was elected with him in November 1984. Mexico, having tended towards the more-competent leaders for its Presidency, had two successive style symbols occupy its Presidency in Joaquín Lopez Garcia, who succeeded the technocratic Luis Echevarria in September 1973, and his successor, Esperanza Rosario, who was elected to the position six years later. Rosario, who in the process became the first female head of government in any of the Amigos, gained the nickname "The Lady in Red" after sporting a beautiful dress in that red color at a reception at the White House for her (along with a number of other NATO leaders and influential people, including Prince Charles and Princess Diana) in April 1983 - that meeting in itself resulted in a friendship between Rosario and the Princess of Wales that would last for decades to come, among other things. Rosario's successor, Arturo Bienvenida, probably got the greatest shock of his career just thirteen days after his election, when Mexico City, along with much of Southern Mexico, was hammered by a massive Earthquake on September 19, 1985.
Despite Mexico having some of the world's best building codes with regards to earthquakes - it had been shaken heavily in 1957 and 1976, and lessons had indeed been learned from these events - the September 19 Earthquake was the largest ever seen in Mexico and the largest in North America since the Good Friday Quake in Alaska in 1964, registering an 8.0 on the Richter scale. The port city of Lazaro Cardenas, some 30 miles from the epicenter, was hit hard, but the worst damage was suffered in Mexico City, owing to its geography - the city sits in a valley that is for the most part a filled-in lakebed, which resonates with some seismic waves - and in 1985, this is exactly what happened in a number of areas. These areas saw massive ground movement, adding to the damage (this would be seen again in San Francisco Bay Area in 1989 as well) and causing major destruction in Mexico City. Over 700 people lost their lives in Mexico City, along with over 60,000 injured and over $5 Billion in damage done. Despite this, Bienvenida himself dived in to try to help with the rescue, along with countless others, and rescue efforts from the Amigos and Latin America were also rapidly dispatched to Mexico City, with the response being remarkably large from the Amigos in particular. (Four years later this favor would be returned in the Bay Area, and once again in Los Angeles in 1994.) While the quake was horribly destructive to Mexico City, the speed at which rebuilding was done was impressive even by the standards of the Get-This-Mess-Sorted Amigos, and the Mexican Government's response to the disaster was excellent by virtually any standards. By 1990 those who had lost their homes from the Earthquake had been moved into their new homes, and Mexico City's architects and city planners made great pains to make sure that what happened in 1985 wouldn't happen again, mandating much denser subsurface structures and foundations in many portions of the city, and adding to Mexico's already-stringent building codes.
Indeed, the response to the 1985 Earthquake was a sign of just how situation got handled in the Amigos. From the famous saving of Wilkes-Barre from flooding from Hurricane Agnes in 1972 to the rapid recovery of Washington and Oregon from the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May 1980, natural disaster recovery was by then very much a speciality, with agencies in all three countries existing specifically for the purpose of both rapid response to disasters and recovery from them. Much of this had been a result of knowing of the conditions of the world they lived in, but a lot of it was also preparedness to try to save every life possible if and when disaster hits. The United States' Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had a good reputation for sorting out messes, and the Mexican Agencia De Preparación Para Emergencias (ADPPE), set up in the aftermath of the 1985 Earthquake, would go on to learn much from FEMA and would learn many lessons from this, and Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team, formed in 1987 also as a result of the Earthquake in Mexico, would soon be copied by both the United States and Mexico, with the former even directly assigning aircraft specifically for the use of the USAF's International Assistance Response Force, including C-141 and C-130 airlifters and CH-47 helicopters. But before that, though, the effectiveness of the DART team and its compatriots in North America would be put to the test in a way that made headlines for all the right reasons.
While Detente between the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies and the West had by the 1980s become a stable force (even as the Russians dramatically expanded their Navy and built a vast fleet of aerial refueling tankers and extended their air force's range in the 1970s and 1980s), to the point that the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties began to be negotiated in the 1970s, initially just involving the United States and Soviet Union but by the 1980s including all of the world's nuclear powers - the United Kingdom, France, China, Canada, Mexico, Israel and India were a part of the arms treaty developments of the 1980s. For all sides, there was an expectation that the growing capabilities of their conventional forces - and all sides were making massive efforts at this in the 1980s - would make up for losses in strategic capabilities, a viewpoint that had the additional benefit of reducing the likelihood of humanity killing themselves in the event of a nuclear war. As part of this, everyone involved began drawing down their nuclear weapons stockpiles, dismantling old weapons and taking earlier weapons platforms out of service - everyone abandoned ICBMs, SLBMs and MRBMs that used hypergolic chemicals for their propulsion, and many older nuclear submarines on both sides began to be adapted for new uses - the American "41 For Freedom" nuclear missile submarines were all removed from strategic operations between 1982 and 1991, the vast majority being adapted for special forces insertion uses or the launching of cruise or anti-ship missiles, for example.
Despite the success on the strategic front, by the 1980s the huge defense buildups of the United States, the Amigos, the Commonwealth, India, China, Japan, Western Europe and even smaller players like Brazil, Argentina, Iran and South Africa had had a major impact. The Americans' reactivation of their Iowa-class and Arizona-class battleships, done as a direct response to the Soviets' Kirov-class battlecruisers, led directly to the Royal Navy finding the money to do the same, permanently reactivating its two remaining battleships, Lion and Vanguard, for long-term service in the 1980s, the former formally recommissioned in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II herself in Portsmouth, England, in April 1985. As the development of modern diesel-electric submarines evolved into those with hydrogen fuel cells to allow the submarines to remain submerged for a long period of time, the world of submarines expanded, and the Canadian Northwest Passage-class of submarine tender, first commissioned in 1982, gave Canada the ability to deploy its fuel-cell powered submarines as part of carrier battle groups and allow their nuclear submarines to operate independently. The Royal Navy and Armada de Mexico directly copied the Northwest Passage class, while the United States Navy developed such vessels of their own types. The American AEGIS Combat System, first seen on the rebuilt Long Beach-class cruisers, was soon adapted into the Ticonderoga class of air warfare destroyers, which was in turn copied (in a slightly modified design) by the Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Australian Navy in their Fraser/Hobart-class multirole destroyers. President Reagan's "600-Ship Navy" proposal of the 1976 election wasn't completed by the time of his leaving office in January 1985, but Robert Kennedy (who had been a US Navy member during World War II, though unlike his brother he hadn't seen combat) continued the good policy, and by the late 1980s the good ideas of everyone had basically eradicated the Not-Built-Here viewpoints in the American armed forces. The United States Navy's Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates' weaknesses had led to the USN to seek a new type of ship to support it and directly copied the Canadian Halifax-class patrol frigates, the design becoming the USN's Miller-class frigate when the first was commissioned in 1990. The American "Teen Series" of fighter planes (F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, F-16 Viper and F/A-18 Hornet) proved popular both at home and abroad, while the 1960s era F-111 design, after proving a capable heavy attack aircraft from Navy carriers during the later stages of the Vietnam War, was adopted by the Canadian, Australian, Japanese, German, Israeli and Iranian Air Forces in the 1970s and 1980s and would have a long career as a deep-strike aircraft, while the European Panavia Tornado project created a highly-successful attack aircraft. The United States' AH-56 Cheyenne attack helicopter with its push propeller system became a revolution for its speed and capability, which itself led to the Canadian-developed CA-200 Scorpion tiltwing, which was even faster and longer-ranged than the impressive Cheyenne, and the Canadians' love of the tiltwing concept also led to its CV-201 Poseidon anti-submarine helicopter, which entered service in 1984 to replace aging Sea King helicopters, and the later generations of RCN (and RAN, which also adopted the Poseidon) warships were designed for the carrying of the bigger and heavier Poseidon.
On land, the Soviets' long-perceived superiority in tank designs was decisively broken by the "Super Tanks" of the 1980s - the American M1 Abrams, the British-Canadian Challenger 2, the Mexican T4 Dragón Negro, German Leopard 2, French Leclerc and Israeli Merkava IV - all of which were better armored than previous designs, were much faster on road and off of it and had much better armor, as well as NBC capabilities and massively-improved fire control and optics. The Turbine-electric Abrams and Dragon Negro were both more complex than the others but had advantages in efficiency and power, while the Leopard 2 pioneered the use of the 120mm smoothbore gun that became the standard on many NATO tanks (though not the Challenger 2, which uses a rifled main gun) and all of the tanks developed fully-electric systems for turret operation and gun traverse to improve safety. NATO nations also all dramatically improved many other elements of their land armies, from wide-area air defense down to small arms. Mexico's famous National Center For The Study Of Rocketry in Costa Rica and its famous "Rocket Man", Dr. Leonardo Arboleda, ended up developing a whole generation of new missiles for the Mexican (and NATO) militaries, while the famed Space Research Corporation of Canada and its own "Boy Genius", Dr. Gerald Bull, saw his work become the basis for countless improvements in NATO field artillery. The new equipment didn't come without additional money for training, though - all of NATO had long realized that good weapons were nothing if the men and women using them couldn't use them to their fullest potential, and so over the course of the late 1970s and into the 1980s the money spent on training on everyone involved grew dramatically, while the regular interchanges of personnel among the nations of NATO, Commonwealth and APTA meant that everyone got a good idea of what everyone else was up to, and many lessons were indeed learned.
While the Soviets fought valiantly to keep up, by 1985 it was clear that their economy simply could not sustain the money involved, and with the final collapse of the People's Republic government and the reunification of China in 1985, the Soviet Union was robbed of the last of its truly huge allies. By this time, India had fully aligned themselves with the Commonwealth (having both developed a huge amount of influence within it and also figuring out that if push came to shove, it was better to be on the side of the rich developed world, particularly as India was raking in foreign investment from them to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in the 1980s and the Commonwealth influence had basically neutered concerns about Pakistan, which was falling behind India rapidly by the late 1980s) and the Western support for the global south was now being joined by that from Asia, particularly Japan and China. While the Soviet Union was still the world's second greatest power in the mid-1980s, it was clear by then that keeping up with the nation in the lead - the United States - was impossible without major reforms in the Soviet Union. The death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 had been followed by the short-term leadership of first Yuri Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko, the latter's death in March 1985 resulting in the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. While Gorbachev was from the start a reformer in the Soviet Union - recognizing its calcified society, struggling scientific and educational progress and faltering economy - Gorbachev's leadership of the Soviet Union was spent mostly lurching from one crisis to another, the first very serious one landing on April 26, 1986.
On that night, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near the border of the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs in the western Soviet Union, suffered a catastrophic accident caused by a major design fault in the reactor design and poorly-trained staff, causing a massive explosion that destroyed the reactor and belched out a vast quantity of radioactive contamination across a large segment of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, while also resulting in radiation fallout in a sizable area of Europe, with contamination being found as far away as Scotland. The massive accident, easily the worst nuclear accident in history, laid bare just how antiquated the Soviet nuclear industry was - Chernobyl's reactors weren't equipped with containment buildings, which all western nuclear power stations were, even the small reactors seeing increasing use in many parts of North America and Europe - and Gorbachev, who was repeatedly misled by many of his own senior personnel during the accident and its aftermath, felt that the disaster opened his eyes widely to the level of workplace inertia, paranoia over secrecy, poor management and workmanship and, perhaps most importantly, the scale of incompetence and the pervasive desire by many in the Soviet Union's higher echelons to cover up mistakes rather than learn from and fix them properly. The disaster resulted in the evacuation of some 340,000 people from a large number of areas in the Soviet Union, and a desire to get help from the West to help deal with the problems that resulted from the accident.
In the West, though some anti-nuclear protests and events did happen, these were almost always met with positive responses and open communication from political leaders, power station operators, the makers of nuclear equipment and reactor operators themselves. In one particularly-famous event on May 15, 1986, a medium-sized protest at the San Onofre nuclear power station in California was met by plant staff, who offered to take many protesters on a guided tour of the facility to show them how safe operations were - and these tours done by the staff at the San Onofre facility weren't just what they wanted the protesters to see, but everything in the plant, hiding nothing. This event earned massive good PR, and was widely copied first in the Amigos, and then in Europe, Japan, the Commonwealth and several other countries, in the process creating months of stories about those concerned about the safety of nuclear power stations were much more at ease after seeing the extensive precautions that existed at modern facilities and design differences that made what happened at Chernobyl impossible. Despite this (or perhaps as a direct result of it), many facilities in 1986 began to develop plans for additional safety improvements, which would almost always be built and developed fully in the years after Chernobyl. In the end, the massive nuclear accident became seen much more as an indictment of the Soviet Union and its policies than that of nuclear energy, and by early 1988 the furor around nuclear facilities had for the most part died off in the West.
Despite the policies of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev's time leading the USSR proved rocky. The glasnost policy, began almost immediately upon his rise to power in 1985, was extraordinarily successful in starting the process of opening up the Soviet Union's calcified society, but it also had a dark side, as it exposed more than a few uncomfortable truths about the Stalinist era and many of those involved in it, and while glasnost had by early 1987 created a massive new press in the Soviet Union, it had also opened up many criticisms of the Soviet Union's structure and plans. Gorbachev's push for a massive reduction in alcohol consumption in the Soviet Union proved a controversial point (though he stuck to his guns on this and the policy remained), but across 1986 and 1987 media liberalization continued - the jamming of major international radio broadcasts in the USSR (including the Voice of America, Radio France International, BBC World Service and Radio Canada International) ended in February 1987, and countless new media organization appeared, most supportive of glasnost (though with the exception of the reactionary - and ultranationalist, aggressive and openly anti-Semitic - Pamyat) and helping Gorbachev. Similarly, Gorbachev and President Kennedy, who met for the first time at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland in July 1985, soon developed a good rapport. While clearly wanting socialism and the Soviet Union to survive and thrive, Gorbachev's desire to reduce the possibility of nuclear war was supported by Kennedy (who felt much the same as Gorbachev on this subject) and despite misgivings in the West, the two countries began to develop new arms treaties, culminating in the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington in December 1987. Gorbachev also made a number of other visits to other nations the USSR wanted to improve relations with, including France in November 1985, Japan and China in August 1986, Canada in January 1988 (immediately after the historic visit to Washington to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and where he was met at the Ottawa Airport by Canadian Prime Minister Edward Seaga) and Mexico in July 1988, in the last case making a point of visiting the place where Leon Trotsky had been murdered in 1940. Despite these visits having a marked positive effect on the Soviet Union's popularity in the world, by late 1988 the problems at home were occupying much of his attention and that of his country, and how far things would shift would be abundantly clear in the events of 1989.
The 1980s were the richest times in history for all three Amigos, but with this wealth had come a sense of responsibility. As an ever-greater number of the Greatest Generation began to retire from positions of authority in the 1980s to make way for younger newcomers, with it came many new views and ways of doing business and management. What also came with this in the first part of the 1980s was a sense of ostentatious style that defined the early part of the decade but was quick to catch flack from many others among the same generation, whose contempt for the idea of so gaudily showing off one's wealth and status was self evident very quickly. By 1985, the trend had swung over to those who favoured the more subdued styles, and though some elements (such as wild hairstyling and to an extent elaborate accessories) remained through the decade, many of the positive styles of earlier times made comebacks, particularly in men's fashion and in color palates, which got far more tasteful with time. Women's "power suits" of the time became a common trend in many female fashions, while particularly in more ethnically-diverse areas of the Amigos countries the trend for ethnic-influenced clothing made a considerable comeback towards in the late 1960s/early 1970s heights by 1982, once again more aimed at women than men in many cases. The Preppy style that somewhat fell by the wayside in the 1970s made something of a revival in response to many of the excesses of the early 80s, and while the more flashy symbols of wealth faded away fairly quickly, the more subtle ones didn't. For those of higher income handmade suits became a status symbol, with Italian and French suits early on being matched first by British tailors by 1983-84 and then by North American ones later in the decade.
Sporty cars of all sizes, capabilities and price ranges were also common status symbols, and while the absolute most flashy ones would remain as much a symbol of excess as ever, by the mid-80s the selection of such cars available at prices most people could afford had swelled dramatically, with the pony cars of past times being joined first by the hot hatchback (most exemplified by the Volkswagen Golf GTI, though for many the Peugeot 205 GTI was the best of the decade and Renault 5 Turbo became a template for many future cars from Renault) and then the small sports cars (like the Toyota MR2, Pontiac Fiero, Westland Sentinel and Mazda MX-5 Miata) of the mid to late 1980s. Later in the decade, though, came the rise of the "rally special" cars, both with cheaper cult classics like the Ford Sierra RS Cosworth and Lancia Delta Integrale and more technically-advanced and expensive machines like the Audi Quattro and Peugeot Quasar, as well as road-racing specials like the BMW M3 and Mercedes-Benz 190 2.5 Cosworth. Particularly in the Amigos, where for many city dwellers the presence of effective and affordable mass transit meant everyday cars weren't a necessity and where cheaper sales taxes, insurance rates and fuel and maintenance costs all meant that automobile ownership was much cheaper than many other places in the world, it led to "fun cars" being a 1980s trend in its own right, both in terms of the sporty vehicles, a major growth of hot rodding (of both traditional and much-more-modern forms), off-road capable vehicles and indeed even motorhomes, RVs and camper trailers. The minivan, first introduced by Chrysler and the Renault-American Motors partnership in 1984, quickly contributed to the death of the traditional family station wagon (though the wagon would return in a very different form in the 1990s) but made vans and extra space available for virtually anyone (and GM's response, the Chevrolet Lumina APV and Pontiac Trans Sport of 1986, added the use of the dent-resistant plastic bodywork and aluminum spaceframe components, while also making a much more futuristically-styled vehicle) while the growth of the sales or larger vehicles and tightening fuel-efficiency rules meant that diesel engines began to make ever more appearances in the 1980s. Despite the trend against the ostentatious, the ultimate pinnacle of cars in the 1980s, represented first by the famous stainless steel-bodied, gullwing-doored DeLorean DMC-12 (launched to massive fanfare in 1981) and then by the exotics of later in the decade, represented by the Lamborghini Countach, Ferrari Testarossa, Vector W8 Twin Turbo and Porsche 959, cars of head-turning style, massive performance (all were capable of top speeds in excess of 180 mph and zero to sixty runs of less than five seconds) and price tags to match.
The Big Five North American automakers (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, American Motors and Westland-Reynard) by the mid-1980s were working actively with their unions, with Chrysler's brush with bankruptcy in 1979 and 1980, which had forced them to convince Washington to give them a bailout (which they got, though it came with conditions) and had forced them to make tough choices with its unions, who ended up with a sizable ownership stake in the company as a result. Despite this and similar problems at American Motors, the auto industry in North America only got stronger in the 1980s, as the employees began making more choices in the management of their companies, relationships between the management and employees improved markedly and the facilities themselves got major overhauls in the 1980s. GM's plants at Tacoma, Washington, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, both opened in 1982, showed the scale of what was possible, with the former meant specifically to allow American cars to be exported and the latter designed for the Chevrolet Corvette sports car and both built to suit, and the facilities built or rebuilt by the makers in the 1980s took many of the ideas of these to heart - better natural lighting, more attention paid to ergonomics and noise levels, improved equipment and many other details - and their suppliers did the same in many cases, both out of a desire to do right by their workforces and because by that point the automakers themselves were demanding better workmanship. GM was particularly harsh with this - there were numerous examples of parts supplied for GM cars being rejected by the automaker's production managers, who made a point of throwing them into piles outside of the plants or sometimes even onto shop floors, telling their makers to come to replace them. (The message got through, though one can only imagine what the part suppliers thought of such treatment.) The many previous failures of American small cars that had allowed Volkswagen and the Japanese automakers to get a major foothold in North America were answered in 1981-82 by the likes of the Ford Escort and Sierra, Chrysler K-cars, American Motors Spirit (and its stablemates in the Renault Alliance and Encore), Westland Chaser and the General Motors J-cars, all machines capable of giving the Japanese rivals a real shock - and to the surprise of few, the new cars sent the Japanese scrambling to build rivals. Perhaps more troublesome in the short term for the Japanese, the growth in the sales of Japanese cars had resulted in pushes for protectionism in all three nations, and the rising yen and the Plaza Accords of 1985 (meant to to push the value of the US Dollar down compared to other currencies) forced the Japanese to quickly shift their plans, with them rapidly developing much more upmarket models and following the lead of Volkswagen in beginning manufacturing operations with the Amigos, with Honda doing so beginning in 1981, Nissan in 1982 and Toyota in 1984.
Having come to exist in the 1970s, the home computer and home video game system became key features of virtually all new homes in the 1980s - and once again, the Amigos found themselves in an enviable position here. While the early dominance of the video game market by American companies was comprehensively shattered by the video game industry crash in 1983 and the growth of first Nintendo and then Sega ws dominant players in the industry, by the end of the decade Atari had muddled its way through and the unlikely duo of Commodore and Microsoft would organize many survivors in the industry into a single new entity, setting the stage for both companies to re-enter the field in dramatic fashion in the 1990s. Computers, by contrast, remained a heavily North American field, with the famous Motorola 68000 series of computer processors being the standard of the industry in the early 1980s (though it would advance far beyond this during the decade of course), though the Intel x86, whose first 32-bit version was released in 1984, quickly supplanted the 68000 series. The IBM PC, first introduced in 1981, introduced the idea of a dramatically-expandable personal computer, while the first Apple MacIntosh, introduced in January 1984 (and promoted from the start through one of the greatest television commercials ever created), introduced the modern graphical user interface design, and was followed by the introduction of Microsoft Windows in November 1985, which would go on to be one of the most successful computer program series of all time. In the midst of the growth, numerous other companies sprouted up to support the new industries, and all three Amigos nations, considering the production of computers, their components and the processors and semiconductors for them to be a strategic industry that needed to be supported domestically, was quick during the 1980s to assist the industry's facilities improvements and many R&D efforts, resulting in California's Silicon Valley (the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area) being joined by a number of other areas whose economies would be heavily influenced by the industry. By the late 1980s, the computer industry in the Amigos was the standard of the world, even as others (Japan, Korea and China in particular) raced to catch up and had considerable success in doing so.
As the 1980s went on, the completion of transportation projects in North America - the final sections of the Interstate Highway System in all three Amigos were Interstate 16 across Northern Alberta and British Columbia, which was opened in 1984, and Interstate 70 across Utah and Colorado, which was opened in 1986 - led to the shifting finances of transportation in North America. The use of tolls on the Interstate Highway System had, by then, made for a large amount of money in the bank accounts of the agencies that maintained and operated the interstates, money which under the Acts that had built the Interstates had to be used on transportation and infrastructure projects. Thus, by the early 1980s, the debate over the future of the tolls on the Interstate System was raging over whether to use it for other purposes or reduce or perhaps even eliminate the toll systems. Ultimately, the successful operations of the California High-Speed Rail System and Amtrak's extension of the Northeast Corridor and its Empire (New York), Keystone (Pennsylvania-New Jersey) and Dominion (Virginia) corridors had proven enormously successful, with daily 125-mph service running from Montreal and Maine as far as Atlanta, and the completion of the Peachtree Corridor (Chattanooga-Atlanta-Augusta-Savannah) in 1972 and the building of the Piedmont Corridor (North Carolina) and the Atlantic extension of the Amtrak high-speed lines from Columbia to Charleston and Myrtle Beach (and then on to Savannah, that route opening in 1984) stretched the fast trains further and further south. Having begun High-Speed "Metroliner" services in 1970, Amtrak went through continuous expansions of the system, but after the opening of the California High-Speed Rail System and the Texas Express in 1976, Amtrak moved to up the ante on its flagship routes, establishing the "Acela" brand in 1977 and running an international competition for high-speed trains for its service. With the prospect of these trains serving virtually the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States (and Via Rail's entry into the project in 1979, as they were planning high-speed lines of their own by then, meaning Canadian train contracts as well), the result was that the Acela Project got interest worldwide, and saved the bacons of countless makers of trains.
First off the mark was Kawasaki Heavy Industries of Japan, partnering with Chrysler-Alco and American Car and Foundry, initially proposing a 200 Series Shinkansen variant until, at the advice of the American partners, Kawasaki and its partner in Hitachi moved to speed up the development of the 500 Series with the goal of offering it for Acela service. General Electric offered an improved variant of the California HS1 to Amtrak, while the Franco-American consortium that had built the Texas Express using TGV-standard equipment also offered their proposal. Canada's Bombardier partnered with Pullman-Standard for its offering, which used mostly German Siemens electrical components. General Motors EMD and its long-time electric partner in ASEA proposed the under-development SJ X 2000, while the Budd Company teamed up with Fiat Ferrovaria in Italy and Brush Traction in the UK for its offering. All aside the HS1 and TGV Sud-Est were still in development at that point, but while the HS1, with its gyroscopic tilting system, was a proven piece, Amtrak wanted a train with a potential 200 mph top speed, knowing that the routes it had built new track for were capable of handling trains at such speeds. The Sud-Est would have as a result been the logical choice, but Amtrak, in an act of foresight, instead placed orders for a test unit with all of the consortiums - GE, Kawasaki/Chrysler/ACF, Alsthom/Francorail/Texas Rail Engineering, Bombardier/Pullman-Standard, EMD/ASEA and Budd/Fiat Ferrovaria/Brush - with the demand that all four be available by the summer of 1983.
All six made the deadline, producing very different trains. The GE-built HS2A, EMD-built X 2000, Budd-built Pioneer V and Pullman-Standard built Liberty II were tilting trains, all equipped with gyroscopic tilting mechanisms, while the Texas Rail Engineering-built TGV Reseau and ACF-built 500 Series weren't tilt trains, but they were designed for serious speeds, both capable of nearly 200 miles per hour. Behind on time and cost, the Japanese-American consortium made a famous hail-mary play in September 1982 when they sent their newly-completed train on a major publicity tour, running out from the Alco plant in Schenectady, New York, plant where it had been built on a nationwide tour, travelling on the electrified Water Level Route of the New York Central to Chicago and then on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe's transcontinental main line to Los Angeles, where it ran California HSR services for two weeks both on the newly-opened San Diego Division and the main line to San Francisco, before traveling back across the country. On its return trip to Chicago, Santa Fe officials allowed the consortium to run the train on a speed run, making sure the line was clear for it - and the train absolutely demolished the record between Los Angeles and Chicago, traveling the 2,227 miles of the ATSF Transcon in 18 hours and 48 minutes, averaging 118.46 mph on the run and taking advantage of the ATSF's arrow-straight, cab signal-equipped route east of Kansas City to make time, being clocked on the ATSF Transcon in southern Illinois at a speed of 183.56 mph, at the time a record in North America.
The "California Testing" was a PR smash, and the widely-publicized run and the sleek 500 Series making its mark in California led to EMD/ASEA making a Western tour of its own, while the Acela TGV was tested extensively on the Texas Express, Budd did a deal with the Southern Railway to allow the Pioneer V to make runs on the former Florida East Coast mainline from Savannah to Miami (and then from Atlanta to Miami, as well as runs to Key West, Tampa and Orlando) and the Liberty II was also sent to California in spring 1983 for testing, taking the same ATSF tracks out as the 500 Series had done the year before. Up until the fall of 1982, there had been some Congressional opposition to the Acela project due to its costs, but the 1982 tour made national news, and the racing by all others to jump on board led to the new train designs being sent all across North America to make appearances and show what they could do. The public response could be well summed up by a writer from The Philadelphia Inquirer about the X 2000 when it made its test runs on the Northeast Corridor in the winter of 1982: "If these are the trains of the future, we aren't just ready for them, we want them." President Reagan was one of the passengers on a test run by the Pioneer V from Washington to New York in January 1983, and remembering what he had said about the California HSR that he had helped to spearhead a decade prior, he commented "I think it's time to make this happen."
Congress agreed with the President, and in April 1983, they passed the Advancement of American Passenger Rail Act, which specifically authorized Amtrak to develop an integrated plan for high-speed trains across as much of the United States as possible. The following month, the Canadian Parliament passed the High-Speed Rail Transportation Bill, authorizing the building of high-speed lines between Detroit, Buffalo and Ottawa and Quebec City, connecting to the existing high-speed lines at Buffalo and Montreal and proposing a complete network, and in September 1983, the province of Alberta announced its intention to build its own high-speed line from Lethbridge to Edmonton via Calgary and Red Deer. Amtrak's formal acceptance trials for its new speed demons began with the famous "Welcome to the Future" picture, taken at the newly-refurbished Washington Union Station on June 4, 1983, where the six contenders - HS2A, Liberty II, X 2000, Pioneer V, 500 Series and TGV Reseau - were lined up for publicity photos, all dressed in the silver, red and blue paint scheme that Amtrak had developed for Acela.
To the surprise of virtually no one, the six contenders' racing up and down the Eastern Seaboard in the summer of 1983 got attention, but what surprised many (including Amtrak themselves) was that demand for many of their other services, including their long-distance trains, swelled rapidly through 1983. The high-speed trains were incredibly popular, and Amtrak's asking people for their views after rides got a lot of good information - the 500 Series, for example, was found to have too tight for many passengers (as it had been designed for Japanese passengers, this wasn't hard to understand) while the X 2000's bistro car was a massive hit with passengers. The TGV's electronic climate control was signalled out for praise, while the Pioneer V's large double-pane windows gave a better view for passengers. All rode well on the dedicated lines, though the tilt function was toned down on the HS2A and Liberty II, with the system's programming being modified for improved passenger comfort. The HS2A was the fastest-accelerating of the units, while the X 2000 was the favorite north of New York owing to its better handling of the twister track along the former New Haven Railroad. By the end of 1983, Amtrak had figured out that while they had sought out one victor from the six, it was clear that all had their strengths and weaknesses, and could be used for different places and services. Congress, many of whose members had been frequent riders of the program, agreed, and as the United States' electrified railroad network was swelling continuously, it was agreed that there had to be multiple winners.
GE got called first in November 1983, as the California HSR system committed to some 44 examples of the HS2A to support their existing HS1 sets as the traffic on the lines grew. It was only a week later that the state of Pennsylvania made a call of their own, ordering 23 X 2000 sets for the Keystone Corridor from Atlantic City to Harrisburg (the Pittsburgh extension was under construction at the time) and a service from New York to Scranton and Wilkes-Barre over the famed Lackawanna Cut-Off. In February 1984, Via Rail Canada ordered 36 examples of the Liberty II for Toronto-Montreal services and to join the existing LRC trains. This all led to Amtrak's first order announcement in April 1984 - the first Acela would be the 500 Series, while the Pioneer V would be ordered for services south of Washington to the sunny south. With the TGV Reseau being ordered by the Texas Express, it meant all six makers would have orders to fill and their trains would see service - and as such, objections were few.
The first train labeled as a timetable Acela Express left Washington at 7:46 AM in the morning on Monday, September 24, 1984, with the refurbished test 500 Series operating the service, while the test X 2000, now owned by the state of Pennsylvania, left Wilkes-Barre for New York two days later on its first revenue service. Through 1984, 1985 and 1986, as trains arrived for service, the older Metroliners were bumped to secondary services and the Acelas took their place at the head of Amtrak's train fleets. As predicted, their success was immediate, and by the late 1980s so successful were they that they resulted in a number of airline operators ending air shuttle service in the Northeast Corridor, unable to compete with the fast trains. While Amtrak's new 150-plus-mph rockets had to share tracks with the long-distance trains, the four-track lines common in Acela territory had little difficulty with this, and with trains able to cover the New York to Washington run in as little as 2 hours and 20 minutes, the seats filled rapidly. Not content with such success, Amtrak's high-speed network kept on expanding, with the connection to Florida resulting in the Acela program expanded throughout the south in the 1980s, with lines soon running west from Atlanta to Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Meridian, Jackson, Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Houston, with this line completed in 1988.
The Amtrak debate also ended the argument on what to do with the money from the Interstates. With the country still growing and improvements needed on a regular basis, the dedication of the money from the Transport America Act towards all forms of transportation, made possible by the reauthorization of the Act under President Kennedy in March 1985, resulted in a wave of improvements in American infrastructure in the 1980s and 1990s. While Amtrak's quest to build a high-speed rail network in the United States got a lot of this, it couldn't and didn't get all of it of course, and as a result airports, ports and waterways, urban and rural roadways and countless other projects got funds from Washington for improvements, the funds kept a lot of construction workers busy during the times, helping to add to an economy that was booming during the times.
As the 1980s went on, the passing of the Employee Free Choice Act in 1975 by Congress under President John F. Kennedy proved to be a milestone. Far from the socialist-enabling many of its detractors had derided it as, the Act's massive growth in the number of union members in the 1970s and 1980s didn't result in the employer troubles that many expected - indeed, it actually in large measures resulted in the opposite, as the newly-expanded union movements actually found out that their members were, by and large, using the unions to advance their interests but had little interest in damaging their employers, and with many of the largest unions having sorted out their long battles with employers in the 1970s - count the United Auto Workers, United Mine Workers, Amalgamated Transit Union, Laborers International Union, United Steelworkers and International Association of Machinists among these - the unions in the early 1980s made a number of moves as a result of the early 1980s recession, which did real harm to a number of industries in North America - with the United Steelworkers having to make a major move to save a lot of members jobs. They did that, in a way virtually no one expected.
The USW's negotiations with the nearly-destitute Bethlehem Steel in 1982 led to a watershed not only in negotiations, but in that the USW used its own funds to recapitalize the firm, taking a major interest in the steelmaker in the process - they got a 42% ownership stake as a direct result, making them the firm's largest shareholder by a mile - and actively involving many of Bethlehem's employees in the operation of the company. This move stunned the American steel industry, and when the USW did the same thing with Colorado Fuel and Iron later that same year, it led to charges that the union was robbing its workers for this. Nothing could be further from the truth - and the members of the Union outside of CF&I and Bethlehem approved of the transactions, leading to a large number of similar moves among other companies.
This change was a watershed, and as a result a large number of companies became owned in whole or in part by their workers in the 1980s and 1990s, with Bethlehem and CF&I joined by the likes of BFGoodrich, Southern Pacific, Johns-Manville, Union Carbide[1], Eastman Kodak, Radio Corporation of America and Zenith Electronics, these companies all seeing revivals of fortunes to some degree, though some were much bigger than others - Southern Pacific and Zenith in particular recovered dramatically - and in several other cases companies that were distressed ended up being bailed out by various natural resource funds, resulting in some making dramatic moves of their own - Commodore Computers, for example, moved from San Jose, California, to Waterloo, Ontario, after a major stake in the company was bought by the Province of Ontario's Trillium Natural Resources Fund in 1985. The employee-owned companies also surprised many, as it was the view of their new managers that the way forward needed to make better products rather cut down the size of the company, and with this came a number of technical developments - Zenith introduced High-Definition Television to North America in 1986 and full-color plasma screens in 1988, and its branching into making components for other companies ended up a boon for Apple in particular, whose Macintosh personal computers began to use the Zenith full-color plasma screens in 1989. Southern Pacific, sold to its employees by Santa Fe Southern Pacific industries in 1984 after merger plans were scuppered by Washington, went on to build a formidable reputation for customer service and branching into related fields, the company's improvements turning a nearly-bankrupt firm in 1984 into a powerful player by the mid-1990s, and after SP made dramatic moves in using its rail lines as conduits for telecommunications lines that made it a fortune, the company expanded its ancillary operations dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s, the growth of the company making a great many SP employees into millionaires in the process. Bethlehem regained much of its former prominence in the American steel industry in the 1990s after selling off many ancillary operations to finance new plants and equipment and refurbishment of existing ones, a similar story to CF&I, though they also jumped heavily into synthetic fuels.
[1] Both Union Carbide and Johns-Manville were left basically bankrupt because of events - for Union Carbide, it was the Bhopal Disaster of 1984 (that killed hundreds and maimed thousands as a result of a catastrophic accident at a chemical plant in India) and for Johns-Manville it was litigation claims related to the company's long-time involvement in asbestos products. Both ultimately did recover as firms, though both paid out billions of dollars in losses as a result of these incidents
By 1981, the wealth and social development of the Amigos nations had reached places that had once been almost unimaginable just a generation before. The 265.2 million citizens of the United States, 63.6 million citizens of Canada and 129.4 million citizens of Mexico lived lives that were among the best on Earth, courtesy of over 30 years of economic growth that, while hampered by the Energy Crisis and slowed by the stagflation of the early to mid 1970s, had resulted in wealth beyond meaning for so many that it was hard to see it as anything but the norm. The Baby Boomer generations who had become the backbone of the Third Great Awakening in the second half of the 1960s and who had been so many of the Born For This Generation were now rapidly becoming a majority in many companies as the World War II veterans increasingly began to head for retirement, and with this had come many shifts in the way of living and doing business alike.
Nowhere was the former point seen more than among the ranks of the LGBT community. All three Amigos had legalized all forms of homosexual activity in 1966 (Canada), 1968 (Mexico) and 1971 (United States, though many US states were well ahead of Washington on this front), the community had been able see many of their taboos broken in the 1970s, and many of the events of the early 1980s ended this forever. The February 1981 Bathhouse Raids in Toronto (and the shameful outing of those arrested in the raids by the Toronto Sun newspaper) ended up ultimately giving rise to the Gay Pride Movement in Toronto, which ended up being a complete backfire for those who were homophobic - no one arrested in the Raids was ever convicted of criminal charges, the Sun and the Toronto Police Service paid out a $154 million settlement to those who had been wronged and the Pride Parade by the late 1980s had become a Toronto institution. It was a similar story in San Francisco after the murder of ground-breaking San Francisco city councillor Harvey Milk by former San Francisco police officer Dan White in 1978 - when White's trial resulted in a lenient sentence under a fear-of-gay-men defense in May 1979, it touched off one of the worst riots in post-World War II San Francisco, where two people died and $3.5 million in damage was done, and was then retaliated by the San Francisco Police Department three days later where over 80 people were seriously injured by the SFPD in a series of massive police raids, three of whom later died of their injuries. This event resulted in the San Francisco Police Department being re-organized under federal supervision in 1981-84, and the events in San Francisco and Toronto ended up causing a wave of Gay Pride events in the 1980s, which most famously led to the Night Of The Rainbow in Guanajuato, Mexico, on August 4, 1984, where a Gay Pride protest that bumped into police units ended up being swamped by local residents who supported the protesters, and turned the whole scene into a massive display of people who supported the LGBT community in Mexico. When the following year on August 4 a second equally-huge event happened in Guanajuato, the Night became a regular event. (Today the Night Of The Rainbow in Guanajuato is one of the world's premiere LGBT-themed events.) Even among the religious over the 1980s the views of homosexuality steadily improved, primarily as more and more LGBT communities came alive and more people began to see who they really were, which dramatically reduced the fears of them, with one of the more famous advancements in this regard being connected to many churches, a great many of whom in the late 1970s and early 1980s openly opened their doors to people who were LGBT, adding to the acceptance of them - indeed, many who consider themselves part of the Born For This Generation consider the massive erosion of homophobia in the 1980s in the Amigos to be one of their most proud actions.
Canada's Constitution in 1972 had given wide latitude to what could be considered a constitutionally-protected right of expression, and in September 1984 sexual orientation was added to this, and an explicit constitutional amendment was ultimately done to this effect, that amendment being written into law in 1995, though for many in Toronto the greatest sign of their success in their fight was the Toronto Sun's editorial on February 7, 2001 - twenty years to the day after their infamous outing of those arrested in the Bathhouse Raids - admitting to a "profound moral failing" in their actions in 1981, hoping that their transgressions could be forgiven but stating quite openly "If some cannot forgive the staff at this newspaper for the sins committed against them on February 7, 1981, we understand and are willing to accept their anger, as we need only think of how we would feel had it been us who had our lives harmed by others, who were hatred for nothing more than who they fell in love with." Likewise, the White Night Riot and the massive gay pride parades that exploded in many places in the United States in the 1980s led to further court challenges, leading to morality laws with regards to sexual relations between consenting adults being considered unconstitutional in the Evans v. MacArthur decision on August 19, 1986, a date that is indeed celebrated by a sizable portion of the United States' LGBT community as "Our Liberation Day".
The 1980s saw the very last gasps of public bigotry begin to disappear forever. Helped along by the Second Act For The Advancement of Native Americans in 1982, the United States and the state of South Dakota returned a vast section of the Black Hills back to the Lakotah tribes of the region (who consider the region sacred), ending a land dispute that had simmered for nearly a century, while the United States elected its first Hispanic Vice-President when Robert Kennedy's Vice President, Texas Senator Henry Gonzalez, was elected with him in November 1984. Mexico, having tended towards the more-competent leaders for its Presidency, had two successive style symbols occupy its Presidency in Joaquín Lopez Garcia, who succeeded the technocratic Luis Echevarria in September 1973, and his successor, Esperanza Rosario, who was elected to the position six years later. Rosario, who in the process became the first female head of government in any of the Amigos, gained the nickname "The Lady in Red" after sporting a beautiful dress in that red color at a reception at the White House for her (along with a number of other NATO leaders and influential people, including Prince Charles and Princess Diana) in April 1983 - that meeting in itself resulted in a friendship between Rosario and the Princess of Wales that would last for decades to come, among other things. Rosario's successor, Arturo Bienvenida, probably got the greatest shock of his career just thirteen days after his election, when Mexico City, along with much of Southern Mexico, was hammered by a massive Earthquake on September 19, 1985.
Despite Mexico having some of the world's best building codes with regards to earthquakes - it had been shaken heavily in 1957 and 1976, and lessons had indeed been learned from these events - the September 19 Earthquake was the largest ever seen in Mexico and the largest in North America since the Good Friday Quake in Alaska in 1964, registering an 8.0 on the Richter scale. The port city of Lazaro Cardenas, some 30 miles from the epicenter, was hit hard, but the worst damage was suffered in Mexico City, owing to its geography - the city sits in a valley that is for the most part a filled-in lakebed, which resonates with some seismic waves - and in 1985, this is exactly what happened in a number of areas. These areas saw massive ground movement, adding to the damage (this would be seen again in San Francisco Bay Area in 1989 as well) and causing major destruction in Mexico City. Over 700 people lost their lives in Mexico City, along with over 60,000 injured and over $5 Billion in damage done. Despite this, Bienvenida himself dived in to try to help with the rescue, along with countless others, and rescue efforts from the Amigos and Latin America were also rapidly dispatched to Mexico City, with the response being remarkably large from the Amigos in particular. (Four years later this favor would be returned in the Bay Area, and once again in Los Angeles in 1994.) While the quake was horribly destructive to Mexico City, the speed at which rebuilding was done was impressive even by the standards of the Get-This-Mess-Sorted Amigos, and the Mexican Government's response to the disaster was excellent by virtually any standards. By 1990 those who had lost their homes from the Earthquake had been moved into their new homes, and Mexico City's architects and city planners made great pains to make sure that what happened in 1985 wouldn't happen again, mandating much denser subsurface structures and foundations in many portions of the city, and adding to Mexico's already-stringent building codes.
Indeed, the response to the 1985 Earthquake was a sign of just how situation got handled in the Amigos. From the famous saving of Wilkes-Barre from flooding from Hurricane Agnes in 1972 to the rapid recovery of Washington and Oregon from the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May 1980, natural disaster recovery was by then very much a speciality, with agencies in all three countries existing specifically for the purpose of both rapid response to disasters and recovery from them. Much of this had been a result of knowing of the conditions of the world they lived in, but a lot of it was also preparedness to try to save every life possible if and when disaster hits. The United States' Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had a good reputation for sorting out messes, and the Mexican Agencia De Preparación Para Emergencias (ADPPE), set up in the aftermath of the 1985 Earthquake, would go on to learn much from FEMA and would learn many lessons from this, and Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team, formed in 1987 also as a result of the Earthquake in Mexico, would soon be copied by both the United States and Mexico, with the former even directly assigning aircraft specifically for the use of the USAF's International Assistance Response Force, including C-141 and C-130 airlifters and CH-47 helicopters. But before that, though, the effectiveness of the DART team and its compatriots in North America would be put to the test in a way that made headlines for all the right reasons.
While Detente between the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies and the West had by the 1980s become a stable force (even as the Russians dramatically expanded their Navy and built a vast fleet of aerial refueling tankers and extended their air force's range in the 1970s and 1980s), to the point that the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties began to be negotiated in the 1970s, initially just involving the United States and Soviet Union but by the 1980s including all of the world's nuclear powers - the United Kingdom, France, China, Canada, Mexico, Israel and India were a part of the arms treaty developments of the 1980s. For all sides, there was an expectation that the growing capabilities of their conventional forces - and all sides were making massive efforts at this in the 1980s - would make up for losses in strategic capabilities, a viewpoint that had the additional benefit of reducing the likelihood of humanity killing themselves in the event of a nuclear war. As part of this, everyone involved began drawing down their nuclear weapons stockpiles, dismantling old weapons and taking earlier weapons platforms out of service - everyone abandoned ICBMs, SLBMs and MRBMs that used hypergolic chemicals for their propulsion, and many older nuclear submarines on both sides began to be adapted for new uses - the American "41 For Freedom" nuclear missile submarines were all removed from strategic operations between 1982 and 1991, the vast majority being adapted for special forces insertion uses or the launching of cruise or anti-ship missiles, for example.
Despite the success on the strategic front, by the 1980s the huge defense buildups of the United States, the Amigos, the Commonwealth, India, China, Japan, Western Europe and even smaller players like Brazil, Argentina, Iran and South Africa had had a major impact. The Americans' reactivation of their Iowa-class and Arizona-class battleships, done as a direct response to the Soviets' Kirov-class battlecruisers, led directly to the Royal Navy finding the money to do the same, permanently reactivating its two remaining battleships, Lion and Vanguard, for long-term service in the 1980s, the former formally recommissioned in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II herself in Portsmouth, England, in April 1985. As the development of modern diesel-electric submarines evolved into those with hydrogen fuel cells to allow the submarines to remain submerged for a long period of time, the world of submarines expanded, and the Canadian Northwest Passage-class of submarine tender, first commissioned in 1982, gave Canada the ability to deploy its fuel-cell powered submarines as part of carrier battle groups and allow their nuclear submarines to operate independently. The Royal Navy and Armada de Mexico directly copied the Northwest Passage class, while the United States Navy developed such vessels of their own types. The American AEGIS Combat System, first seen on the rebuilt Long Beach-class cruisers, was soon adapted into the Ticonderoga class of air warfare destroyers, which was in turn copied (in a slightly modified design) by the Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Australian Navy in their Fraser/Hobart-class multirole destroyers. President Reagan's "600-Ship Navy" proposal of the 1976 election wasn't completed by the time of his leaving office in January 1985, but Robert Kennedy (who had been a US Navy member during World War II, though unlike his brother he hadn't seen combat) continued the good policy, and by the late 1980s the good ideas of everyone had basically eradicated the Not-Built-Here viewpoints in the American armed forces. The United States Navy's Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates' weaknesses had led to the USN to seek a new type of ship to support it and directly copied the Canadian Halifax-class patrol frigates, the design becoming the USN's Miller-class frigate when the first was commissioned in 1990. The American "Teen Series" of fighter planes (F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, F-16 Viper and F/A-18 Hornet) proved popular both at home and abroad, while the 1960s era F-111 design, after proving a capable heavy attack aircraft from Navy carriers during the later stages of the Vietnam War, was adopted by the Canadian, Australian, Japanese, German, Israeli and Iranian Air Forces in the 1970s and 1980s and would have a long career as a deep-strike aircraft, while the European Panavia Tornado project created a highly-successful attack aircraft. The United States' AH-56 Cheyenne attack helicopter with its push propeller system became a revolution for its speed and capability, which itself led to the Canadian-developed CA-200 Scorpion tiltwing, which was even faster and longer-ranged than the impressive Cheyenne, and the Canadians' love of the tiltwing concept also led to its CV-201 Poseidon anti-submarine helicopter, which entered service in 1984 to replace aging Sea King helicopters, and the later generations of RCN (and RAN, which also adopted the Poseidon) warships were designed for the carrying of the bigger and heavier Poseidon.
On land, the Soviets' long-perceived superiority in tank designs was decisively broken by the "Super Tanks" of the 1980s - the American M1 Abrams, the British-Canadian Challenger 2, the Mexican T4 Dragón Negro, German Leopard 2, French Leclerc and Israeli Merkava IV - all of which were better armored than previous designs, were much faster on road and off of it and had much better armor, as well as NBC capabilities and massively-improved fire control and optics. The Turbine-electric Abrams and Dragon Negro were both more complex than the others but had advantages in efficiency and power, while the Leopard 2 pioneered the use of the 120mm smoothbore gun that became the standard on many NATO tanks (though not the Challenger 2, which uses a rifled main gun) and all of the tanks developed fully-electric systems for turret operation and gun traverse to improve safety. NATO nations also all dramatically improved many other elements of their land armies, from wide-area air defense down to small arms. Mexico's famous National Center For The Study Of Rocketry in Costa Rica and its famous "Rocket Man", Dr. Leonardo Arboleda, ended up developing a whole generation of new missiles for the Mexican (and NATO) militaries, while the famed Space Research Corporation of Canada and its own "Boy Genius", Dr. Gerald Bull, saw his work become the basis for countless improvements in NATO field artillery. The new equipment didn't come without additional money for training, though - all of NATO had long realized that good weapons were nothing if the men and women using them couldn't use them to their fullest potential, and so over the course of the late 1970s and into the 1980s the money spent on training on everyone involved grew dramatically, while the regular interchanges of personnel among the nations of NATO, Commonwealth and APTA meant that everyone got a good idea of what everyone else was up to, and many lessons were indeed learned.
While the Soviets fought valiantly to keep up, by 1985 it was clear that their economy simply could not sustain the money involved, and with the final collapse of the People's Republic government and the reunification of China in 1985, the Soviet Union was robbed of the last of its truly huge allies. By this time, India had fully aligned themselves with the Commonwealth (having both developed a huge amount of influence within it and also figuring out that if push came to shove, it was better to be on the side of the rich developed world, particularly as India was raking in foreign investment from them to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in the 1980s and the Commonwealth influence had basically neutered concerns about Pakistan, which was falling behind India rapidly by the late 1980s) and the Western support for the global south was now being joined by that from Asia, particularly Japan and China. While the Soviet Union was still the world's second greatest power in the mid-1980s, it was clear by then that keeping up with the nation in the lead - the United States - was impossible without major reforms in the Soviet Union. The death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 had been followed by the short-term leadership of first Yuri Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko, the latter's death in March 1985 resulting in the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. While Gorbachev was from the start a reformer in the Soviet Union - recognizing its calcified society, struggling scientific and educational progress and faltering economy - Gorbachev's leadership of the Soviet Union was spent mostly lurching from one crisis to another, the first very serious one landing on April 26, 1986.
On that night, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near the border of the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs in the western Soviet Union, suffered a catastrophic accident caused by a major design fault in the reactor design and poorly-trained staff, causing a massive explosion that destroyed the reactor and belched out a vast quantity of radioactive contamination across a large segment of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, while also resulting in radiation fallout in a sizable area of Europe, with contamination being found as far away as Scotland. The massive accident, easily the worst nuclear accident in history, laid bare just how antiquated the Soviet nuclear industry was - Chernobyl's reactors weren't equipped with containment buildings, which all western nuclear power stations were, even the small reactors seeing increasing use in many parts of North America and Europe - and Gorbachev, who was repeatedly misled by many of his own senior personnel during the accident and its aftermath, felt that the disaster opened his eyes widely to the level of workplace inertia, paranoia over secrecy, poor management and workmanship and, perhaps most importantly, the scale of incompetence and the pervasive desire by many in the Soviet Union's higher echelons to cover up mistakes rather than learn from and fix them properly. The disaster resulted in the evacuation of some 340,000 people from a large number of areas in the Soviet Union, and a desire to get help from the West to help deal with the problems that resulted from the accident.
In the West, though some anti-nuclear protests and events did happen, these were almost always met with positive responses and open communication from political leaders, power station operators, the makers of nuclear equipment and reactor operators themselves. In one particularly-famous event on May 15, 1986, a medium-sized protest at the San Onofre nuclear power station in California was met by plant staff, who offered to take many protesters on a guided tour of the facility to show them how safe operations were - and these tours done by the staff at the San Onofre facility weren't just what they wanted the protesters to see, but everything in the plant, hiding nothing. This event earned massive good PR, and was widely copied first in the Amigos, and then in Europe, Japan, the Commonwealth and several other countries, in the process creating months of stories about those concerned about the safety of nuclear power stations were much more at ease after seeing the extensive precautions that existed at modern facilities and design differences that made what happened at Chernobyl impossible. Despite this (or perhaps as a direct result of it), many facilities in 1986 began to develop plans for additional safety improvements, which would almost always be built and developed fully in the years after Chernobyl. In the end, the massive nuclear accident became seen much more as an indictment of the Soviet Union and its policies than that of nuclear energy, and by early 1988 the furor around nuclear facilities had for the most part died off in the West.
Despite the policies of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev's time leading the USSR proved rocky. The glasnost policy, began almost immediately upon his rise to power in 1985, was extraordinarily successful in starting the process of opening up the Soviet Union's calcified society, but it also had a dark side, as it exposed more than a few uncomfortable truths about the Stalinist era and many of those involved in it, and while glasnost had by early 1987 created a massive new press in the Soviet Union, it had also opened up many criticisms of the Soviet Union's structure and plans. Gorbachev's push for a massive reduction in alcohol consumption in the Soviet Union proved a controversial point (though he stuck to his guns on this and the policy remained), but across 1986 and 1987 media liberalization continued - the jamming of major international radio broadcasts in the USSR (including the Voice of America, Radio France International, BBC World Service and Radio Canada International) ended in February 1987, and countless new media organization appeared, most supportive of glasnost (though with the exception of the reactionary - and ultranationalist, aggressive and openly anti-Semitic - Pamyat) and helping Gorbachev. Similarly, Gorbachev and President Kennedy, who met for the first time at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland in July 1985, soon developed a good rapport. While clearly wanting socialism and the Soviet Union to survive and thrive, Gorbachev's desire to reduce the possibility of nuclear war was supported by Kennedy (who felt much the same as Gorbachev on this subject) and despite misgivings in the West, the two countries began to develop new arms treaties, culminating in the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington in December 1987. Gorbachev also made a number of other visits to other nations the USSR wanted to improve relations with, including France in November 1985, Japan and China in August 1986, Canada in January 1988 (immediately after the historic visit to Washington to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and where he was met at the Ottawa Airport by Canadian Prime Minister Edward Seaga) and Mexico in July 1988, in the last case making a point of visiting the place where Leon Trotsky had been murdered in 1940. Despite these visits having a marked positive effect on the Soviet Union's popularity in the world, by late 1988 the problems at home were occupying much of his attention and that of his country, and how far things would shift would be abundantly clear in the events of 1989.
The 1980s were the richest times in history for all three Amigos, but with this wealth had come a sense of responsibility. As an ever-greater number of the Greatest Generation began to retire from positions of authority in the 1980s to make way for younger newcomers, with it came many new views and ways of doing business and management. What also came with this in the first part of the 1980s was a sense of ostentatious style that defined the early part of the decade but was quick to catch flack from many others among the same generation, whose contempt for the idea of so gaudily showing off one's wealth and status was self evident very quickly. By 1985, the trend had swung over to those who favoured the more subdued styles, and though some elements (such as wild hairstyling and to an extent elaborate accessories) remained through the decade, many of the positive styles of earlier times made comebacks, particularly in men's fashion and in color palates, which got far more tasteful with time. Women's "power suits" of the time became a common trend in many female fashions, while particularly in more ethnically-diverse areas of the Amigos countries the trend for ethnic-influenced clothing made a considerable comeback towards in the late 1960s/early 1970s heights by 1982, once again more aimed at women than men in many cases. The Preppy style that somewhat fell by the wayside in the 1970s made something of a revival in response to many of the excesses of the early 80s, and while the more flashy symbols of wealth faded away fairly quickly, the more subtle ones didn't. For those of higher income handmade suits became a status symbol, with Italian and French suits early on being matched first by British tailors by 1983-84 and then by North American ones later in the decade.
Sporty cars of all sizes, capabilities and price ranges were also common status symbols, and while the absolute most flashy ones would remain as much a symbol of excess as ever, by the mid-80s the selection of such cars available at prices most people could afford had swelled dramatically, with the pony cars of past times being joined first by the hot hatchback (most exemplified by the Volkswagen Golf GTI, though for many the Peugeot 205 GTI was the best of the decade and Renault 5 Turbo became a template for many future cars from Renault) and then the small sports cars (like the Toyota MR2, Pontiac Fiero, Westland Sentinel and Mazda MX-5 Miata) of the mid to late 1980s. Later in the decade, though, came the rise of the "rally special" cars, both with cheaper cult classics like the Ford Sierra RS Cosworth and Lancia Delta Integrale and more technically-advanced and expensive machines like the Audi Quattro and Peugeot Quasar, as well as road-racing specials like the BMW M3 and Mercedes-Benz 190 2.5 Cosworth. Particularly in the Amigos, where for many city dwellers the presence of effective and affordable mass transit meant everyday cars weren't a necessity and where cheaper sales taxes, insurance rates and fuel and maintenance costs all meant that automobile ownership was much cheaper than many other places in the world, it led to "fun cars" being a 1980s trend in its own right, both in terms of the sporty vehicles, a major growth of hot rodding (of both traditional and much-more-modern forms), off-road capable vehicles and indeed even motorhomes, RVs and camper trailers. The minivan, first introduced by Chrysler and the Renault-American Motors partnership in 1984, quickly contributed to the death of the traditional family station wagon (though the wagon would return in a very different form in the 1990s) but made vans and extra space available for virtually anyone (and GM's response, the Chevrolet Lumina APV and Pontiac Trans Sport of 1986, added the use of the dent-resistant plastic bodywork and aluminum spaceframe components, while also making a much more futuristically-styled vehicle) while the growth of the sales or larger vehicles and tightening fuel-efficiency rules meant that diesel engines began to make ever more appearances in the 1980s. Despite the trend against the ostentatious, the ultimate pinnacle of cars in the 1980s, represented first by the famous stainless steel-bodied, gullwing-doored DeLorean DMC-12 (launched to massive fanfare in 1981) and then by the exotics of later in the decade, represented by the Lamborghini Countach, Ferrari Testarossa, Vector W8 Twin Turbo and Porsche 959, cars of head-turning style, massive performance (all were capable of top speeds in excess of 180 mph and zero to sixty runs of less than five seconds) and price tags to match.
The Big Five North American automakers (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, American Motors and Westland-Reynard) by the mid-1980s were working actively with their unions, with Chrysler's brush with bankruptcy in 1979 and 1980, which had forced them to convince Washington to give them a bailout (which they got, though it came with conditions) and had forced them to make tough choices with its unions, who ended up with a sizable ownership stake in the company as a result. Despite this and similar problems at American Motors, the auto industry in North America only got stronger in the 1980s, as the employees began making more choices in the management of their companies, relationships between the management and employees improved markedly and the facilities themselves got major overhauls in the 1980s. GM's plants at Tacoma, Washington, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, both opened in 1982, showed the scale of what was possible, with the former meant specifically to allow American cars to be exported and the latter designed for the Chevrolet Corvette sports car and both built to suit, and the facilities built or rebuilt by the makers in the 1980s took many of the ideas of these to heart - better natural lighting, more attention paid to ergonomics and noise levels, improved equipment and many other details - and their suppliers did the same in many cases, both out of a desire to do right by their workforces and because by that point the automakers themselves were demanding better workmanship. GM was particularly harsh with this - there were numerous examples of parts supplied for GM cars being rejected by the automaker's production managers, who made a point of throwing them into piles outside of the plants or sometimes even onto shop floors, telling their makers to come to replace them. (The message got through, though one can only imagine what the part suppliers thought of such treatment.) The many previous failures of American small cars that had allowed Volkswagen and the Japanese automakers to get a major foothold in North America were answered in 1981-82 by the likes of the Ford Escort and Sierra, Chrysler K-cars, American Motors Spirit (and its stablemates in the Renault Alliance and Encore), Westland Chaser and the General Motors J-cars, all machines capable of giving the Japanese rivals a real shock - and to the surprise of few, the new cars sent the Japanese scrambling to build rivals. Perhaps more troublesome in the short term for the Japanese, the growth in the sales of Japanese cars had resulted in pushes for protectionism in all three nations, and the rising yen and the Plaza Accords of 1985 (meant to to push the value of the US Dollar down compared to other currencies) forced the Japanese to quickly shift their plans, with them rapidly developing much more upmarket models and following the lead of Volkswagen in beginning manufacturing operations with the Amigos, with Honda doing so beginning in 1981, Nissan in 1982 and Toyota in 1984.
Having come to exist in the 1970s, the home computer and home video game system became key features of virtually all new homes in the 1980s - and once again, the Amigos found themselves in an enviable position here. While the early dominance of the video game market by American companies was comprehensively shattered by the video game industry crash in 1983 and the growth of first Nintendo and then Sega ws dominant players in the industry, by the end of the decade Atari had muddled its way through and the unlikely duo of Commodore and Microsoft would organize many survivors in the industry into a single new entity, setting the stage for both companies to re-enter the field in dramatic fashion in the 1990s. Computers, by contrast, remained a heavily North American field, with the famous Motorola 68000 series of computer processors being the standard of the industry in the early 1980s (though it would advance far beyond this during the decade of course), though the Intel x86, whose first 32-bit version was released in 1984, quickly supplanted the 68000 series. The IBM PC, first introduced in 1981, introduced the idea of a dramatically-expandable personal computer, while the first Apple MacIntosh, introduced in January 1984 (and promoted from the start through one of the greatest television commercials ever created), introduced the modern graphical user interface design, and was followed by the introduction of Microsoft Windows in November 1985, which would go on to be one of the most successful computer program series of all time. In the midst of the growth, numerous other companies sprouted up to support the new industries, and all three Amigos nations, considering the production of computers, their components and the processors and semiconductors for them to be a strategic industry that needed to be supported domestically, was quick during the 1980s to assist the industry's facilities improvements and many R&D efforts, resulting in California's Silicon Valley (the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area) being joined by a number of other areas whose economies would be heavily influenced by the industry. By the late 1980s, the computer industry in the Amigos was the standard of the world, even as others (Japan, Korea and China in particular) raced to catch up and had considerable success in doing so.
As the 1980s went on, the completion of transportation projects in North America - the final sections of the Interstate Highway System in all three Amigos were Interstate 16 across Northern Alberta and British Columbia, which was opened in 1984, and Interstate 70 across Utah and Colorado, which was opened in 1986 - led to the shifting finances of transportation in North America. The use of tolls on the Interstate Highway System had, by then, made for a large amount of money in the bank accounts of the agencies that maintained and operated the interstates, money which under the Acts that had built the Interstates had to be used on transportation and infrastructure projects. Thus, by the early 1980s, the debate over the future of the tolls on the Interstate System was raging over whether to use it for other purposes or reduce or perhaps even eliminate the toll systems. Ultimately, the successful operations of the California High-Speed Rail System and Amtrak's extension of the Northeast Corridor and its Empire (New York), Keystone (Pennsylvania-New Jersey) and Dominion (Virginia) corridors had proven enormously successful, with daily 125-mph service running from Montreal and Maine as far as Atlanta, and the completion of the Peachtree Corridor (Chattanooga-Atlanta-Augusta-Savannah) in 1972 and the building of the Piedmont Corridor (North Carolina) and the Atlantic extension of the Amtrak high-speed lines from Columbia to Charleston and Myrtle Beach (and then on to Savannah, that route opening in 1984) stretched the fast trains further and further south. Having begun High-Speed "Metroliner" services in 1970, Amtrak went through continuous expansions of the system, but after the opening of the California High-Speed Rail System and the Texas Express in 1976, Amtrak moved to up the ante on its flagship routes, establishing the "Acela" brand in 1977 and running an international competition for high-speed trains for its service. With the prospect of these trains serving virtually the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States (and Via Rail's entry into the project in 1979, as they were planning high-speed lines of their own by then, meaning Canadian train contracts as well), the result was that the Acela Project got interest worldwide, and saved the bacons of countless makers of trains.
First off the mark was Kawasaki Heavy Industries of Japan, partnering with Chrysler-Alco and American Car and Foundry, initially proposing a 200 Series Shinkansen variant until, at the advice of the American partners, Kawasaki and its partner in Hitachi moved to speed up the development of the 500 Series with the goal of offering it for Acela service. General Electric offered an improved variant of the California HS1 to Amtrak, while the Franco-American consortium that had built the Texas Express using TGV-standard equipment also offered their proposal. Canada's Bombardier partnered with Pullman-Standard for its offering, which used mostly German Siemens electrical components. General Motors EMD and its long-time electric partner in ASEA proposed the under-development SJ X 2000, while the Budd Company teamed up with Fiat Ferrovaria in Italy and Brush Traction in the UK for its offering. All aside the HS1 and TGV Sud-Est were still in development at that point, but while the HS1, with its gyroscopic tilting system, was a proven piece, Amtrak wanted a train with a potential 200 mph top speed, knowing that the routes it had built new track for were capable of handling trains at such speeds. The Sud-Est would have as a result been the logical choice, but Amtrak, in an act of foresight, instead placed orders for a test unit with all of the consortiums - GE, Kawasaki/Chrysler/ACF, Alsthom/Francorail/Texas Rail Engineering, Bombardier/Pullman-Standard, EMD/ASEA and Budd/Fiat Ferrovaria/Brush - with the demand that all four be available by the summer of 1983.
All six made the deadline, producing very different trains. The GE-built HS2A, EMD-built X 2000, Budd-built Pioneer V and Pullman-Standard built Liberty II were tilting trains, all equipped with gyroscopic tilting mechanisms, while the Texas Rail Engineering-built TGV Reseau and ACF-built 500 Series weren't tilt trains, but they were designed for serious speeds, both capable of nearly 200 miles per hour. Behind on time and cost, the Japanese-American consortium made a famous hail-mary play in September 1982 when they sent their newly-completed train on a major publicity tour, running out from the Alco plant in Schenectady, New York, plant where it had been built on a nationwide tour, travelling on the electrified Water Level Route of the New York Central to Chicago and then on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe's transcontinental main line to Los Angeles, where it ran California HSR services for two weeks both on the newly-opened San Diego Division and the main line to San Francisco, before traveling back across the country. On its return trip to Chicago, Santa Fe officials allowed the consortium to run the train on a speed run, making sure the line was clear for it - and the train absolutely demolished the record between Los Angeles and Chicago, traveling the 2,227 miles of the ATSF Transcon in 18 hours and 48 minutes, averaging 118.46 mph on the run and taking advantage of the ATSF's arrow-straight, cab signal-equipped route east of Kansas City to make time, being clocked on the ATSF Transcon in southern Illinois at a speed of 183.56 mph, at the time a record in North America.
The "California Testing" was a PR smash, and the widely-publicized run and the sleek 500 Series making its mark in California led to EMD/ASEA making a Western tour of its own, while the Acela TGV was tested extensively on the Texas Express, Budd did a deal with the Southern Railway to allow the Pioneer V to make runs on the former Florida East Coast mainline from Savannah to Miami (and then from Atlanta to Miami, as well as runs to Key West, Tampa and Orlando) and the Liberty II was also sent to California in spring 1983 for testing, taking the same ATSF tracks out as the 500 Series had done the year before. Up until the fall of 1982, there had been some Congressional opposition to the Acela project due to its costs, but the 1982 tour made national news, and the racing by all others to jump on board led to the new train designs being sent all across North America to make appearances and show what they could do. The public response could be well summed up by a writer from The Philadelphia Inquirer about the X 2000 when it made its test runs on the Northeast Corridor in the winter of 1982: "If these are the trains of the future, we aren't just ready for them, we want them." President Reagan was one of the passengers on a test run by the Pioneer V from Washington to New York in January 1983, and remembering what he had said about the California HSR that he had helped to spearhead a decade prior, he commented "I think it's time to make this happen."
Congress agreed with the President, and in April 1983, they passed the Advancement of American Passenger Rail Act, which specifically authorized Amtrak to develop an integrated plan for high-speed trains across as much of the United States as possible. The following month, the Canadian Parliament passed the High-Speed Rail Transportation Bill, authorizing the building of high-speed lines between Detroit, Buffalo and Ottawa and Quebec City, connecting to the existing high-speed lines at Buffalo and Montreal and proposing a complete network, and in September 1983, the province of Alberta announced its intention to build its own high-speed line from Lethbridge to Edmonton via Calgary and Red Deer. Amtrak's formal acceptance trials for its new speed demons began with the famous "Welcome to the Future" picture, taken at the newly-refurbished Washington Union Station on June 4, 1983, where the six contenders - HS2A, Liberty II, X 2000, Pioneer V, 500 Series and TGV Reseau - were lined up for publicity photos, all dressed in the silver, red and blue paint scheme that Amtrak had developed for Acela.
To the surprise of virtually no one, the six contenders' racing up and down the Eastern Seaboard in the summer of 1983 got attention, but what surprised many (including Amtrak themselves) was that demand for many of their other services, including their long-distance trains, swelled rapidly through 1983. The high-speed trains were incredibly popular, and Amtrak's asking people for their views after rides got a lot of good information - the 500 Series, for example, was found to have too tight for many passengers (as it had been designed for Japanese passengers, this wasn't hard to understand) while the X 2000's bistro car was a massive hit with passengers. The TGV's electronic climate control was signalled out for praise, while the Pioneer V's large double-pane windows gave a better view for passengers. All rode well on the dedicated lines, though the tilt function was toned down on the HS2A and Liberty II, with the system's programming being modified for improved passenger comfort. The HS2A was the fastest-accelerating of the units, while the X 2000 was the favorite north of New York owing to its better handling of the twister track along the former New Haven Railroad. By the end of 1983, Amtrak had figured out that while they had sought out one victor from the six, it was clear that all had their strengths and weaknesses, and could be used for different places and services. Congress, many of whose members had been frequent riders of the program, agreed, and as the United States' electrified railroad network was swelling continuously, it was agreed that there had to be multiple winners.
GE got called first in November 1983, as the California HSR system committed to some 44 examples of the HS2A to support their existing HS1 sets as the traffic on the lines grew. It was only a week later that the state of Pennsylvania made a call of their own, ordering 23 X 2000 sets for the Keystone Corridor from Atlantic City to Harrisburg (the Pittsburgh extension was under construction at the time) and a service from New York to Scranton and Wilkes-Barre over the famed Lackawanna Cut-Off. In February 1984, Via Rail Canada ordered 36 examples of the Liberty II for Toronto-Montreal services and to join the existing LRC trains. This all led to Amtrak's first order announcement in April 1984 - the first Acela would be the 500 Series, while the Pioneer V would be ordered for services south of Washington to the sunny south. With the TGV Reseau being ordered by the Texas Express, it meant all six makers would have orders to fill and their trains would see service - and as such, objections were few.
The first train labeled as a timetable Acela Express left Washington at 7:46 AM in the morning on Monday, September 24, 1984, with the refurbished test 500 Series operating the service, while the test X 2000, now owned by the state of Pennsylvania, left Wilkes-Barre for New York two days later on its first revenue service. Through 1984, 1985 and 1986, as trains arrived for service, the older Metroliners were bumped to secondary services and the Acelas took their place at the head of Amtrak's train fleets. As predicted, their success was immediate, and by the late 1980s so successful were they that they resulted in a number of airline operators ending air shuttle service in the Northeast Corridor, unable to compete with the fast trains. While Amtrak's new 150-plus-mph rockets had to share tracks with the long-distance trains, the four-track lines common in Acela territory had little difficulty with this, and with trains able to cover the New York to Washington run in as little as 2 hours and 20 minutes, the seats filled rapidly. Not content with such success, Amtrak's high-speed network kept on expanding, with the connection to Florida resulting in the Acela program expanded throughout the south in the 1980s, with lines soon running west from Atlanta to Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Meridian, Jackson, Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Houston, with this line completed in 1988.
The Amtrak debate also ended the argument on what to do with the money from the Interstates. With the country still growing and improvements needed on a regular basis, the dedication of the money from the Transport America Act towards all forms of transportation, made possible by the reauthorization of the Act under President Kennedy in March 1985, resulted in a wave of improvements in American infrastructure in the 1980s and 1990s. While Amtrak's quest to build a high-speed rail network in the United States got a lot of this, it couldn't and didn't get all of it of course, and as a result airports, ports and waterways, urban and rural roadways and countless other projects got funds from Washington for improvements, the funds kept a lot of construction workers busy during the times, helping to add to an economy that was booming during the times.
As the 1980s went on, the passing of the Employee Free Choice Act in 1975 by Congress under President John F. Kennedy proved to be a milestone. Far from the socialist-enabling many of its detractors had derided it as, the Act's massive growth in the number of union members in the 1970s and 1980s didn't result in the employer troubles that many expected - indeed, it actually in large measures resulted in the opposite, as the newly-expanded union movements actually found out that their members were, by and large, using the unions to advance their interests but had little interest in damaging their employers, and with many of the largest unions having sorted out their long battles with employers in the 1970s - count the United Auto Workers, United Mine Workers, Amalgamated Transit Union, Laborers International Union, United Steelworkers and International Association of Machinists among these - the unions in the early 1980s made a number of moves as a result of the early 1980s recession, which did real harm to a number of industries in North America - with the United Steelworkers having to make a major move to save a lot of members jobs. They did that, in a way virtually no one expected.
The USW's negotiations with the nearly-destitute Bethlehem Steel in 1982 led to a watershed not only in negotiations, but in that the USW used its own funds to recapitalize the firm, taking a major interest in the steelmaker in the process - they got a 42% ownership stake as a direct result, making them the firm's largest shareholder by a mile - and actively involving many of Bethlehem's employees in the operation of the company. This move stunned the American steel industry, and when the USW did the same thing with Colorado Fuel and Iron later that same year, it led to charges that the union was robbing its workers for this. Nothing could be further from the truth - and the members of the Union outside of CF&I and Bethlehem approved of the transactions, leading to a large number of similar moves among other companies.
This change was a watershed, and as a result a large number of companies became owned in whole or in part by their workers in the 1980s and 1990s, with Bethlehem and CF&I joined by the likes of BFGoodrich, Southern Pacific, Johns-Manville, Union Carbide[1], Eastman Kodak, Radio Corporation of America and Zenith Electronics, these companies all seeing revivals of fortunes to some degree, though some were much bigger than others - Southern Pacific and Zenith in particular recovered dramatically - and in several other cases companies that were distressed ended up being bailed out by various natural resource funds, resulting in some making dramatic moves of their own - Commodore Computers, for example, moved from San Jose, California, to Waterloo, Ontario, after a major stake in the company was bought by the Province of Ontario's Trillium Natural Resources Fund in 1985. The employee-owned companies also surprised many, as it was the view of their new managers that the way forward needed to make better products rather cut down the size of the company, and with this came a number of technical developments - Zenith introduced High-Definition Television to North America in 1986 and full-color plasma screens in 1988, and its branching into making components for other companies ended up a boon for Apple in particular, whose Macintosh personal computers began to use the Zenith full-color plasma screens in 1989. Southern Pacific, sold to its employees by Santa Fe Southern Pacific industries in 1984 after merger plans were scuppered by Washington, went on to build a formidable reputation for customer service and branching into related fields, the company's improvements turning a nearly-bankrupt firm in 1984 into a powerful player by the mid-1990s, and after SP made dramatic moves in using its rail lines as conduits for telecommunications lines that made it a fortune, the company expanded its ancillary operations dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s, the growth of the company making a great many SP employees into millionaires in the process. Bethlehem regained much of its former prominence in the American steel industry in the 1990s after selling off many ancillary operations to finance new plants and equipment and refurbishment of existing ones, a similar story to CF&I, though they also jumped heavily into synthetic fuels.
[1] Both Union Carbide and Johns-Manville were left basically bankrupt because of events - for Union Carbide, it was the Bhopal Disaster of 1984 (that killed hundreds and maimed thousands as a result of a catastrophic accident at a chemical plant in India) and for Johns-Manville it was litigation claims related to the company's long-time involvement in asbestos products. Both ultimately did recover as firms, though both paid out billions of dollars in losses as a result of these incidents
I figure I should make a few points about the world as it retains to the post above (and before we bring out the next ones).
The Amigos here will always remain a manufacturing powerhouse on a massive scale. Here, between the corporations who control most industry being much more heavily influenced by their workers and their management classes after the 1980s being basically all Baby Boomer-generation people[1], the relative lack of low-income places to outsource manufacturing to[2], subsidizing of important industries in a number of fields deemed essential for the nations' defenses[3] and simply the highly-educated workforce and access to cheap and plentiful energy supplies, relatively low cost of equipment and land and one of the world's best transportation networks, makes the Amigos a good place to make things. While for obvious reasons the lowest-end of the manufacturing scale is virtually non-existent in the Amigos, the medium to high end very much is, with millions of people still going to work every day to make things with their hands or their machines.
However, a lot of important distinctions remain. Lordstown Syndrome[4] terrifies management at many companies and they would do just about anything to avoid it, resulting in there being greater concern towards the working conditions of people on shop floors, while as higher-ranking union members are regularly board members at many major companies (a trend that began in the 1950s but dramatically grew in the 1970s and 1980s) and they have much more knowledge as to the financial conditions of the companies themselves, there is a far greater consideration of the issues of the other side in industrial management. Many companies promote heavily from within and many of these go further by making it so that the best ideas for new products and designs are the ticket to the top, giving a powerful incentive for those with the drive to develop such ideas. Knowing that drive, many companies focused on the development of new products, including 3M, Apple, GE, DuPont, Eastman Kodak and Magnavox, specifically set up days or times when employees in R&D fields can work on their own ideas and experiments on company time and equipment, provided the company benefits from anything developed this way. (For more than a few people and companies alike, this has been a history changer.) In fields involving processing of raw materials these concerns have led to much better working environments and facilities and processes being changed - today, few modern aluminum mills don't also process red mud to recover iron, silicon, rare earth minerals, titanium dioxide and kaolinite, steel mills almost always recover ferrous slag for use as construction (including dams, railroad ballast, road surfaces and some forms of concrete for high-performance applications) and even in agricultural purposes and recycling of waste products from industry is big business in its own right in the Amigos.
The desire to help the environment shows clearly among industry in the Amigos. Newer industrial facilities are a far cry from the dirty, exposed facilities of the past, with industrial parks and facilities today being much cleaner than in times past. Oil refineries and their tank farms today are often nearly spotless, with massive stainless-steel tanks and piping inside of polymer-lined concrete boxes for safety reasons, while refinery structures and enclosed in temperature-controlled buildings to reduce corrosion on components and leaks of products and to allow extensive fire-prevention measures. Smokestacks began to be seen less and less in new facilities as reformation systems to capture industrial emissions came into use, allowing facilities and companies to recover - and sell - what would have been otherwise a waste product. As all three Amigos have outlawed the dumping of liquid toxic waste since the early 1980s, what is today called the "recovery industry" has worked and turning toxic byproducts into usable new products and gotten very good at destroying what is unsalvageable, helping to clean up the environments of countless places in the Amigos.
Because of the integrated power grid of the Amigos and it's sophistication - nuclear and hydroelectric sources provide a solid baseload, while other sources (solar, wind, geothermal, ocean thermal, tidal, pumped-storage hydroelectric, waste to energy) add power as needed to allow the reactors and remaining fossil-fuel thermal facilities to be the throttled down, extending their lifespans and improving their reliability, while HVDC lines act as grid connectors, allowing power to be sent hundreds of miles if needed - there is little worry about energy supply in the Amigos. Homes are generally heated using electric forced-air furnaces and the vast majority of residences in the Amigos by the late 1980s had air conditioning, while the rapid expansion of electrified railroads, mass transit systems and trolleybuses (as well as more exotic systems like diesel-electric trucks equipped with pantographs and electric cars themselves) have allowed a lot of transportation systems to go electric as well, reducing oil and gas demands. As this is common in Europe, Asia and many other developed parts of the world as well, energy prices in the Amigos are quite reasonable, even as cars and trucks in modern times male greater use of alternative fuels, namely biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol. This cheap energy hasn't, however, encouraged its waste - most citizens of the Amigos see keeping their energy supplies secure as a major priority for governments, and so there is fee objections to the development of energy supplies, provided the environment is protected in the process.
The environmentalism of the Amigos is a source of pride for a great many, particularly in Mexico and the American Southwest. There, nuclear-powered desalination projects have literally made millions of productive acres of farmland out of the deserts, agricultural developments that have provided a food bounty to countless people, made Mexico one of the world's elite agricultural producers and at the same time allowed for major rehabilitation projects. The desalination water projects allowed for a much reduced draw on the Colorado River and the recovery of vast quantities of treated wastewater combined with the desalination efforts allowed for the rehabilitation of countless rivers in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and throughout Mexico. California's Tulare Lake was reborn in the 1980s as a result, and the Salton Sea was rehabilitated to a massive degree in the 1980s and 1990s, while effluent recovery efforts made a major impact on the water quality of several rivers in Mexico as well as the United States, probably most of all the once badly-contaminated Lerma-Rio Santiago, Salado, Balsas and Papaloapan river systems, as well as cleaning up much of the hydrologic system of the Bolson de Mapini.
The desalination efforts of the Southwest have been matched - in many cases exceeded - by the efforts in other parts of the Amigos. The Ontario North-James Bay hydroelectric complex is the largest of its type in the world with a total maximum output of nearly 54,000 MW at full power output, while at the same time the project's needs have resulted in a vast swath of Ontario and Quebec protected for this reason. The flood projects of much of the East Coast are also impressive, providing flood control, hydroelectric power, recreation, environmental protection and in a few cases even water to support the Erie Canal's operating ocean-going section from Oswego to Albany, New York. The remediation efforts here have made a major impact on such badly-contaminated sites such as Onondaga Lake and the Hudson River in New York and the mines under the Wyoming and Lehigh Valleys in Pennsylvania.
[1] The Boomer generation here has been holding many desires to change the world in a positive way since their youth, and now they have the ability to do so in a very visible way, and they have every intention of doing just that.
[2] Both China and India are economically well ahead of OTL, and both are by the late 1980s dealing with nasty side-effects of rapid industrialization - pollution, contaminated lands, health issues and an unhealthy level of income inequality - and both want to move far beyond cheap factories for the West.
[3] In the Amigos there is a long list of these, including steel and aluminum production, semiconductor fabrication, electronics, aircraft and aircraft engines and components, heavy trucks, shipbuilding, oil refining, chemical manufacturing and several forms of recycling of various materials, as well as several mining and extracting industries.
[4] Lordstown Syndrome is named for the once-infamous General Motors Lordstown Assembly plant in eastern Ohio, where the replacing of workers by robots in an attempt to streamline operations at the plant backfired dramatically, causing a long series of ugly battles between management and the workers at the facility in the 1970s. The name stuck, but GM ultimately sold the plant to John DeLorean, who converted it into a facility to make his famous Delorean DMC-12 sports car, a move that proved highly successful.
The Amigos here will always remain a manufacturing powerhouse on a massive scale. Here, between the corporations who control most industry being much more heavily influenced by their workers and their management classes after the 1980s being basically all Baby Boomer-generation people[1], the relative lack of low-income places to outsource manufacturing to[2], subsidizing of important industries in a number of fields deemed essential for the nations' defenses[3] and simply the highly-educated workforce and access to cheap and plentiful energy supplies, relatively low cost of equipment and land and one of the world's best transportation networks, makes the Amigos a good place to make things. While for obvious reasons the lowest-end of the manufacturing scale is virtually non-existent in the Amigos, the medium to high end very much is, with millions of people still going to work every day to make things with their hands or their machines.
However, a lot of important distinctions remain. Lordstown Syndrome[4] terrifies management at many companies and they would do just about anything to avoid it, resulting in there being greater concern towards the working conditions of people on shop floors, while as higher-ranking union members are regularly board members at many major companies (a trend that began in the 1950s but dramatically grew in the 1970s and 1980s) and they have much more knowledge as to the financial conditions of the companies themselves, there is a far greater consideration of the issues of the other side in industrial management. Many companies promote heavily from within and many of these go further by making it so that the best ideas for new products and designs are the ticket to the top, giving a powerful incentive for those with the drive to develop such ideas. Knowing that drive, many companies focused on the development of new products, including 3M, Apple, GE, DuPont, Eastman Kodak and Magnavox, specifically set up days or times when employees in R&D fields can work on their own ideas and experiments on company time and equipment, provided the company benefits from anything developed this way. (For more than a few people and companies alike, this has been a history changer.) In fields involving processing of raw materials these concerns have led to much better working environments and facilities and processes being changed - today, few modern aluminum mills don't also process red mud to recover iron, silicon, rare earth minerals, titanium dioxide and kaolinite, steel mills almost always recover ferrous slag for use as construction (including dams, railroad ballast, road surfaces and some forms of concrete for high-performance applications) and even in agricultural purposes and recycling of waste products from industry is big business in its own right in the Amigos.
The desire to help the environment shows clearly among industry in the Amigos. Newer industrial facilities are a far cry from the dirty, exposed facilities of the past, with industrial parks and facilities today being much cleaner than in times past. Oil refineries and their tank farms today are often nearly spotless, with massive stainless-steel tanks and piping inside of polymer-lined concrete boxes for safety reasons, while refinery structures and enclosed in temperature-controlled buildings to reduce corrosion on components and leaks of products and to allow extensive fire-prevention measures. Smokestacks began to be seen less and less in new facilities as reformation systems to capture industrial emissions came into use, allowing facilities and companies to recover - and sell - what would have been otherwise a waste product. As all three Amigos have outlawed the dumping of liquid toxic waste since the early 1980s, what is today called the "recovery industry" has worked and turning toxic byproducts into usable new products and gotten very good at destroying what is unsalvageable, helping to clean up the environments of countless places in the Amigos.
Because of the integrated power grid of the Amigos and it's sophistication - nuclear and hydroelectric sources provide a solid baseload, while other sources (solar, wind, geothermal, ocean thermal, tidal, pumped-storage hydroelectric, waste to energy) add power as needed to allow the reactors and remaining fossil-fuel thermal facilities to be the throttled down, extending their lifespans and improving their reliability, while HVDC lines act as grid connectors, allowing power to be sent hundreds of miles if needed - there is little worry about energy supply in the Amigos. Homes are generally heated using electric forced-air furnaces and the vast majority of residences in the Amigos by the late 1980s had air conditioning, while the rapid expansion of electrified railroads, mass transit systems and trolleybuses (as well as more exotic systems like diesel-electric trucks equipped with pantographs and electric cars themselves) have allowed a lot of transportation systems to go electric as well, reducing oil and gas demands. As this is common in Europe, Asia and many other developed parts of the world as well, energy prices in the Amigos are quite reasonable, even as cars and trucks in modern times male greater use of alternative fuels, namely biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol. This cheap energy hasn't, however, encouraged its waste - most citizens of the Amigos see keeping their energy supplies secure as a major priority for governments, and so there is fee objections to the development of energy supplies, provided the environment is protected in the process.
The environmentalism of the Amigos is a source of pride for a great many, particularly in Mexico and the American Southwest. There, nuclear-powered desalination projects have literally made millions of productive acres of farmland out of the deserts, agricultural developments that have provided a food bounty to countless people, made Mexico one of the world's elite agricultural producers and at the same time allowed for major rehabilitation projects. The desalination water projects allowed for a much reduced draw on the Colorado River and the recovery of vast quantities of treated wastewater combined with the desalination efforts allowed for the rehabilitation of countless rivers in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and throughout Mexico. California's Tulare Lake was reborn in the 1980s as a result, and the Salton Sea was rehabilitated to a massive degree in the 1980s and 1990s, while effluent recovery efforts made a major impact on the water quality of several rivers in Mexico as well as the United States, probably most of all the once badly-contaminated Lerma-Rio Santiago, Salado, Balsas and Papaloapan river systems, as well as cleaning up much of the hydrologic system of the Bolson de Mapini.
The desalination efforts of the Southwest have been matched - in many cases exceeded - by the efforts in other parts of the Amigos. The Ontario North-James Bay hydroelectric complex is the largest of its type in the world with a total maximum output of nearly 54,000 MW at full power output, while at the same time the project's needs have resulted in a vast swath of Ontario and Quebec protected for this reason. The flood projects of much of the East Coast are also impressive, providing flood control, hydroelectric power, recreation, environmental protection and in a few cases even water to support the Erie Canal's operating ocean-going section from Oswego to Albany, New York. The remediation efforts here have made a major impact on such badly-contaminated sites such as Onondaga Lake and the Hudson River in New York and the mines under the Wyoming and Lehigh Valleys in Pennsylvania.
[1] The Boomer generation here has been holding many desires to change the world in a positive way since their youth, and now they have the ability to do so in a very visible way, and they have every intention of doing just that.
[2] Both China and India are economically well ahead of OTL, and both are by the late 1980s dealing with nasty side-effects of rapid industrialization - pollution, contaminated lands, health issues and an unhealthy level of income inequality - and both want to move far beyond cheap factories for the West.
[3] In the Amigos there is a long list of these, including steel and aluminum production, semiconductor fabrication, electronics, aircraft and aircraft engines and components, heavy trucks, shipbuilding, oil refining, chemical manufacturing and several forms of recycling of various materials, as well as several mining and extracting industries.
[4] Lordstown Syndrome is named for the once-infamous General Motors Lordstown Assembly plant in eastern Ohio, where the replacing of workers by robots in an attempt to streamline operations at the plant backfired dramatically, causing a long series of ugly battles between management and the workers at the facility in the 1970s. The name stuck, but GM ultimately sold the plant to John DeLorean, who converted it into a facility to make his famous Delorean DMC-12 sports car, a move that proved highly successful.
Welcome to the 1980s, Part 2
By the inauguration of President Robert Kennedy in January 1985, the Amigos were once again looking at a world that was changing. The final collapse of Communist China in 1985 and the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union did ultimately make for a geopolitical world that was dramatically shifting, but it wasn't just shifting in the Amigos. The world was changing, and in ways that saw a lot of realignments and changes in ideas in the West.
India was by this point increasingly a world power, the Commonwealth had become a major player in much of the world's geopolitics, the final stage of South Africa's transition to multiparty democracy was completed in 1982 (Pretoria successfully completing the road that a large portion of Asia was setting out by this point), Iran's government was shifting from the body that had rubber-stamped Shah Reza Pahlavi's decisions to a body with real power and Latin America increasingly found themselves debating its own relationship between their individual nations. The world's shifting sands meant more nations with democratically-elected governments, vibrant, well-functioning societies and prosperous, capable economies, forcing the leaders and public policy shapers of the Amigos to abandon the NATO vs. Warsaw Pact mindset that had defined much of the world's geopolitics since 1945. This was for some an extremely difficult adjustment, and it was an adjustment that would only get trickier with time. With it also came dramatic changes at home, as the Greatest Generation that had successfully defeated fascism and watched their children evolve into very different, but still remarkable, people in the previous three decades begin to take on the roles of leadership in society, as the "Generation X" generation, the children of the Baby Boomers, began to show their own thoughts, beliefs and abilities.
Despite getting into multiple scraps with Pakistan and at times dealing with some disrespect from the West for their stances, India was by the mid-1980s rising to be a nation of the future. The country's enormous growth in recent times had made the standards of living in much of the country much, much better, though a number of events in the 1980s wounded the idea that India's growth wouldn't at times be painful. The infamous Bhopal Disaster of December 1984, one of the worst industrial disasters in the history of the human species, was one of the worst events of this - there, a massive runaway reaction in a pesticide plant caused a massive leak of highly-toxic methyl isocyanate gas, killing over 1800 people and injuring over 300,000. The Bhopal Disaster resulted in a large number of angry recriminations between India and the United States, as the Indians felt (with some justification) that negligence on the part of Union Carbide Corporation, the owner of the facility, had contributed to the disaster, demanding Union Carbide's CEO at the time, Warren Anderson, be extradited to India on murder charges. Washington refused this (and despite India's loud protests, the Amigos agreed with the decision), but the victims of the disaster were successfully able to sue Union Carbide into near-dissolution, forcing the company's re-organization and sale to its employees in 1989, and all but killing American involvement in India's agricultural and chemical industries - even today, several other makers of American chemical products in India, including DuPont, Monsanto, Ashland, Praxair and Rohm and Haas, regularly struggle in their markets - and causing a geopolitical rift that took decades to fully recover.
While Bhopal never broke the Commonwealth alliances - though at one point then Indian Deputy Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao loudly argued with then Canadian Prime Minister Edward Seaga about how the Americans were "causing harm to so much of the world", though Rao would eventually take back that statement and Seaga made a point of trying to calm down the Indians - Bhopal, like Chernobyl a year and a half later, caused a massive wave of concerns about chemical industry safety across the world, and one day even the Indians themselves would admit that if Bhopal had saved the lives of countless others in the world, that it would be of some comfort to those who lost loved ones. Bhopal also led to a major series of changes around the country with regards to pollution and the after-effects of the country's rapid industrial development, and most Indian historians say that Bhopal, along with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the months of intercommunal violence (and the infamous Mumbai bombings of February 1993) that were a direct result, were two highly-traumatic events that saw India's society change course in a dramatic way in the years that followed.
The Commonwealth began the 1980s with a bang, as the Commonwealth Heads of State Meeting in May 1980, held on Socotra for the first time, also produced a distinct plan for a "Commonwealth Corps" and a "Commonwealth Fleet", where the nations involved would co-operate on armed forces operations with an eye towards working alongside the existing Western structures that the Central Commonwealth operated under but showcasing a major independent capability. As if to make this point, the Royal Canadian Navy's "Operation India" made a highly-public deployment to the Indian Ocean in the spring of 1981, exercising with the Australian, New Zealander and Indian navies as well as British units and making a number of high-profile visits. The following year, the Indian Navy was invited to join the American-led RIMPAC exercises - and the Indians, eager to prove a point, sent a vertiable armada to the event, with two of its British-built fleet carriers, armed with British and American aircraft and weapons, led the fleet. During the exercises the Indians proved much more competent than the other visitors had expected and made a point of its own. While Bhopal and the fallout from it caused initial problems, India joined the Commonwealth's fleet programs in 1986 and its rapidly-evolving Air Force and Army made plenty of appearances of their own.
For the Commonwealth, the Indian accession to the highest echelons of the organization was joined by South Africa's rise. Having steadily broken down racial barriers since 1948 - the narrow victory of Jan Smuts and his United Party over the openly-racist, fascist-sympathizing Daniel Malan and his National Party in South Africa's 1948 elections had scared the living hell of out many white and non-white South Africans alike - as the country was one of the fastest growing economies in the world in the 1950s and 1960s, South Africa's final moves towards multiparty democracy had begun in 1964, when the country abolished voting blocs meant for individual races (as well as eliminating restrictions on where individual races could live at the same time). While the following year the National Party under Hendrik Verwoerd finally ascended to power, Verwoerd and the Afrikaners of South Africa by that time had recognized the obvious, and the National Party, aiming to bring South Africans of mixed race (Coloreds, as they were known to South Africans) and of Indian-subcontinent descent into the National Party fold, was quick to remove barriers aimed at their voting, with Verwoerd himself stating "It's time we recognized that this nation belongs to all of us." (While he had to fight off a revolt from his own party on this, events would vindicate his views.) While the National Party's initial hold on power was brief - Verwoerd was defeated by Sir De Villiers Graff in 1969 - the move did ultimately lead to the National Party's once-hopeless position on non-Afrikaners being decisively broken. The African National Congress also formally entered South African politics for the first time in 1966 - and got their first MP elected, to the surprise of many, in 1969 - the ANC's focus on activism, openly influenced by the community activism practiced in the United States (the ANC openly admitted they mimiced many of the goals of Dr. Martin Luther King's Campaign For The Less Fortunate) also helped with the shifting politics of the 1970s in South Africa.
Finally getting a wish, Pretoria held a highly-publicized referendum among all those eligible to vote in South Africa in July 1976 over whether they would support South Africa's negotiating out a new constitution and moving to universal suffrage, removing all racial, education or wealth restrictions on voting. The vote was highly in favor - 72% of voters supported the idea - and in March 1977 the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, sat down with De Villiers Graff and his negotiating team in Pretoria to begin the task of creating a new constitution for a new South Africa. Despite the negotiations being at times arduous, they came to a final, accepted document in August 1978, and after the approval of the government (and another election, this time won by De Villiers Graff's successor, Alexander Kruger), the new constitution was the subject of another referendum in September 1980, once again passing with a wide margin and setting the stage for South Africa's first all-race elections, held on August 17-21, 1981.
Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were decisively victorious in this election, though even with such a spectacular victory Mandela was forced to set up an alliance with other parties to give his party a workable majority in South Africa's new bicameral parliament. Mandela, recognizing this, upon taking office as South Africa's President appointed three Vice-Presidents, appointing the leader of the United Party in Alexander Kruger, his right-hand man in Thabo Mbeki (Mandela's best friend and ANC comrade, Oliver Tambo, had been offered the job first but declined it for health reasons) and the ANC's top Indian official in Amichand Rajbansi. Even among the fractured parliament that followed the groundbreaking 1981 elections, the desire for everything to succeed and the collegiality of the people involved - Mbeki was once quoted as saying that even Afrikaner nationalists of the likes of Johannes Vorster were very collegial to him, with him stating that Vorster said to Mbeki "Once we are here, the disdain stops and the work begins" - served the country well. Mandela made a point of making a tour of the Commonwealth in 1982, seeking investment money (he got all he wanted and more) but seeing that his success had made him more than a little bit of a hero among those of African descent in the West. Recognizing this, Mandela made a state visit to Washington in September 1982, complete with a tour of several American cities and a press conference at the White House where President Reagan referred to him as "One of the greatest statesmen of our time."
Having successfully moved beyond race, South Africa formally applied to the Commonwealth of Nations in April 1984 for a place among the Central Commonwealth. While their per-capita income didn't quite allow this (though with a GDP per capita of nearly $22,000 in 1984, they were much closer than many thought), the decision would be hotly debated in the second half of the 1980s. In the meantime, South Africa granted Namibia independence in January 1985 and embarked on a major revival of its societal fortunes. Much of South Africa became one big construction zone in the 1980s as the poorer black neighborhoods of the past disappeared in favor of brand-new communities, the country's economy shifted to deal with the new realities and the incoming investment of the prosperous 1980s meant many black South Africans were already economically emancipated by the 1970s and 1980s and the end of racial segregation simply finished the job. The 1980s also saw countless South African investors developing many new companies, products and markets, adding to the country's position. By the late 1980s, South Africa's progress was incredible, and as a result on July 1, 1989, when the Commonwealth of Nations shifted its positions, the five nations of the Central Commonwealth (United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) became eight, with Israel, South Africa and Singapore joining the elite club, with all of the privileges and responsibilites it entailed.
While the second half of the 1980s would be most defined by the USSR and its relationships with its neighbors and the rest of the world, the early 1980s would end up being focused heavily on Asia, both because of the shifting sands in Korea as it moved from its military governments to democracy in the early 1980s and because of China, and while both Korea and China would ultimately benefit from the 1980s, the early part of the decade was a dark day before the dawn as the People's Republic of China, having struggled through many problems in later years, finally began to come apart in 1976.
That process began with the devastating earthquake that hammered Tangshan and much of northeastern China on July 28, 1976. The monster 7.6-magnitude Earthquake was the most devastating disaster since the Bay of Bengal Cyclone of 1970 and easily the deadliest earthquake of the 20th Century, with virtually the entire city of Tangshan being completely leveled and much of Hebei provinces absolutely hammered. While other cities were hit hard on both the PRC and ROC sides, the destruction was far worse on the PRC side, with an estimated 320,000 people dying in the Earthquake and much of the PRC's infrastructure in the region taking a massive hit. Making matters worse was the traditional Chinese belief that natural disasters being considered disruptions in the natural order and possibly being a sign of a lack of legitimacy in the PRC's government. With China in the dying days of the Cultural Revolution, it wasn't clear what the future would hold in the PRC, particularly as the destruction in Tangshan was far beyond the PRC's ability to easily rebuild and, despite offers of help from the ROC, Japan, Korea and the Amigos, help accepted from abroad was minimal.
Making matters worse still for the PRC was the death of the nation's founder, Mao Zedong, died after years of illnesses on September 9, 1976, setting off a long struggle for control of the country between multiple different factions. With the Cultural Revolution's petering out was helpful for the PRC's stability, it was clear the country was stagnating badly by the mid-1970s, a state of affairs shared by the Soviet Union to the north (which by then had become a major patron to the PRC, though the costs of doing so by then were a drain on the USSR's resources) and a serious problem, doubly so when one looked the Republic of China to the South, which by the late 1970s was becoming a world power all its own and was in the midst of a major series of improvements in relations with its neighbours (including sorting out the last of its many border and maritime disputes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most famously finally giving up its claim to Formosa in 1982) and a massive wave of economic growth that by the early 1980s had seen much of the country's coastal regions becoming as prosperous as anywhere else in Asia and with major efforts being directed inland to other regions. The ROC's success made things worse for the PRC, as the ROC took the German approach of giving any PRC citizen the right to come to the ROC if they chose to stay permanently. By the early 1980s this was happening a lot, as multiple factions battled for the future of the PRC, with the likes of Jiang Qing, Lin Biao, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping and multiple others leading factions that battled for leadership of the nation. All the while, the country's problems with crop production began to mount, not helped by the loss of major food storage infrastructure in Tianjin and Ninghe that was destroyed in the 1976 Earthquake.
In 1982-83 things began to come to a head as crop failures that year led to famine becoming a real problem for the PRC. This first decisively breaks the Qing-Biao faction, leading to the latter's execution in September 1983, but the fighting's continuing results in a legitimate civil conflict breaking out in the winter of 1983-84, and having control of the ports for imported food (necessary due to crop failures), Guofeng's faction tries to use food as a weapon to force a capituation by the other factions. This leads to a gradual collapse of authority in China, resulting in massive protests in the summer of 1984. After Hua is assassinated by a disgruntled PLA officer in October 1984, Deng's attempt to take control of the PRC falls completely apart, forcing the PRC to go to the USSR to try to get help, and with the USSR being in no position to solve China's food crisis, the situation forces the PRC's authorities to go to the ROC, which Deng does on November 11, 1984.
The ROC, while sympathetic to the situation, is open in its belief that the PRC is close to collapse (a viewpoint shared by most observers) and that Deng's inability to control the situation across all of the PRC's territory makes trying to negotiate out aid without major political changes impossible. The breakdown on the first negotiations in December leads to a massive flood of refugees heading for the borders east and north of Beijing. PRC soldiers end up having to shoot to kill at the border, making a bad situation worse and forcing the ROC's 16th Army, stationed around Beijing, to be deployed to the border to keep some semblance of order on January 6, 1985. By then, however, the PRC is completely collapsing - and on January 28, 1985, a massive power struggle in the PRC's Politburo results in Deng's arrest and several others being injured or killed, and the senior military and political leaders of China the following day announce their willingness to dissolve the PRC in return for a massive aid movement to help save lives in northern and northeastern China.
The ROC had been waiting for that, and knowing of the need and sure of the eventual collapse of the PRC's government, when the day came the ROC and its allies were ready - and within days, whole trains of foodstuffs were rolling across the border between the ROC and PRC, while the government of the PRC negotiated the end of the People's Republic, with the ROC being generous with the terms - they could afford to be - and basically allowing the PRC's central government to be dissolved and the provincial authorities simply joining the Republic of China. The deals done, the PRC announced its own dissolution on May 25, 1985, and that the provinces of the PRC would be joining the Republic of China. By that time, the ROC had gotten large-scale help from Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Great Britain, Australia and all three Amigos nations, and food aid was arriving in huge amounts, followed within days of the end of the PRC by the first foreign specialists.
What they found was a horror show. Nearly 80 million people lived in what had been the People's Republic, and famine had affected nearly all of them. The discoveries of this would lead directly to the famous Live Aid Concerts of July 13-14, 1985, and what it would also do is bring about a vast change in the way China dealt with its neighbours and how the countries around China worked with it. The knowledge of China's famines had been well known in the West, but the discovery of just how bad it had become began a cause celebre in Asia and among Chinese expatriate communities around the world. So numerous were the people seeking to help that the ROC could pick and choose who and what they wanted to happen, but remembering that the lack of co-ordination had been so devastating for China in World War II and wanting its new people to feel like they mattered to the government in Beijing, the ROC had no problems with non-governmental agencies going to the new regions and helping out if they wanted to, and a great many did, with the Live Aid Concert organizers in particular having raised hundreds of millions that they wanted to use, and they did. The private efforts were substantial as well, particularly as many groups took the opportunity (with the ROC's approval) to begin to purchase pieces of the PRC's remaining industrial infrastructure. The legacy of the past kept the Japanese and Koreans mostly out of this, but the Amigos ended up benefitting, with a number of industrial giants taking the opportunity to purchase the remains of companies for peanuts and then rebuilding them - count Dow Chemical, US Steel, Hess Petroleum, Pacific Truck and Engineering, Archer Daniels Midland, Robinson Heavy Industries and Cemex among these, all of whom set up shop in the former PRC and quickly hired armies of workers to rebuild operations, earning kudos with all involved.
The collapse of the PRC was the last gasp for communism in Asia, buy by no means the end of history there, even as Japan's vast economic bubble of the 1980s led to the Japanese owing truly monumental quantities of equities around the world and Korea's transition to democracy led to the Koreans becoming much more popular people in Asia. By the time of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the games had adopted a "Asia For Tomorrow" theme and had developed a wide "Cultural Olympiad" that the Koreans invited the rest of Asia to get on - and everyone did, helping to create a different world for many visitors to the Seoul games from Korea's neighbors, with the proud Koreans discovering the Japanese and Chinese were much more respectful towards them than had once been believed. In the process the games became a major sea change for Asia, as centuries of animosity were steadily declining.
For the PRC's remaining leaders, the ROC took a surprisingly-concilliatory tone towards them. Deng Xiaoping and his leaders were allowed to retire peacefully, and Deng would spend the rest of his life watching the ROC's rise, stating in a rare interview in May 1995 that he had few regrets over the events of a decade earlier, stating "It was for the best for all of us." Many PRC-era leaders were granted the same courtesy, though in the years after 1985 they weren't often seen in their former territory, as many of the locals had a very low opinion of them indeed. The ROC's modernization of the country led to a number of famous events and donations, including at Vancouver's Expo '86 (one of whose focuses was on transportation) where, in recognition of the Canadian Pacific's efforts to help with food transportation with its trains and ships the year before, the ROC donated a quartet of almost-new QJ-class steam locomotives to the Canadian Pacific if they chose to accept them, which the CPR did[1]. In addition to this, the ROC commissioned a monument in Beijing to the nations who helped so massively in countering the famine - including a recognition of Japan, which surprised many Chinese - but then Japanese then made things more poignant at the monument's opening in June 1991, which was attended by Emperor Akihito himself, who spoke of how he was impressed that China could give such a recognition to Japan considering the past as well as reiterating that he saw the future of the two nations as being greater than either could ever hope to achieve on their own. That powerful statement - done by Akihito out of a desire to continue the work his father had begun in helping mend Japan's relations with the world in the 1960s - was taken in both China and Japan that the Emperor considered China an equal to Japan, something that once upon a time would have been almost blasphemous but which, by 1991, meshed perfectly with Japan's desire to move beyond its Imperial past into a brighter future.
The end of the People's Republic of China was very much a contrast with the end of racial segregation in South Africa, and shined a bright light onto the world's dramatic changes in the 1980s. Communism was collapsing, and while Gorbachev did his level best to deal with the rot, the events of 1989 would change the world almost overnight in ways many could never have foreseen....
[1] CPR's four donated QJs would all have good fates - the first would be given by them to the province of British Columbia for the British Columbia Railway's steam program, the second to the Canadian Museum of Civilization (for the museum's exhibit of Canada's efforts towards humanitarian causes, which opened at the museum in 1988), the third to The Rail Museum of the Americas in Hoboken, New Jersey and the fourth remaining as part of the CPR's steam fleet, being numbered 8001 by CPR. CPR 8001 was part of the Grand Display of Steam at Expo 86.
By the inauguration of President Robert Kennedy in January 1985, the Amigos were once again looking at a world that was changing. The final collapse of Communist China in 1985 and the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union did ultimately make for a geopolitical world that was dramatically shifting, but it wasn't just shifting in the Amigos. The world was changing, and in ways that saw a lot of realignments and changes in ideas in the West.
India was by this point increasingly a world power, the Commonwealth had become a major player in much of the world's geopolitics, the final stage of South Africa's transition to multiparty democracy was completed in 1982 (Pretoria successfully completing the road that a large portion of Asia was setting out by this point), Iran's government was shifting from the body that had rubber-stamped Shah Reza Pahlavi's decisions to a body with real power and Latin America increasingly found themselves debating its own relationship between their individual nations. The world's shifting sands meant more nations with democratically-elected governments, vibrant, well-functioning societies and prosperous, capable economies, forcing the leaders and public policy shapers of the Amigos to abandon the NATO vs. Warsaw Pact mindset that had defined much of the world's geopolitics since 1945. This was for some an extremely difficult adjustment, and it was an adjustment that would only get trickier with time. With it also came dramatic changes at home, as the Greatest Generation that had successfully defeated fascism and watched their children evolve into very different, but still remarkable, people in the previous three decades begin to take on the roles of leadership in society, as the "Generation X" generation, the children of the Baby Boomers, began to show their own thoughts, beliefs and abilities.
Despite getting into multiple scraps with Pakistan and at times dealing with some disrespect from the West for their stances, India was by the mid-1980s rising to be a nation of the future. The country's enormous growth in recent times had made the standards of living in much of the country much, much better, though a number of events in the 1980s wounded the idea that India's growth wouldn't at times be painful. The infamous Bhopal Disaster of December 1984, one of the worst industrial disasters in the history of the human species, was one of the worst events of this - there, a massive runaway reaction in a pesticide plant caused a massive leak of highly-toxic methyl isocyanate gas, killing over 1800 people and injuring over 300,000. The Bhopal Disaster resulted in a large number of angry recriminations between India and the United States, as the Indians felt (with some justification) that negligence on the part of Union Carbide Corporation, the owner of the facility, had contributed to the disaster, demanding Union Carbide's CEO at the time, Warren Anderson, be extradited to India on murder charges. Washington refused this (and despite India's loud protests, the Amigos agreed with the decision), but the victims of the disaster were successfully able to sue Union Carbide into near-dissolution, forcing the company's re-organization and sale to its employees in 1989, and all but killing American involvement in India's agricultural and chemical industries - even today, several other makers of American chemical products in India, including DuPont, Monsanto, Ashland, Praxair and Rohm and Haas, regularly struggle in their markets - and causing a geopolitical rift that took decades to fully recover.
While Bhopal never broke the Commonwealth alliances - though at one point then Indian Deputy Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao loudly argued with then Canadian Prime Minister Edward Seaga about how the Americans were "causing harm to so much of the world", though Rao would eventually take back that statement and Seaga made a point of trying to calm down the Indians - Bhopal, like Chernobyl a year and a half later, caused a massive wave of concerns about chemical industry safety across the world, and one day even the Indians themselves would admit that if Bhopal had saved the lives of countless others in the world, that it would be of some comfort to those who lost loved ones. Bhopal also led to a major series of changes around the country with regards to pollution and the after-effects of the country's rapid industrial development, and most Indian historians say that Bhopal, along with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the months of intercommunal violence (and the infamous Mumbai bombings of February 1993) that were a direct result, were two highly-traumatic events that saw India's society change course in a dramatic way in the years that followed.
The Commonwealth began the 1980s with a bang, as the Commonwealth Heads of State Meeting in May 1980, held on Socotra for the first time, also produced a distinct plan for a "Commonwealth Corps" and a "Commonwealth Fleet", where the nations involved would co-operate on armed forces operations with an eye towards working alongside the existing Western structures that the Central Commonwealth operated under but showcasing a major independent capability. As if to make this point, the Royal Canadian Navy's "Operation India" made a highly-public deployment to the Indian Ocean in the spring of 1981, exercising with the Australian, New Zealander and Indian navies as well as British units and making a number of high-profile visits. The following year, the Indian Navy was invited to join the American-led RIMPAC exercises - and the Indians, eager to prove a point, sent a vertiable armada to the event, with two of its British-built fleet carriers, armed with British and American aircraft and weapons, led the fleet. During the exercises the Indians proved much more competent than the other visitors had expected and made a point of its own. While Bhopal and the fallout from it caused initial problems, India joined the Commonwealth's fleet programs in 1986 and its rapidly-evolving Air Force and Army made plenty of appearances of their own.
For the Commonwealth, the Indian accession to the highest echelons of the organization was joined by South Africa's rise. Having steadily broken down racial barriers since 1948 - the narrow victory of Jan Smuts and his United Party over the openly-racist, fascist-sympathizing Daniel Malan and his National Party in South Africa's 1948 elections had scared the living hell of out many white and non-white South Africans alike - as the country was one of the fastest growing economies in the world in the 1950s and 1960s, South Africa's final moves towards multiparty democracy had begun in 1964, when the country abolished voting blocs meant for individual races (as well as eliminating restrictions on where individual races could live at the same time). While the following year the National Party under Hendrik Verwoerd finally ascended to power, Verwoerd and the Afrikaners of South Africa by that time had recognized the obvious, and the National Party, aiming to bring South Africans of mixed race (Coloreds, as they were known to South Africans) and of Indian-subcontinent descent into the National Party fold, was quick to remove barriers aimed at their voting, with Verwoerd himself stating "It's time we recognized that this nation belongs to all of us." (While he had to fight off a revolt from his own party on this, events would vindicate his views.) While the National Party's initial hold on power was brief - Verwoerd was defeated by Sir De Villiers Graff in 1969 - the move did ultimately lead to the National Party's once-hopeless position on non-Afrikaners being decisively broken. The African National Congress also formally entered South African politics for the first time in 1966 - and got their first MP elected, to the surprise of many, in 1969 - the ANC's focus on activism, openly influenced by the community activism practiced in the United States (the ANC openly admitted they mimiced many of the goals of Dr. Martin Luther King's Campaign For The Less Fortunate) also helped with the shifting politics of the 1970s in South Africa.
Finally getting a wish, Pretoria held a highly-publicized referendum among all those eligible to vote in South Africa in July 1976 over whether they would support South Africa's negotiating out a new constitution and moving to universal suffrage, removing all racial, education or wealth restrictions on voting. The vote was highly in favor - 72% of voters supported the idea - and in March 1977 the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, sat down with De Villiers Graff and his negotiating team in Pretoria to begin the task of creating a new constitution for a new South Africa. Despite the negotiations being at times arduous, they came to a final, accepted document in August 1978, and after the approval of the government (and another election, this time won by De Villiers Graff's successor, Alexander Kruger), the new constitution was the subject of another referendum in September 1980, once again passing with a wide margin and setting the stage for South Africa's first all-race elections, held on August 17-21, 1981.
Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were decisively victorious in this election, though even with such a spectacular victory Mandela was forced to set up an alliance with other parties to give his party a workable majority in South Africa's new bicameral parliament. Mandela, recognizing this, upon taking office as South Africa's President appointed three Vice-Presidents, appointing the leader of the United Party in Alexander Kruger, his right-hand man in Thabo Mbeki (Mandela's best friend and ANC comrade, Oliver Tambo, had been offered the job first but declined it for health reasons) and the ANC's top Indian official in Amichand Rajbansi. Even among the fractured parliament that followed the groundbreaking 1981 elections, the desire for everything to succeed and the collegiality of the people involved - Mbeki was once quoted as saying that even Afrikaner nationalists of the likes of Johannes Vorster were very collegial to him, with him stating that Vorster said to Mbeki "Once we are here, the disdain stops and the work begins" - served the country well. Mandela made a point of making a tour of the Commonwealth in 1982, seeking investment money (he got all he wanted and more) but seeing that his success had made him more than a little bit of a hero among those of African descent in the West. Recognizing this, Mandela made a state visit to Washington in September 1982, complete with a tour of several American cities and a press conference at the White House where President Reagan referred to him as "One of the greatest statesmen of our time."
Having successfully moved beyond race, South Africa formally applied to the Commonwealth of Nations in April 1984 for a place among the Central Commonwealth. While their per-capita income didn't quite allow this (though with a GDP per capita of nearly $22,000 in 1984, they were much closer than many thought), the decision would be hotly debated in the second half of the 1980s. In the meantime, South Africa granted Namibia independence in January 1985 and embarked on a major revival of its societal fortunes. Much of South Africa became one big construction zone in the 1980s as the poorer black neighborhoods of the past disappeared in favor of brand-new communities, the country's economy shifted to deal with the new realities and the incoming investment of the prosperous 1980s meant many black South Africans were already economically emancipated by the 1970s and 1980s and the end of racial segregation simply finished the job. The 1980s also saw countless South African investors developing many new companies, products and markets, adding to the country's position. By the late 1980s, South Africa's progress was incredible, and as a result on July 1, 1989, when the Commonwealth of Nations shifted its positions, the five nations of the Central Commonwealth (United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) became eight, with Israel, South Africa and Singapore joining the elite club, with all of the privileges and responsibilites it entailed.
While the second half of the 1980s would be most defined by the USSR and its relationships with its neighbors and the rest of the world, the early 1980s would end up being focused heavily on Asia, both because of the shifting sands in Korea as it moved from its military governments to democracy in the early 1980s and because of China, and while both Korea and China would ultimately benefit from the 1980s, the early part of the decade was a dark day before the dawn as the People's Republic of China, having struggled through many problems in later years, finally began to come apart in 1976.
That process began with the devastating earthquake that hammered Tangshan and much of northeastern China on July 28, 1976. The monster 7.6-magnitude Earthquake was the most devastating disaster since the Bay of Bengal Cyclone of 1970 and easily the deadliest earthquake of the 20th Century, with virtually the entire city of Tangshan being completely leveled and much of Hebei provinces absolutely hammered. While other cities were hit hard on both the PRC and ROC sides, the destruction was far worse on the PRC side, with an estimated 320,000 people dying in the Earthquake and much of the PRC's infrastructure in the region taking a massive hit. Making matters worse was the traditional Chinese belief that natural disasters being considered disruptions in the natural order and possibly being a sign of a lack of legitimacy in the PRC's government. With China in the dying days of the Cultural Revolution, it wasn't clear what the future would hold in the PRC, particularly as the destruction in Tangshan was far beyond the PRC's ability to easily rebuild and, despite offers of help from the ROC, Japan, Korea and the Amigos, help accepted from abroad was minimal.
Making matters worse still for the PRC was the death of the nation's founder, Mao Zedong, died after years of illnesses on September 9, 1976, setting off a long struggle for control of the country between multiple different factions. With the Cultural Revolution's petering out was helpful for the PRC's stability, it was clear the country was stagnating badly by the mid-1970s, a state of affairs shared by the Soviet Union to the north (which by then had become a major patron to the PRC, though the costs of doing so by then were a drain on the USSR's resources) and a serious problem, doubly so when one looked the Republic of China to the South, which by the late 1970s was becoming a world power all its own and was in the midst of a major series of improvements in relations with its neighbours (including sorting out the last of its many border and maritime disputes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most famously finally giving up its claim to Formosa in 1982) and a massive wave of economic growth that by the early 1980s had seen much of the country's coastal regions becoming as prosperous as anywhere else in Asia and with major efforts being directed inland to other regions. The ROC's success made things worse for the PRC, as the ROC took the German approach of giving any PRC citizen the right to come to the ROC if they chose to stay permanently. By the early 1980s this was happening a lot, as multiple factions battled for the future of the PRC, with the likes of Jiang Qing, Lin Biao, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping and multiple others leading factions that battled for leadership of the nation. All the while, the country's problems with crop production began to mount, not helped by the loss of major food storage infrastructure in Tianjin and Ninghe that was destroyed in the 1976 Earthquake.
In 1982-83 things began to come to a head as crop failures that year led to famine becoming a real problem for the PRC. This first decisively breaks the Qing-Biao faction, leading to the latter's execution in September 1983, but the fighting's continuing results in a legitimate civil conflict breaking out in the winter of 1983-84, and having control of the ports for imported food (necessary due to crop failures), Guofeng's faction tries to use food as a weapon to force a capituation by the other factions. This leads to a gradual collapse of authority in China, resulting in massive protests in the summer of 1984. After Hua is assassinated by a disgruntled PLA officer in October 1984, Deng's attempt to take control of the PRC falls completely apart, forcing the PRC to go to the USSR to try to get help, and with the USSR being in no position to solve China's food crisis, the situation forces the PRC's authorities to go to the ROC, which Deng does on November 11, 1984.
The ROC, while sympathetic to the situation, is open in its belief that the PRC is close to collapse (a viewpoint shared by most observers) and that Deng's inability to control the situation across all of the PRC's territory makes trying to negotiate out aid without major political changes impossible. The breakdown on the first negotiations in December leads to a massive flood of refugees heading for the borders east and north of Beijing. PRC soldiers end up having to shoot to kill at the border, making a bad situation worse and forcing the ROC's 16th Army, stationed around Beijing, to be deployed to the border to keep some semblance of order on January 6, 1985. By then, however, the PRC is completely collapsing - and on January 28, 1985, a massive power struggle in the PRC's Politburo results in Deng's arrest and several others being injured or killed, and the senior military and political leaders of China the following day announce their willingness to dissolve the PRC in return for a massive aid movement to help save lives in northern and northeastern China.
The ROC had been waiting for that, and knowing of the need and sure of the eventual collapse of the PRC's government, when the day came the ROC and its allies were ready - and within days, whole trains of foodstuffs were rolling across the border between the ROC and PRC, while the government of the PRC negotiated the end of the People's Republic, with the ROC being generous with the terms - they could afford to be - and basically allowing the PRC's central government to be dissolved and the provincial authorities simply joining the Republic of China. The deals done, the PRC announced its own dissolution on May 25, 1985, and that the provinces of the PRC would be joining the Republic of China. By that time, the ROC had gotten large-scale help from Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Great Britain, Australia and all three Amigos nations, and food aid was arriving in huge amounts, followed within days of the end of the PRC by the first foreign specialists.
What they found was a horror show. Nearly 80 million people lived in what had been the People's Republic, and famine had affected nearly all of them. The discoveries of this would lead directly to the famous Live Aid Concerts of July 13-14, 1985, and what it would also do is bring about a vast change in the way China dealt with its neighbours and how the countries around China worked with it. The knowledge of China's famines had been well known in the West, but the discovery of just how bad it had become began a cause celebre in Asia and among Chinese expatriate communities around the world. So numerous were the people seeking to help that the ROC could pick and choose who and what they wanted to happen, but remembering that the lack of co-ordination had been so devastating for China in World War II and wanting its new people to feel like they mattered to the government in Beijing, the ROC had no problems with non-governmental agencies going to the new regions and helping out if they wanted to, and a great many did, with the Live Aid Concert organizers in particular having raised hundreds of millions that they wanted to use, and they did. The private efforts were substantial as well, particularly as many groups took the opportunity (with the ROC's approval) to begin to purchase pieces of the PRC's remaining industrial infrastructure. The legacy of the past kept the Japanese and Koreans mostly out of this, but the Amigos ended up benefitting, with a number of industrial giants taking the opportunity to purchase the remains of companies for peanuts and then rebuilding them - count Dow Chemical, US Steel, Hess Petroleum, Pacific Truck and Engineering, Archer Daniels Midland, Robinson Heavy Industries and Cemex among these, all of whom set up shop in the former PRC and quickly hired armies of workers to rebuild operations, earning kudos with all involved.
The collapse of the PRC was the last gasp for communism in Asia, buy by no means the end of history there, even as Japan's vast economic bubble of the 1980s led to the Japanese owing truly monumental quantities of equities around the world and Korea's transition to democracy led to the Koreans becoming much more popular people in Asia. By the time of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the games had adopted a "Asia For Tomorrow" theme and had developed a wide "Cultural Olympiad" that the Koreans invited the rest of Asia to get on - and everyone did, helping to create a different world for many visitors to the Seoul games from Korea's neighbors, with the proud Koreans discovering the Japanese and Chinese were much more respectful towards them than had once been believed. In the process the games became a major sea change for Asia, as centuries of animosity were steadily declining.
For the PRC's remaining leaders, the ROC took a surprisingly-concilliatory tone towards them. Deng Xiaoping and his leaders were allowed to retire peacefully, and Deng would spend the rest of his life watching the ROC's rise, stating in a rare interview in May 1995 that he had few regrets over the events of a decade earlier, stating "It was for the best for all of us." Many PRC-era leaders were granted the same courtesy, though in the years after 1985 they weren't often seen in their former territory, as many of the locals had a very low opinion of them indeed. The ROC's modernization of the country led to a number of famous events and donations, including at Vancouver's Expo '86 (one of whose focuses was on transportation) where, in recognition of the Canadian Pacific's efforts to help with food transportation with its trains and ships the year before, the ROC donated a quartet of almost-new QJ-class steam locomotives to the Canadian Pacific if they chose to accept them, which the CPR did[1]. In addition to this, the ROC commissioned a monument in Beijing to the nations who helped so massively in countering the famine - including a recognition of Japan, which surprised many Chinese - but then Japanese then made things more poignant at the monument's opening in June 1991, which was attended by Emperor Akihito himself, who spoke of how he was impressed that China could give such a recognition to Japan considering the past as well as reiterating that he saw the future of the two nations as being greater than either could ever hope to achieve on their own. That powerful statement - done by Akihito out of a desire to continue the work his father had begun in helping mend Japan's relations with the world in the 1960s - was taken in both China and Japan that the Emperor considered China an equal to Japan, something that once upon a time would have been almost blasphemous but which, by 1991, meshed perfectly with Japan's desire to move beyond its Imperial past into a brighter future.
The end of the People's Republic of China was very much a contrast with the end of racial segregation in South Africa, and shined a bright light onto the world's dramatic changes in the 1980s. Communism was collapsing, and while Gorbachev did his level best to deal with the rot, the events of 1989 would change the world almost overnight in ways many could never have foreseen....
[1] CPR's four donated QJs would all have good fates - the first would be given by them to the province of British Columbia for the British Columbia Railway's steam program, the second to the Canadian Museum of Civilization (for the museum's exhibit of Canada's efforts towards humanitarian causes, which opened at the museum in 1988), the third to The Rail Museum of the Americas in Hoboken, New Jersey and the fourth remaining as part of the CPR's steam fleet, being numbered 8001 by CPR. CPR 8001 was part of the Grand Display of Steam at Expo 86.
Ming777
Monthly Donor
I am curious what the ROC Armed Forces and the Indian Armed Forces look like. I presume that the Indians are using a lot more western equipment, and perhaps some indigenous designs, or even collaborative projects via the Commonwealth.
I am also curious what the Republic of China is using, since they undoubtedly are going to also strive to make some indigenous weapons systems and platforms. I also wonder if they might enter the carrier business. Despite having friendly relations with most of its neighbors, there is still a certain issue up north that the ROC may be wary of.
What is also clear is that the Soviets are running out of time and war neighbors by the late 80s. The APTA, NATO, the Commonwealth, and the Amigos are all clearly not fans of the Russians/Soviets.
Would it be fair to presume that Argentina never had the silly ideas of provoking the British in the Falklands?
I am also curious what the Republic of China is using, since they undoubtedly are going to also strive to make some indigenous weapons systems and platforms. I also wonder if they might enter the carrier business. Despite having friendly relations with most of its neighbors, there is still a certain issue up north that the ROC may be wary of.
What is also clear is that the Soviets are running out of time and war neighbors by the late 80s. The APTA, NATO, the Commonwealth, and the Amigos are all clearly not fans of the Russians/Soviets.
Would it be fair to presume that Argentina never had the silly ideas of provoking the British in the Falklands?
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Riding the Rail in the Amigos: Early Electrification and New York Union Station
15 dead in Gotham wreck! The Mayor Blames Steam. Tunnels at fault, Experts Find.
Tragedy struck New York on January 8th, 1902, when a locomotive plowed into a stalled commuter train on the Park Avenue Line. The impact force at 30 miles an hour telescoped two wooden coaches, killing 15 and scalding another 40 with hot steam. The Engineer, John Whisker, was charged with manslaughter for the gruesome incident. Whisker was judged Not Guilty by the Jury, and the blame was shifted to the steam engine's severe obstruction of signal equipment. A steam train roaring in the tunnel every 45 seconds produced a dangerous amount of smoke, so hazardous that the City of New York would ban steam engines entirely by 1908. How could the train get through? Electricity, of course.
At that time, electrification of the steam railroads was still very experimental. Rapid transit and interurbans had shown efficiencies over steam, yet not even the great Huntington lines of Los Angeles could match the New York Central. Under tremendous pressure from the public and government, the NYC would electrify their Water Level Route up to Albany and their Harlem and Putnam Divisions to Brewster for commuter trains under a 1500v overhead wire. The General Electric company oversaw the electrification, with Thomas Edison and Frank Sprague managing the first long-distance electrification scheme of a steam railroad. Central's Chief Engineer William Wilgus busied himself with right-of-way improvements eliminating grade crossings and curves while adding high-level platforms and improving signaling. Wilgus' improvements culminated in Grand Central Terminal by architects Reed and Stem, a massive Beaux Arts complex topped by a 35-story office tower. The tracks into Grand Central were entirely underground, leading to a two-level concourse operating long-distance and commuter trains. Additional connections included an underground annex to the IRT's Lexington Avenue subway, with thorough running by the Hudson and Manhattan system. The truly expansive interior featured shops, restaurants, stylists, and lounges for traveling customers that catered to most whims. The filled-in land on Lexington Avenue quickly became some of the most valuable in New York, with Wilgus credited to the concept of Air Rights in urban development. Suburban electrification was completed by 1907, with the first MU car helmed by Sprague and Edison. The Terminal was opened on July 4th, 1909, and the remaining tower and ancillary infrastructure were completed by 1913. The Water Level Route to Albany was electrified by 1911. It inspired the Southern Pacific, Illinois Central, Mexico Central, and Canadian National to electrify their commute operations with similar infrastructure and rolling stock.
Truly on top of the world, the New York Central became the gold standard of railroading with the completion of Grand Central. Not to be outdone, the Pennsylvania and Baltimore, and Ohio railroads had been planning their own Manhattan terminals for some time. At the turn of the century, Pennsylvania and B&O had made consolidation moves, with the PRR buying a controlling stake in the Long Island Railroad. At the same time, the B&O officially merged the Reading and Central New Jersey lines into itself. The immense real estate speculation caused by potentially two new Manhattan stations and the displacement of thousands of residents forced the Alderman Council to step in. They stipulated that any future Manhattan station would be jointly constructed as a Union Station. Seen as a significant success for the Progressive-minded, President William McKinley championed the Union Station idea of furthering interstate commerce. With their appeals rejected by the Courts, the Pennsylvania reached out to its fierce rival, the Baltimore and Ohio, to form the joint New York Union Station Corporation. Though already running into Grand Central, the New Haven soon joined the NYU plan as well, with through service to Boston. Unlike the Central, the new Union Station was built with no existing infrastructure in Manhattan or right-of-way restrictions. Under the Hudson, the PRR and B&O would develop double-tracked tunnels to the former Tenderloin District at Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street within a stone's throw of Grand Central.
The necessary electrification became a heated battle of words and backdoor dealings between the Westinghouse and General Electric Corporations. With his Alternating Current system, George Westinghouse promised more power with fewer substations and, more importantly, higher profits. Westinghouse personally lobbied J.P. Morgan for his AC system, knowing that if the New Haven would electrify with his system, so would the PRR and B&O. Though unproven technology, all three railroads approved of the Westinghouse system in 1905. Westinghouse would provide signaling, electrification, and motive power operating at 11 kV 25Hz. Clearances in the twin Hudson tunnels would be much higher than the Grand Centrals lines, with over an additional foot of height clearance as through freight to the New Haven was built into their plans at the B&O's insistence. A gentleman's agreement with the PRR and B&O planned joint electrification down to Philadelphia to a new downtown union station, sharing distribution and generating infrastructure. On the opposite end, the New Haven would expand their lines to a whopping six tracks via the Hells Gate line to Queens. The jointly developed Sunnyside Yard would act as a coach yard for the PRR and NH, with space for interchange freight. The six tracks would continue under the East River, with four tracks dedicated to the LIRR and NH commute trains and two tracks for long-haul passenger trains and freight movements at non-peak times. The B&O would consolidate its coach yard in a new Secaucus development. New York Union Station would host its first train from the LIRR on August 23rd, 1910, and then fully open a year later. Though not significantly larger than Grand Central, NYU operated as a single-level station with through tracks running in the middle and stub ends on either side for commuters. Air Rights above the eight superblocks were quickly developed into apartments, offices, markets, and hotels to rival the Terminal City project of the Central. Topping the Head House was the 40-story tall Union Hotel, billed as the most palatial in all of the Amigos. Following that was the main post office of all of Manhattan, handling mail and express hauled by the three railroads.
Despite the extreme initial cost, Grand Central Terminal and New York Union Station were overnight successes. The balance of efficient transfers with long distance, commute, and rapid transit within a downtown core, as well as transferring between different railroads for the NYU, became an insatiable desire for all commuters within the Amigos. Combined with the roaring Progressive and City Beautiful movements continually stoked by the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations, railroads across the nation came together begrudgingly to form union station companies. The architectural beauty and transit planning brawn of Daniel Burnham and Bion Arnold made great strides in rebuilding ravaged San Francisco, nubile Washington DC, and maturing Cleveland and Chicago. With great spans of urban greenery, wide arteries for burgeoning road traffic, expansive public forums, and unified transportation networks, the City Beautiful movement continued strong despite the Great War and economic bumps. While others, like Frank Lloyd Wright, pushed against the Beaux Arts for the next two decades with his Modernist Deco and Mayan-Revivalist Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, and Dallas union stations. Wright had his most fantastic splash in Southern California and its suburban mindset. The elevation of the Pacific Electric into a proper rapid transit system had Wright develop beautifully impressed textile concrete arches that elevated trains above the city streets. The Southern Pacific hired Wright on retainer and put him to work designing new stations for their Coast Line from San Luis Obispo to Cabo San Lucas. Railroad electrification continued in the early teens. The Milwaukee Road finished the first leg of a 3000v DC electric road between Tacoma, Washington, and Baker, Montana, a distance of over 900 miles and the longest electrification of any steam railroad conceived up until that time. Milwaukee's "Pacific Extension," completed in 1893, dealt with the great tribulations of mountain railroading and looked to electrification to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. Initially, the onset of the Great War halted construction, but the beginnings of the United States Railroad Administration through temporary nationalization benefitted electrification immensely. In addition to rationalizing ticketing and traffic control, the USRA, under Director General William Gibbs McAdoo, envisioned that all mainlines in the Amigos would be underwire. The USRA would finish not only the Milwaukee Road's electric division but also the Great Northern's electric division between Spokane - Seattle, Virginian, Norfolk and Western, and Vancouver and Bakersfield - Barstow via the Tehachapi loop. The New Haven line to Boston would be finished, and the suburban lines of the Erie Lackawanna, PRR, and B&O in New Jersey and Pennsylvania would also be electrified.
Passenger operations under the USRA saw New York Union Station tested to its planned limits as the Erie Lackawanna, Lehigh Valley, NY Ontario and Western, recently completed NY Westchester and Boston, and even the New York Central via the West Shore Line all gained access to NYU. Ferry crossings could be consolidated into Erie's Hoboken Terminal as the Hudson had been choked with river traffic. Running 20 hours daily, hundreds of trains brought hundreds of thousands of commuters into Manhattan. The four hours of "cool down time" saw a small army of men combing over the right of way to ensure maximum efficiency. During the non-peak times, trainloads of coal, copper, steel, and cotton made their way north to the factories and shipyards of New England, while finished goods traveled south to the urban centers of the East Coast. The USRA also introduced its standardized rolling stock of locomotives and cars in which electric trains were included. The USRA standardized multiple units on the innovative New York, Westchester, and Boston cars featuring a centerline door for rapid dis-embarkment. Passenger cars were standardized with a 48" platform height for easy boarding, and uniformed ticketing allowed passengers and commuters seamless transfers between different lines. Standard locomotives designs could be found on high-speed passenger trains with the Pennsylvania, B&O, and New Haven, while the heavy haulers of the Virginian, N&W and North Pacific shared monstrous designs that could pull twice as much as their largest steam locomotive. Even though the USRA was only designed to function during the war, the new Wilson Administration decided to keep running the national system well past the 1917 Treaty of Versailles. Under Federal control, the union stations of Chicago, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland, Denver, Seattle, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, to name a few. In a gradual return to private control of the economy, the USRA cooperated with the various builders of locomotives and railroad cars to advance their development further. Advanced construction techniques with new alloys joined by welding and tested in wind tunnels to increase thermal efficacies in steam locomotives via compounding, superheating, and condensing; American railroading was the world's envy. The final three years of the USRA would see the PRR and B&O continue their joint electrification to Washington with new cab signaling allowing for trains to hit 80 miles an hour regularly and higher for scheduled service; cab signaling could also be found on the UP, IC, NYC, and Santa Fe lines by the early 20s.
Making good on his election promise, President Wilson dissolved the USRA after passing the Esch-Cummins Act in March 1920. In nearly six years of operation, the USRA left a lasting mark with better labor relations, centralized passenger terminals and ticketing, uniform signaling for faster and safer trains, and a right of way that could continue to meet the United States' economic needs. In addition to a "return to normalcy" with private railroads, the Esch-Cummins Act also allowed the various lines to consolidate trackage and subsidies, merge together, and increase rates via the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC attempted to balance the public need for transportation and the corporate need to maintain a profitable business with varying success for both sides. The railroads were pleased to find their rolling stock and infrastructure in better shape than when they gave it up in 1914. Back in New York, Union Station and Grand Central were bustling with commuters heading to Manhattan's financial district. The Roaring Twenties would see record profits for railroads that methodically paid down debts and paid handsome dividends to stockholders and employees. The New York Central would spend the 20s elevating their West Side Line along the Hudson River, bringing a series of elevated warehouses and distribution centers into the largest cities of the Amigos. Centralized traffic control and bi-directional signaling allowed for an increase in trains per hour without increasing the amount of physical trackage. The NYC would end their westside line with a tunnel connecting to New York Union mainly for mail and freight traffic, though commuter trains would run through as well. In return, the Union Station would tunnel directly to Grand Central through running commute service, which opened in 1924.
Much to the B&O's disappointment, freight interchange with the New Haven was oversold, and freight traffic through the Hudson and East River tunnels were more cumbersome than initially imagined. The B&O made up for the lack of revenue by renting their train spots to the Erie Lackawanna and NYC's west side line passenger trains, while the PRR allowed the Canadian Pacific via the Lehigh Valley to use their tunnels. With the entry of the EL and CP permanently into NYU, all primary ferry service was consolidated into Hoboken, which was sold to the NYU Corporation. The recently formed and city-owned IND subway connected to NYU and the LIRR's Atlantic Terminal and took over the Hudson and Manhattan Jersey lines, enhancing local transportation in Manhattan. Elsewhere, the Mexican Central Railway would spend the 20s electrifying their El Paso - Mexico City and Monterrey mainline to top the Milwaukee Road as the world's longest electric railroad. With its extensive hydroelectric developments, Canada would spend its post-war years electrifying in Ontario and Quebec. The Canadian National would continue with its DC system, electrifying Montreal - Ontario - Niagra Falls and the Canadian Pacific using Westinghouse AC on a similar route, with later plans to electric their Lehigh Valley subsidy. The New York Central, suitably in awe of the Milwaukee, drew up plans to electrify from Cleavland to Boston sometime in the next decade as they paid down debts. Despite a splurge on electrics, steam reigned supreme as the Superpower Era took hold. Efforts from the USRA took fruit as 4-8-4 and 2-10-4s became mainstays with their roller bearings, superheating, and a renewed interest in compounding. Articulated Mallet locomotives were a further draw away from electrification as 4-6-6-4s, and 2-8-8-4s proved more capable of mixed-traffic operations for maximum utility. The Norfolk and Western had been quick to license their "Lubritorium" system of rapid maintenance to the other steam roads. Furthermore, diesel-electric locomotives and railcars began production, and the automotive industries funded their developments. Between the upfront benefits of new Superpower engines, modernization of existing motive power, and the lack of USRA funding, long-distance steam railroad electrification took a backseat during the 20s in the United States.
Correct on all fronts. India's armed forces use mostly Commonwealth and European (and some American and Mexican) equipment as well as what they make domestically. The American contribution is largest in the radar fields - the Indian Air Force uses E-3 Sentry and E-2 Hawkeye AWACS aircraft, and the Indian Army uses the i-HAWK surface to air missile system. India (like the RCAF, RAF and RAAF, as well as the Israeli and South African air forces in smaller numbers) is a user of the CF-105 Arrow for many fighter and interceptor duties, and while they did use Russian jets for fighter duties for a while, as the 1980s went on these have been mostly phased out in favor of more-modern replacements - India license-builds the Panavia Tornado, for example. The Indian Navy is almost entirely Commonwealth in terms of technologies, though these are related to the Amigos in some regards. The Indian Army is over time shrinking in size (though still huge), but has been steadily improving its equipment and training and moving to a more Western-oriented, more mobile and flexible force.
The ROC's focus in terms of its armed forces until May 1985 was always the PRC, for obvious reasons, and so the ROC's Navy is mostly a surface ship force (no carriers....yet), but their air force is huge and their army is absolutely immense. Like everyone else, the ROC is moving towards less of a conscript force and more of a professional force, though the ROC's officer corps today are among the best in the world and they are developing a professional NCO corps to direct the forces. The ROC's forces include a huge number of tanks and APCs and vast quantities of artillery, much of it built in China. Exactly what I still need to figure out, though one can be sure much of it will be of indigenous manufacture,
Yep, and while none of the above has any real desires to directly confront the Soviets, they are quite happy to watch the USSR's technological advantages evaporate and its economic problems mount. Gorbachev is having some success in countering this (as mentioned the first part of the 1980s chapter), but he's got a huge number of problems that he still needs to attend to, and the events at Chernobyl in 1986 and in Armenia in 1988 will not help matters.
Yep. Argentina has been one of Latin America's leading lights for the last few decades of the 19th Century and most of the 20th, and while Peron did come to power, Argentina managed to get him out and avoid the cycle of military dictatorships and weak civilian government that defined its politics from WWII until the summer of 1982 IOTL. Here, Argentina is rather more powerful military than OTL, but they know against a Navy with three full-sized carriers, an amphibious fleet (complete with battleships for fire support) and a large fleet of nuclear submarines and the Royal Air Force's long-range bomber fleet, they'd get wrecked and quickly.
Ming777
Monthly Donor
One thing that could be elaborated on is the nature of the UN in this Timeline.
Does it have a Security Council?
Are there permanent members in the security Council?
Does this UN have a bit more teeth in enforcing its mandates?
Where is the headquarters located? In New York? Navy Island?
Another thing to ponder is the progress of space exploration in this Timeline.
Does it have a Security Council?
Are there permanent members in the security Council?
Does this UN have a bit more teeth in enforcing its mandates?
Where is the headquarters located? In New York? Navy Island?
Another thing to ponder is the progress of space exploration in this Timeline.
These things have been bounced around a lot. We did agree on NASA completing the NERVA project and launching spacecraft with nuclear power and we did have the Apollo Project still send men to the Moon (and that Robert Goddard lives long enough to see it) we never fully hammered out the space program. As for the UN, I'm not sure about that one - it exists and surely has a Security Council, and almost certainly the OTL Five Permanent Members (US, USSR, UK, France and China) are a part of it, but beyond that I'm not sure yet.
July 13, 1985 - Live Aid
By the time the formal reunification of the extinct People’s Republic of China with the Chinese mainland took place, the tragic famine that had spread across Manchuria and threatened millions more lives there had already spurred into action the largest one-time charity event the world had yet seen, one that could hardly have been imagined even a few short years earlier. And it focused on music.
Bob Geldof, the lead singer of a middlingly-successful Irish New Wave group, the Boomtown Rats, in late 1984 was watching a BBC report on the spreading famine in Manchuria. Moved to tears, Geldof was distressed at the tragic loss of lives that had already occurred, plus the feared potential that the famine would grow much worse; without substantial aid, the famine might grow to become one of the worst in modern history. Geldof was moved to write a song about the catastrophe, “Do They Know It’s Christmas," questioning whether the suffering people of Manchuria would get to know the oncoming Christmas season through the generosity of the rest of the world, upon whose shoulders the responsibility for feeding the famine-stricken population rested – Christmas, Geldof’s song pointed out, wasn’t supposed to be just about having a good time; it was supposed to be about helping others. Geldof was realistic enough about his band’s own situation to realize that there was only a moderate chance the song would make the charts at all – meaning that, as a charity single, it would raise only limited funds. Something more needed to be done, he resolved.
Together with Midge Ure of Ultravox, Geldof hastily assembled a number of British pop stars. The group was less than comprehensive, consisting as it did of whoever Geldof and Ure could assemble in time for the recording session, but a number of big names, including Sting, George Michael of Wham!, Boy George of Culture Club, and Bono of U2 were present. Geldof’s reasoning was that the attraction of big names would entice more music fans to buy the record, which was critical since the point, after all, was to make money for aid to China. Geldof dubbed the group “Band Aid,” and under that name “Do They Know It’s Christmas” was released. The record was a Number One hit on the British New Musical Express pop chart and on the American and Canadian Billboard pop charts, while reaching number 8 on the Mexican chart – indicating that the impact of the record was already felt in the Amigos as well.
Events cascaded rapidly after that. American soul singer Lionel Richie was distressed that there was no equivalent effort on the part of American artists, so he co-wrote with Michael Jackson their own song, “We Are the World,” with a less accusatory and more urging tone than Geldof’s song. The two, along with producer Quincy Jones, assembled an all-star cast for a group to be dubbed “USA for China” that included current stars like Huey Lewis and Cyndi Lauper and superstars of long standing like Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. The video – soon in heavy rotation on MTV – was directed by Stephen Spielberg, who readily volunteered his own services, and it intercut footage of the performers in the studio with footage from Manchuria of the faces of children in the grip of the famine. “We Are the World” topped the US chart that April. By then, there was also an effort from Canada – “Great White North Aid,” assembled by Burton Cummings and featuring Canadian luminaries like his ex-bandmate Randy Bachman, Gordon Lightfoot, Geddy Lee, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, recording Cummings’ new song “The Time Is Now” – and from Mexico, “Lagrimas Por China [Tears for China],” with established stars like Julio Iglesias and Juan Gabriel joining newcomers like teen pop sensation Luis Miguel to sing “Las Lagrimas No Son Suficientes [Tears Are Not Enough].”
By April, Geldof, having now established the organization “Live Aid” to coordinate relief efforts, had begun the process of assembling those four tracks, as well as other tracks contributed by other famous names, into a charity album. But events were snowballing rapidly, as dozens more performers offered to help. Geldof’s vision by now encompassed the concept of a worldwide concert, to be carried by satellite. When the question arose as to the most appropriate venue for the concert, Geldof’s vision expanded even further, since more performers were offering their services than could be got on a single stage in one day. Perhaps, he thought, the concerts could be carried on in venues around the world, succeeding one another by satellite in a single, all-encompassing world broadcast – and phone lines would be open throughout the day’s shows to collect pledges.
Booking the venues and making the necessary arrangements for the worldwide broadcast required the help of many persons outside of the music industry. Geldof, Richie, and other organizers found themselves amazed at the willingness of industry insiders, even hard-nosed promoters like Bill Graham, to help. But what really surprised everyone was the way so many outside the industry offered their assistance. It was as if this event struck millions worldwide as an opportunity to show just how much their willingness to help others and to cooperate had matured. Television executives almost fell over each other to donate valuable air time for the broadcast. Thousands of persons offered to help with promoting the event. Religious organizations worldwide brought out thousands of volunteers to help in any way they could, from manning the phones to helping with food distribution (Live Aid from the start made a point of linking its efforts directly to getting food to China, rather than simply handling the entertainment side and letting the actual food distribution be handled by others). Pope John Paul II, current President Robert Kennedy and former President Ronald Reagan (appearing together), and the leaders of Canada and Mexico were among those who filmed advertisements urging viewers to make donations. The spirit of donation extended even to the likes of the corporate offices of Archer Daniels Midland and the Canada Wheat Board, who donated flour and barley free of charge; Burlington Northern, Santa Fe, Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific railroads, who offered to ship food supplies in special trains to seaports without charge (the latter also placing prominent displays in its many hotels describing the Live Aid effort and giving instructions how to help); and the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, who donated the services of staff accountants to act as the bean counters and auditors for the event to make sure the money was spent as intended. Most surprisingly of all, perhaps, the corporate sponsors didn’t even make a point of asking for any recognition – they simply offered to help. Geldof, though, made sure the corporate sponsors were credited appropriately.
By the weekend of July 13, 1985, when the concerts were ready to roll, the Live Aid event had crystallized into a series of worldwide concerts that would kick off in Melbourne, Australia. Tokyo would be up next, followed by outdoor shows in Jerusalem, Athens, Greece, and Berlin. The London show, at Wembley Stadium, would begin at noon London time and 8 am East Coast U.S. time. Then the Philadelphia show would kick off, followed by the Toronto show, to be held at the new Skydome, and the Mexico City show. The day’s events would be capped by a final show in Los Angeles.
Besides the theme of the Live Aid event, which was emphasized throughout, the weekend was one of unforgettable musical performances – arguably the greatest single weekend of live music in rock history.
After the introduction of the opening show at Melbourne at the Cricket Ground by Australia’s prime minister, Billy Joel gave one of his finest line performances ever, being joined onstage by the Four Seasons for his “Uptown Girl”; Australian heavy metal rockers AC/DC came next, leading off a widely diverse set of performances that included the Bee Gees, a few years past their disco prime but enormously well-received. The first show was closed by the Ramones and then Men at Work, who closed with their huge Australia-themed hit “Down Under” (with the chorus changed a bit to “we came from a land Down Under.”
The Tokyo show was introduced by the Emperor of Japan, Akihito, and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who spoke specifically of how the Japanese participants hoped their participation would illustrate Japan’s desire to aid China, in contrast to the imperialism of the long-gone war years. The highlight of the Tokyo show was homegrown heavy-metal act Loudness, along with British act Tears for Fears and superstar Paul Simon, who appeared for the first time with the South African musicians with whom he would soon record Graceland. It was considered important, also, that Chinese performers be booked to appear at Live Aid, and Hong Kong singer Priscilla Chan was among the first to appear, to be joined later by Formosan singer Teresa Teng in London and Hong Kong’s Anita Mui in Philadelphia. The Japanese show did much to expose Japanese pop music to Western ears for the first time.
The Jerusalem show, appropriately enough, focused on gospel and faith-music performers, featuring CeCe Winans, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Dixie Hummingbirds, Sallie Martin, the Reverend James Cleveland, Shirley Caesar, and Andrae Crouch. Aware that they were performing to a very-much interfaith audience, they chose songs that were inspirational without being too specific, and the Jerusalem show turned out to be a pleasant interlude.
The concerts in Athens and Berlin included many performers whom Geldof had initially not been able to find room for in the London or Philadelphia shows. The Athens show featured the Doors, who had retired in 1972 when Jim Morrison left the band to pursue a writing career but who reunited specifically for the concert; Pink Floyd, who likewise overcame the differences that had been plaguing the band, and who performed a chilling version of “One of These Days”; the Eurhythmics; and the great Van Morrison, who closed with a ten-minute rendition of “Wavelength.” The Berlin show, although it did feature the futuristic sounds of Kraftwerk, was a hard-rock extravaganza, ranging from Billy Idol early in the day to the “unholy trinity” that closed the show – Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and the Yardbirds.
The major show in London, opening with a royal salute to attendees Prince Charles and Princess Diana, included an iconic set from U2, whose version of “Bad” stretched to some fourteen minutes when Bono jumped offstage to rescue two girls who were being squeezed against the barrier at the front of the audience. Bob Geldof performed with his Boomtown Rats, and Midge Ure with Ultravox, both more than holding their own amid the famous names. Elvis Costello, asking the audience to join him on an “old Northern English folk song,” led an acoustic version of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” Sting played a duet with Phil Collins, who performed his recent hit “Against All Odds” – and then hopped on a supersonic flight across the Atlantic to perform again later that day in Philadelphia, this time with a band, singing “In the Air Tonight.” Queen performed perhaps the greatest set of their career, followed by iconic sets by David Bowie and then the Who, the latter starting out a bit lackluster but being energized by drummer Keith Moon to close their set with a brain-melting version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The London show was closed by – who else could have? – the Beatles, making their first live performance in five years.
The Philadelphia show featured a poignant moment when Dennis Wilson rejoined the Beach Boys onstage for the first time in three years, after having gone into intensive drug and alcohol rehab after nearly drowning while drunk in 1983. Dennis joined Mike Love for the lead vocal on the band’s current hit, the just-released “Getcha Back.” Another poignant moment came when Teddy Pendergrass, nearly killed in a car crash a few years before, came onstage in a wheelchair; with tears in his eyes as he heard the rapturous response of the crowd, he sang Diana Ross’ song “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” A less edifying moment came with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, when at the beginning of their set Petty apparently flipped off someone, causing Geldof, watching the feed in London, to explode in rage, for fear that skittish TV censors would drop the broadcast. (Fortunately, no one appeared to notice.) But stunning sets by, among others, the Pretenders and Madonna led to an acoustic set by Bob Dylan, joined by Bruce Springsteen, and then to the final performance – the King, Elvis Presley, taking a break from his acting career to return to live performance with maybe the best version of “Suspicious Minds” he ever sang.
The Toronto show, introduced by Prime Minister Edward Seaga, featured Canadian stars, most notably Neil Young, along with Bob Marley and the Wailers. As the new Skydome was opened for the first time, Marley – who had begun his set with a new song written especially for the occasion - cried out, “Open the Dome, and let the rain fall on our brothers and sisters in China!” Rush, despite some misgivings at first, were convinced that the concert was on the up-and-up, and ended up delivering a classic set. Along with Rush, the Canadian show was heavy on hard rock, with Van Halen, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and Steppenwolf all performing. The show was closed by Blind Faith, the group Brian Jones had formed with Rod Stewart after leaving the Rolling Stones, and then the Stones themselves, with Brian joining his ex-bandmates onstage for the first time since 1968.
Some Hollywood stars had offered to introduce acts at the Philadelphia and Toronto shows, but Geldof wisely decided to forego Hollywood-like introductions in favor of letting a bevy of well-known comedians – also eager to help – introduce the acts, ranging from SNL and Third City TV alums like Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, John Candy, Rick Moranis and Chris Thomas (as the Mackenzie brothers), and Catherine O’Hara, to up-and-comers like Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Paul Reubens in character as Pee-Wee Herman (responding to a heckler – a rare thing that weekend – with “Real mature.”
Lionel Richie chose to perform at the Mexico City show at the Estadia Azteca, along with Prince, who also was persuaded to perform after initial skepticism. Bonnie Raitt was among the other “Anglo” performers at Mexico City, but the real highlights of the show were the Latin performers, including Julio Iglesias, Santana, Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, and Radio Futura.
The final show, in Los Angeles, was led off by the Supremes, with Diana Ross reuniting with Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong for the first time in 15 years. A slew of hip-hop acts, pointing the next route for popular music, appeared, including Run-DMC, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Eric B. and Rakim, and A Tribe Called Quest. Other great moments came from Huey Lewis and the News. The final performers of the amazing weekend were the Jacksons, with Jermaine rejoining his brothers onstage for the first time since 1976. Michael Jackson, solo, sang a breathtaking version of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” in what was felt to be a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation of performers. (Paul McCartney said later, “We knew immediately we had to work with Michael on the next album – we couldn’t have done anything else.”)
But perhaps the greatest moment of all came just before the end of the Jacksons’ set, when Bob Geldof – having, like Phil Collins, made a lengthy flight for just this purpose – appeared onstage to tell the audience that the funds raised would be sufficient, along with all the other aid received, to stop the famine in its tracks.
“You felt different – permanently – after that show,” Dan Akyroyd later told a reporter, echoing a sentiment that was expressed millions of times over. Live Aid felt like it was more than just a charity show, even with the success of the charity. It felt like it was symbolic of the way the world had changed so much even in the last ten or twenty years, about how people were working hard, even with the material wealth piled up around them, to put the Golden Rule into practice and make it real. For many in the world, it felt like a watershed.
By the time the formal reunification of the extinct People’s Republic of China with the Chinese mainland took place, the tragic famine that had spread across Manchuria and threatened millions more lives there had already spurred into action the largest one-time charity event the world had yet seen, one that could hardly have been imagined even a few short years earlier. And it focused on music.
Bob Geldof, the lead singer of a middlingly-successful Irish New Wave group, the Boomtown Rats, in late 1984 was watching a BBC report on the spreading famine in Manchuria. Moved to tears, Geldof was distressed at the tragic loss of lives that had already occurred, plus the feared potential that the famine would grow much worse; without substantial aid, the famine might grow to become one of the worst in modern history. Geldof was moved to write a song about the catastrophe, “Do They Know It’s Christmas," questioning whether the suffering people of Manchuria would get to know the oncoming Christmas season through the generosity of the rest of the world, upon whose shoulders the responsibility for feeding the famine-stricken population rested – Christmas, Geldof’s song pointed out, wasn’t supposed to be just about having a good time; it was supposed to be about helping others. Geldof was realistic enough about his band’s own situation to realize that there was only a moderate chance the song would make the charts at all – meaning that, as a charity single, it would raise only limited funds. Something more needed to be done, he resolved.
Together with Midge Ure of Ultravox, Geldof hastily assembled a number of British pop stars. The group was less than comprehensive, consisting as it did of whoever Geldof and Ure could assemble in time for the recording session, but a number of big names, including Sting, George Michael of Wham!, Boy George of Culture Club, and Bono of U2 were present. Geldof’s reasoning was that the attraction of big names would entice more music fans to buy the record, which was critical since the point, after all, was to make money for aid to China. Geldof dubbed the group “Band Aid,” and under that name “Do They Know It’s Christmas” was released. The record was a Number One hit on the British New Musical Express pop chart and on the American and Canadian Billboard pop charts, while reaching number 8 on the Mexican chart – indicating that the impact of the record was already felt in the Amigos as well.
Events cascaded rapidly after that. American soul singer Lionel Richie was distressed that there was no equivalent effort on the part of American artists, so he co-wrote with Michael Jackson their own song, “We Are the World,” with a less accusatory and more urging tone than Geldof’s song. The two, along with producer Quincy Jones, assembled an all-star cast for a group to be dubbed “USA for China” that included current stars like Huey Lewis and Cyndi Lauper and superstars of long standing like Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. The video – soon in heavy rotation on MTV – was directed by Stephen Spielberg, who readily volunteered his own services, and it intercut footage of the performers in the studio with footage from Manchuria of the faces of children in the grip of the famine. “We Are the World” topped the US chart that April. By then, there was also an effort from Canada – “Great White North Aid,” assembled by Burton Cummings and featuring Canadian luminaries like his ex-bandmate Randy Bachman, Gordon Lightfoot, Geddy Lee, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, recording Cummings’ new song “The Time Is Now” – and from Mexico, “Lagrimas Por China [Tears for China],” with established stars like Julio Iglesias and Juan Gabriel joining newcomers like teen pop sensation Luis Miguel to sing “Las Lagrimas No Son Suficientes [Tears Are Not Enough].”
By April, Geldof, having now established the organization “Live Aid” to coordinate relief efforts, had begun the process of assembling those four tracks, as well as other tracks contributed by other famous names, into a charity album. But events were snowballing rapidly, as dozens more performers offered to help. Geldof’s vision by now encompassed the concept of a worldwide concert, to be carried by satellite. When the question arose as to the most appropriate venue for the concert, Geldof’s vision expanded even further, since more performers were offering their services than could be got on a single stage in one day. Perhaps, he thought, the concerts could be carried on in venues around the world, succeeding one another by satellite in a single, all-encompassing world broadcast – and phone lines would be open throughout the day’s shows to collect pledges.
Booking the venues and making the necessary arrangements for the worldwide broadcast required the help of many persons outside of the music industry. Geldof, Richie, and other organizers found themselves amazed at the willingness of industry insiders, even hard-nosed promoters like Bill Graham, to help. But what really surprised everyone was the way so many outside the industry offered their assistance. It was as if this event struck millions worldwide as an opportunity to show just how much their willingness to help others and to cooperate had matured. Television executives almost fell over each other to donate valuable air time for the broadcast. Thousands of persons offered to help with promoting the event. Religious organizations worldwide brought out thousands of volunteers to help in any way they could, from manning the phones to helping with food distribution (Live Aid from the start made a point of linking its efforts directly to getting food to China, rather than simply handling the entertainment side and letting the actual food distribution be handled by others). Pope John Paul II, current President Robert Kennedy and former President Ronald Reagan (appearing together), and the leaders of Canada and Mexico were among those who filmed advertisements urging viewers to make donations. The spirit of donation extended even to the likes of the corporate offices of Archer Daniels Midland and the Canada Wheat Board, who donated flour and barley free of charge; Burlington Northern, Santa Fe, Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific railroads, who offered to ship food supplies in special trains to seaports without charge (the latter also placing prominent displays in its many hotels describing the Live Aid effort and giving instructions how to help); and the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, who donated the services of staff accountants to act as the bean counters and auditors for the event to make sure the money was spent as intended. Most surprisingly of all, perhaps, the corporate sponsors didn’t even make a point of asking for any recognition – they simply offered to help. Geldof, though, made sure the corporate sponsors were credited appropriately.
By the weekend of July 13, 1985, when the concerts were ready to roll, the Live Aid event had crystallized into a series of worldwide concerts that would kick off in Melbourne, Australia. Tokyo would be up next, followed by outdoor shows in Jerusalem, Athens, Greece, and Berlin. The London show, at Wembley Stadium, would begin at noon London time and 8 am East Coast U.S. time. Then the Philadelphia show would kick off, followed by the Toronto show, to be held at the new Skydome, and the Mexico City show. The day’s events would be capped by a final show in Los Angeles.
Besides the theme of the Live Aid event, which was emphasized throughout, the weekend was one of unforgettable musical performances – arguably the greatest single weekend of live music in rock history.
After the introduction of the opening show at Melbourne at the Cricket Ground by Australia’s prime minister, Billy Joel gave one of his finest line performances ever, being joined onstage by the Four Seasons for his “Uptown Girl”; Australian heavy metal rockers AC/DC came next, leading off a widely diverse set of performances that included the Bee Gees, a few years past their disco prime but enormously well-received. The first show was closed by the Ramones and then Men at Work, who closed with their huge Australia-themed hit “Down Under” (with the chorus changed a bit to “we came from a land Down Under.”
The Tokyo show was introduced by the Emperor of Japan, Akihito, and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who spoke specifically of how the Japanese participants hoped their participation would illustrate Japan’s desire to aid China, in contrast to the imperialism of the long-gone war years. The highlight of the Tokyo show was homegrown heavy-metal act Loudness, along with British act Tears for Fears and superstar Paul Simon, who appeared for the first time with the South African musicians with whom he would soon record Graceland. It was considered important, also, that Chinese performers be booked to appear at Live Aid, and Hong Kong singer Priscilla Chan was among the first to appear, to be joined later by Formosan singer Teresa Teng in London and Hong Kong’s Anita Mui in Philadelphia. The Japanese show did much to expose Japanese pop music to Western ears for the first time.
The Jerusalem show, appropriately enough, focused on gospel and faith-music performers, featuring CeCe Winans, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Dixie Hummingbirds, Sallie Martin, the Reverend James Cleveland, Shirley Caesar, and Andrae Crouch. Aware that they were performing to a very-much interfaith audience, they chose songs that were inspirational without being too specific, and the Jerusalem show turned out to be a pleasant interlude.
The concerts in Athens and Berlin included many performers whom Geldof had initially not been able to find room for in the London or Philadelphia shows. The Athens show featured the Doors, who had retired in 1972 when Jim Morrison left the band to pursue a writing career but who reunited specifically for the concert; Pink Floyd, who likewise overcame the differences that had been plaguing the band, and who performed a chilling version of “One of These Days”; the Eurhythmics; and the great Van Morrison, who closed with a ten-minute rendition of “Wavelength.” The Berlin show, although it did feature the futuristic sounds of Kraftwerk, was a hard-rock extravaganza, ranging from Billy Idol early in the day to the “unholy trinity” that closed the show – Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and the Yardbirds.
The major show in London, opening with a royal salute to attendees Prince Charles and Princess Diana, included an iconic set from U2, whose version of “Bad” stretched to some fourteen minutes when Bono jumped offstage to rescue two girls who were being squeezed against the barrier at the front of the audience. Bob Geldof performed with his Boomtown Rats, and Midge Ure with Ultravox, both more than holding their own amid the famous names. Elvis Costello, asking the audience to join him on an “old Northern English folk song,” led an acoustic version of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” Sting played a duet with Phil Collins, who performed his recent hit “Against All Odds” – and then hopped on a supersonic flight across the Atlantic to perform again later that day in Philadelphia, this time with a band, singing “In the Air Tonight.” Queen performed perhaps the greatest set of their career, followed by iconic sets by David Bowie and then the Who, the latter starting out a bit lackluster but being energized by drummer Keith Moon to close their set with a brain-melting version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The London show was closed by – who else could have? – the Beatles, making their first live performance in five years.
The Philadelphia show featured a poignant moment when Dennis Wilson rejoined the Beach Boys onstage for the first time in three years, after having gone into intensive drug and alcohol rehab after nearly drowning while drunk in 1983. Dennis joined Mike Love for the lead vocal on the band’s current hit, the just-released “Getcha Back.” Another poignant moment came when Teddy Pendergrass, nearly killed in a car crash a few years before, came onstage in a wheelchair; with tears in his eyes as he heard the rapturous response of the crowd, he sang Diana Ross’ song “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” A less edifying moment came with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, when at the beginning of their set Petty apparently flipped off someone, causing Geldof, watching the feed in London, to explode in rage, for fear that skittish TV censors would drop the broadcast. (Fortunately, no one appeared to notice.) But stunning sets by, among others, the Pretenders and Madonna led to an acoustic set by Bob Dylan, joined by Bruce Springsteen, and then to the final performance – the King, Elvis Presley, taking a break from his acting career to return to live performance with maybe the best version of “Suspicious Minds” he ever sang.
The Toronto show, introduced by Prime Minister Edward Seaga, featured Canadian stars, most notably Neil Young, along with Bob Marley and the Wailers. As the new Skydome was opened for the first time, Marley – who had begun his set with a new song written especially for the occasion - cried out, “Open the Dome, and let the rain fall on our brothers and sisters in China!” Rush, despite some misgivings at first, were convinced that the concert was on the up-and-up, and ended up delivering a classic set. Along with Rush, the Canadian show was heavy on hard rock, with Van Halen, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and Steppenwolf all performing. The show was closed by Blind Faith, the group Brian Jones had formed with Rod Stewart after leaving the Rolling Stones, and then the Stones themselves, with Brian joining his ex-bandmates onstage for the first time since 1968.
Some Hollywood stars had offered to introduce acts at the Philadelphia and Toronto shows, but Geldof wisely decided to forego Hollywood-like introductions in favor of letting a bevy of well-known comedians – also eager to help – introduce the acts, ranging from SNL and Third City TV alums like Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, John Candy, Rick Moranis and Chris Thomas (as the Mackenzie brothers), and Catherine O’Hara, to up-and-comers like Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Paul Reubens in character as Pee-Wee Herman (responding to a heckler – a rare thing that weekend – with “Real mature.”
Lionel Richie chose to perform at the Mexico City show at the Estadia Azteca, along with Prince, who also was persuaded to perform after initial skepticism. Bonnie Raitt was among the other “Anglo” performers at Mexico City, but the real highlights of the show were the Latin performers, including Julio Iglesias, Santana, Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, and Radio Futura.
The final show, in Los Angeles, was led off by the Supremes, with Diana Ross reuniting with Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong for the first time in 15 years. A slew of hip-hop acts, pointing the next route for popular music, appeared, including Run-DMC, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Eric B. and Rakim, and A Tribe Called Quest. Other great moments came from Huey Lewis and the News. The final performers of the amazing weekend were the Jacksons, with Jermaine rejoining his brothers onstage for the first time since 1976. Michael Jackson, solo, sang a breathtaking version of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” in what was felt to be a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation of performers. (Paul McCartney said later, “We knew immediately we had to work with Michael on the next album – we couldn’t have done anything else.”)
But perhaps the greatest moment of all came just before the end of the Jacksons’ set, when Bob Geldof – having, like Phil Collins, made a lengthy flight for just this purpose – appeared onstage to tell the audience that the funds raised would be sufficient, along with all the other aid received, to stop the famine in its tracks.
“You felt different – permanently – after that show,” Dan Akyroyd later told a reporter, echoing a sentiment that was expressed millions of times over. Live Aid felt like it was more than just a charity show, even with the success of the charity. It felt like it was symbolic of the way the world had changed so much even in the last ten or twenty years, about how people were working hard, even with the material wealth piled up around them, to put the Golden Rule into practice and make it real. For many in the world, it felt like a watershed.
Time for a little side adventure of my own:
The Automobiles of the Amigos
"If you had anybody who had seen Detroit in 1957 what it would become over the fifty years that followed, they'd have laughed at you. If you'd told them what the Auto Industry of the Amigos would look like, they'd have thought you insane. If you told them how much that industry would rewrite the rules of cars for the world, they'd have been absolutely certain you were insane. But thr truth....the truth is sometimes more remarkable than the fiction."
Born from an unlikely existence as a provincial Midwest city thanks to the accident of history of being home to two of the great pioneers of the American auto industry, men like Henry Ford, William "Billy" Durant, Ransom E. Olds, David Dunbar Buick and John and Horace Dodge. But even with all of that, it wasn't until the world of the automobile truly came of age in the 1920s that America's powerful position in the world of the automobile globally came to be known. As the many companies spluttered and merged and battled over the times, a number of things became apparent - the giants of the industry would gain a legend for technical advancement and said technology would make American cars thr standard of the world, even as the competition heated up.
The Great Depression was the end of the road for most of the smaller firms, though it still provided opportunities for others. William Durant's second attempt at creating an auto manufacturer came apart with the Depression, but it's remains (along with bankrupt luxury car makers Pierce Arrow and Duesenberg) were bought out of bankruptcy by the Province of Ontario's natural resources fund, creating what would today be known as Westland-Reynard, leading to the Mexican government doing the same, creating the Automobile Corporation of Mexico, which subsequently acquired several names of famed brands, making cars under the Auburn, Stutz and Eagle nameplates. As the Depression eased, it was soon clear that there would indeed be enough demand for all of the big makers to survive. Many other smaller companies ended up dying during the Depression and weren't able to be saved - count Hupmobile, Graham-Paige, Franklin, Cord and Locomobile among these - but World War II made it possible for virtually everyone to survive, as the all-hands-on-deck effort to vanquish Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy resulted in overnight there being work for everyone making vehicles and supplies for the armed forces. This financial success saved a number of the companies transitioning in products - REO and White in particular - and also set everyone up for a huge explosion in sales when the war was over.
After the war, most of the surviving smaller automakers - Hudson, Nash, Studebaker, Packard, Apollo - were swept into the American Motors conglomerate, while the attempts to enter the business by the likes of Henry J. Kaiser, Joseph Frazer and Preston Tucker had moderate success (Kaiser-Frazer would merge with American Motors in 1964 while Tucker would stay in business to the present day), but the steady integration of all of the smaller automakers led to a spreading industry during the booming Fifties. American Motors would become the fourth of the Big Four automakers in the United States, while both Westland-Reynard and ACM (which kept its name after the Mexican government sold them into private sector ownership in 1953, but was known by its big three brands) became dominant players in their respective markets and successes in the American one. The cars of the 1950s from all involved rapidly evolved from tasteful earlier designs into garish, chrome-draped beasts that were huge in size, plush in amenities, often quite fast to accelerate and absolutely horrible when it came to fuel efficiency - but with the price of gasoline at the time being less than fifteen cents a gallon in most markets, the inefficiency wasn't seen as a particularly big problem....until the Suez Crisis and the following Energy Crisis.
The Energy Crisis brought a sledgehammer to the industry in the short term, but the successes of the two revolutionary smaller cars in the years after the Crisis (the Chevrolet Corvair and AMC Javelin) saw a new focus on the technical side of automotive and vehicle engineering, as well as diversification efforts. GM's huge success in railroad equipment inspired Chrysler to enter the business through the purchase of the American Locomotive Company in 1966, while American Motors began manufacturing farm machinery and merged Mack Trucks into its empire in 1974, Ford making its own heavy trucks before expanding into buses (as GM and American Motors were also already making) and mass transit vehicles being made by GM, Chrysler and AMC as well as many other companies.
But for the cars themselves, the oil shock and the sudden rise in fuel prices led to a need for much more efficient cars, even as suddenly transit-oriented development was all the rage in the Amigos. Responding quickly, all of the makers made a series of small cars, but the Corvair being such a move far beyond its competition led to a paradigm shift as the GM (and AMC, whose Ramblers were well known for their efficiency) cars led to similar machines from the other automakers, with ACM and Westland-Reynard already working on rivals to the Corvair even before the introduction of the pony cars. Cars made in the Amigos almost overnight abandoned the fins and chrome that defined the 1950s in favor of much more restrained designs, but many designs from all the companies nevertheless became famous for their lines and styles, from the exuberant (like the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, which is widely considered one of the best-looking cars ever made) to the more handsome and understated. The "pony cars" of the 1960s - the AMC Javelin, Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Firebird, Dodge Challenger, Plymouth Barracuda, Stutz Bearcat and Westland Chaser - were all well-known for their being reasonable-sized cars (by North American standards - they were big cars by the standards of Europe and Asia) that handled as well as they went and were able to be purchased for reasonable prices, and as a result ended up selling in vast numbers - the Mustang sold nearly a million units in its first two years on its own - and became the cars for much of the Baby Boomer generation.
While this happened, many of those who had gone to Europe in the war had brought home memories of European sports cars, and these memories led to many of the brands of the cars - MG, Triumph, Lotus, Austin-Healey, Alfa Romeo, Jaguar - seeings sales births in North America in the 1940s and 1950s, and while the original Chevrolet Corvette and Ford Thunderbird were meant as rivals, the Corvette quickly moved up the sports car pecking order and the Thunderbird became a big four-seat coupe that would in the 1960s evolve into a genuine grand touring car, leaving it to the Westland Origin and the Stutz Spectre to be the Amigos' entrants into the world of the two-seat sports car. At the same time, the Amigos luxury brands followed their more prosaic cousins into the more subtle and handsome designs, with the 1967 Cadillac Eldorado and 1969 Packard Clipper being among the most handsome cars of their generation. Having established themselves with the Tucker 48 in 1949, Preston Tucker's firm became notably successful both from their own products but also, after 1957, by being the authorized dealer network for Mercedes-Benz, helping to get the German firm established in North America, while other german marques - Volkswagen, BMW, Porsche, Auto Union - also got off the ground following agreements in the post-war era. BMW ended up with half its shares owned by the powerful Neikan family of Canada's Haudenosaunee, resulting in a large number of BMWs, including a large number of the famously-beautiful BMW 507 sports car, being sold in Canada and the northern United States in the 1950s and 1960s. (The Neikan and Quandt families control BMW to this day). The Volkswagen Beetle and Volkswagen Bus became 1960s counterculture icons, and while the British, French and Italians would later struggle to maintain a place in Amigos' car markets, the Germans never struggled with this again and their successes became the template the Japanese, whose automakers sold their first cars in North America in 1957, would later follow.
From the prosaic to the exotic, by the mid-1960s, the Amigos' car world was among the best, helped by the prosperity of the times. The Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers alike had a desire for good new cars, and their choices were remarkable. As the expansion of transit and changing lifestyles of the younger generations led to a very different way of living for many of them, the new choices of cars of the 1960s became a sign of the prosperity of the Amigos. While sales of traditional sedans did slow, the muscle cars and pony cars were extremely popular, and all kinds of new choices and designs came. From car-based pickup trucks to off-road vehicles, sporty small cars to luxury sedans in smaller sizes, the options were endless. Making things even better for the Amigos automakers was the massive technical advancement of the era, as well as the Auto Pact of 1962 between the three nations, which basically made the three countries into one market and led to a major growth in the industry in Canada and Mexico.
Having scored with the Corvair, General Motors - which for the most part set the trends the rest of the industry followed - was quick to embrace technical innovations, though Chrysler and AMC landed early shots of their own. Chrysler's new Slant-Six engine was ultimately (after some teeth-gnashing by the company's accountants that ultimately were in the end ignored) built almost entirely from aluminum alloy (though with hardened-steel cylinder sleeves for durability) and an twin-overhead-cam head with desmodromic valve gear, while American Motors began using disc brakes with the 1962 Javelin and rapidly expanded their use across their lineup. GM pioneered the use of turbocharging with the Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire in 1961, while radial tires were first seen with the Javelin and the Corvette Sting Ray in 1963, their clear advantages over former cross-ply tires resulting in Goodyear, Firestone, BFGoodrich and General Tire all quickly developing rivals, even as European makers Michelin, Pirelli, Dunlop and Continental and Japanese makers Bridgestone and Yokohama began to make inroads in North America. Fuel injection, first seen in General Motors vehicles in 1956, swelled in use, and cars from Chevrolet, Dodge, Packard, Westland, Auburn and Stutz were by 1963 using engine-driven superchargers. Many of the newer muscle cars gained high-energy ignition systems and multiple-carburetors on specially-designed intake manifolds. Disc brakes were followed by the development of anti-lock braking systems (another GM first, this time in the all-new 1968 Corvette), and suspension designs improved dramatically - by the early 1970s, the solid rear axles and leaf springs of many previous Detroit cars had all but disappeared, and independent suspension was showing up even on pickup trucks.
The later 1960s brought major changes as lead was phased out of gasoline (in Canada, it became illegal to use leaded gas on the street in 1971, and the United States and Mexico followed the following year) and emissions-reductions systems conspired to have a dramatic effect on the power of cars. The automakers, however, were able to move beyond this by the use of more modern engine designs, and by the mid-1970s General Motors had developed a number of turbodiesel engine designs that would prove famous for their indestructibility, which forced Ford, Chrysler and Westland-Reynard to seek outside help for responses and resulted in a whole line of Mack-developed "Bulldog" engines in AMC cars by the late 1970s. Multilink and double-wishbone suspensions and rack and pinion steering were almost de rigeur for cars by the mid-1970s, and performance cars by this time almost always had remote-reservoir shock absorbers and adjustment systems that allowed the suspension firmness, steering assist, brake balance and shock absorber response to be adjusted from the driver's seat. Aluminum and fiberglass bodywork were common by the late 1960s, with dent-resistant plastic panels over top of spaceframe body structures first being seen at Westland-Reynard in the late 1970s and becoming immensely popular there as well as at General Motors and American Motors by the mid-1980s. General Motors' development of cylinder deactivation for Cadillac in 1981 was, once the bugs were worked out, used across much of the lineup of cars.
The Energy Crisis led to a massive groundswell in the use of alternative-fuel vehicles in the 1960s, with gasoline engines converted to run on alcohol (either ethanol, isobutanol or methanol, with the former being much more common) and diesel ones converted for the use of biodiesel. This worked further into the development of electric vehicles, with these first being seen in modern forms in the form of concept cars built by Ford and Auburn in the late 1960s, these concepts using the then-newly-developed Nickel Metal Hydride batteries and using multiple electric motors. While these primitive designs made headlines, it was until the early 1980s that the first practical electric cars began to be developed, though original plans focused on the use of batteries and electric motors for hybrid car applications, which became very common in larger vehicles by the late 1980s. General Motors' famous EV1 sports car, introduced in 1985, was the first of what would be many incoming electric cars for the world of the automobile, and the development of multiple new types of batteries in the 1980s and 1990s - from Japanese-developed lithium-ion batteries, Australian-developed UltraBattery technology (which combines ultracapacitor and conventional lead-acid battery technologies in one) to American-developed aluminum-ion batteries (which became a rival to lithium-ion batteries by the late 1990s) - made the prospect of fully-electric cars possible, and by the late 1990s this was indeed happening at a rapid pace.
The ever-improving transportation systems of the Amigos had by the 1980s made the automobile for many city dwellers an option or a toy, and it showed in the sorts of cars that proved popular. While the off-road vehicles of the 1970s ultimately spawned the modern sport utility vehicles in the 1980s, the Chrysler and AMC minivans introduced in 1984 rewrote the rules of family haulers, while regulatory changes in the 1980s concerning smaller-volume automakers led to a massive growth in smaller car companies in the Amigos in the 1980s, with famous DeLorean company (whose first car, the famed stainless steel-bodied, gullwing-doored DMC-12, was introduced to massive fanfare in 1980 and would sell better than 80,000 units between 1981 and 1989) was the vanguard of a long line of people who sought to make their own special cars, from exciting sports cars built by the likes of Panoz, former tuning companies moving into the production of their own vehicles in Saleen and Callaway, ultra-luxury sedans from Excalibur and exotic supercars from the likes of Vector and Cizeta. These makers made numerous splashes in the 1980s, and established places like Braselton, Georgia (Panoz), Lordstown, Ohio (DeLorean), Torrance, California (Vector) and Spencerport, New York (Excalibur) as places to be seen outside of the automakers based in Detroit (GM, Ford, Chrysler), Chicago (American Motors), Toronto (Westland-Reynard) and Mexico City (ACM).
The Automobiles of the Amigos
"If you had anybody who had seen Detroit in 1957 what it would become over the fifty years that followed, they'd have laughed at you. If you'd told them what the Auto Industry of the Amigos would look like, they'd have thought you insane. If you told them how much that industry would rewrite the rules of cars for the world, they'd have been absolutely certain you were insane. But thr truth....the truth is sometimes more remarkable than the fiction."
Born from an unlikely existence as a provincial Midwest city thanks to the accident of history of being home to two of the great pioneers of the American auto industry, men like Henry Ford, William "Billy" Durant, Ransom E. Olds, David Dunbar Buick and John and Horace Dodge. But even with all of that, it wasn't until the world of the automobile truly came of age in the 1920s that America's powerful position in the world of the automobile globally came to be known. As the many companies spluttered and merged and battled over the times, a number of things became apparent - the giants of the industry would gain a legend for technical advancement and said technology would make American cars thr standard of the world, even as the competition heated up.
The Great Depression was the end of the road for most of the smaller firms, though it still provided opportunities for others. William Durant's second attempt at creating an auto manufacturer came apart with the Depression, but it's remains (along with bankrupt luxury car makers Pierce Arrow and Duesenberg) were bought out of bankruptcy by the Province of Ontario's natural resources fund, creating what would today be known as Westland-Reynard, leading to the Mexican government doing the same, creating the Automobile Corporation of Mexico, which subsequently acquired several names of famed brands, making cars under the Auburn, Stutz and Eagle nameplates. As the Depression eased, it was soon clear that there would indeed be enough demand for all of the big makers to survive. Many other smaller companies ended up dying during the Depression and weren't able to be saved - count Hupmobile, Graham-Paige, Franklin, Cord and Locomobile among these - but World War II made it possible for virtually everyone to survive, as the all-hands-on-deck effort to vanquish Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy resulted in overnight there being work for everyone making vehicles and supplies for the armed forces. This financial success saved a number of the companies transitioning in products - REO and White in particular - and also set everyone up for a huge explosion in sales when the war was over.
After the war, most of the surviving smaller automakers - Hudson, Nash, Studebaker, Packard, Apollo - were swept into the American Motors conglomerate, while the attempts to enter the business by the likes of Henry J. Kaiser, Joseph Frazer and Preston Tucker had moderate success (Kaiser-Frazer would merge with American Motors in 1964 while Tucker would stay in business to the present day), but the steady integration of all of the smaller automakers led to a spreading industry during the booming Fifties. American Motors would become the fourth of the Big Four automakers in the United States, while both Westland-Reynard and ACM (which kept its name after the Mexican government sold them into private sector ownership in 1953, but was known by its big three brands) became dominant players in their respective markets and successes in the American one. The cars of the 1950s from all involved rapidly evolved from tasteful earlier designs into garish, chrome-draped beasts that were huge in size, plush in amenities, often quite fast to accelerate and absolutely horrible when it came to fuel efficiency - but with the price of gasoline at the time being less than fifteen cents a gallon in most markets, the inefficiency wasn't seen as a particularly big problem....until the Suez Crisis and the following Energy Crisis.
The Energy Crisis brought a sledgehammer to the industry in the short term, but the successes of the two revolutionary smaller cars in the years after the Crisis (the Chevrolet Corvair and AMC Javelin) saw a new focus on the technical side of automotive and vehicle engineering, as well as diversification efforts. GM's huge success in railroad equipment inspired Chrysler to enter the business through the purchase of the American Locomotive Company in 1966, while American Motors began manufacturing farm machinery and merged Mack Trucks into its empire in 1974, Ford making its own heavy trucks before expanding into buses (as GM and American Motors were also already making) and mass transit vehicles being made by GM, Chrysler and AMC as well as many other companies.
But for the cars themselves, the oil shock and the sudden rise in fuel prices led to a need for much more efficient cars, even as suddenly transit-oriented development was all the rage in the Amigos. Responding quickly, all of the makers made a series of small cars, but the Corvair being such a move far beyond its competition led to a paradigm shift as the GM (and AMC, whose Ramblers were well known for their efficiency) cars led to similar machines from the other automakers, with ACM and Westland-Reynard already working on rivals to the Corvair even before the introduction of the pony cars. Cars made in the Amigos almost overnight abandoned the fins and chrome that defined the 1950s in favor of much more restrained designs, but many designs from all the companies nevertheless became famous for their lines and styles, from the exuberant (like the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, which is widely considered one of the best-looking cars ever made) to the more handsome and understated. The "pony cars" of the 1960s - the AMC Javelin, Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Firebird, Dodge Challenger, Plymouth Barracuda, Stutz Bearcat and Westland Chaser - were all well-known for their being reasonable-sized cars (by North American standards - they were big cars by the standards of Europe and Asia) that handled as well as they went and were able to be purchased for reasonable prices, and as a result ended up selling in vast numbers - the Mustang sold nearly a million units in its first two years on its own - and became the cars for much of the Baby Boomer generation.
While this happened, many of those who had gone to Europe in the war had brought home memories of European sports cars, and these memories led to many of the brands of the cars - MG, Triumph, Lotus, Austin-Healey, Alfa Romeo, Jaguar - seeings sales births in North America in the 1940s and 1950s, and while the original Chevrolet Corvette and Ford Thunderbird were meant as rivals, the Corvette quickly moved up the sports car pecking order and the Thunderbird became a big four-seat coupe that would in the 1960s evolve into a genuine grand touring car, leaving it to the Westland Origin and the Stutz Spectre to be the Amigos' entrants into the world of the two-seat sports car. At the same time, the Amigos luxury brands followed their more prosaic cousins into the more subtle and handsome designs, with the 1967 Cadillac Eldorado and 1969 Packard Clipper being among the most handsome cars of their generation. Having established themselves with the Tucker 48 in 1949, Preston Tucker's firm became notably successful both from their own products but also, after 1957, by being the authorized dealer network for Mercedes-Benz, helping to get the German firm established in North America, while other german marques - Volkswagen, BMW, Porsche, Auto Union - also got off the ground following agreements in the post-war era. BMW ended up with half its shares owned by the powerful Neikan family of Canada's Haudenosaunee, resulting in a large number of BMWs, including a large number of the famously-beautiful BMW 507 sports car, being sold in Canada and the northern United States in the 1950s and 1960s. (The Neikan and Quandt families control BMW to this day). The Volkswagen Beetle and Volkswagen Bus became 1960s counterculture icons, and while the British, French and Italians would later struggle to maintain a place in Amigos' car markets, the Germans never struggled with this again and their successes became the template the Japanese, whose automakers sold their first cars in North America in 1957, would later follow.
From the prosaic to the exotic, by the mid-1960s, the Amigos' car world was among the best, helped by the prosperity of the times. The Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers alike had a desire for good new cars, and their choices were remarkable. As the expansion of transit and changing lifestyles of the younger generations led to a very different way of living for many of them, the new choices of cars of the 1960s became a sign of the prosperity of the Amigos. While sales of traditional sedans did slow, the muscle cars and pony cars were extremely popular, and all kinds of new choices and designs came. From car-based pickup trucks to off-road vehicles, sporty small cars to luxury sedans in smaller sizes, the options were endless. Making things even better for the Amigos automakers was the massive technical advancement of the era, as well as the Auto Pact of 1962 between the three nations, which basically made the three countries into one market and led to a major growth in the industry in Canada and Mexico.
Having scored with the Corvair, General Motors - which for the most part set the trends the rest of the industry followed - was quick to embrace technical innovations, though Chrysler and AMC landed early shots of their own. Chrysler's new Slant-Six engine was ultimately (after some teeth-gnashing by the company's accountants that ultimately were in the end ignored) built almost entirely from aluminum alloy (though with hardened-steel cylinder sleeves for durability) and an twin-overhead-cam head with desmodromic valve gear, while American Motors began using disc brakes with the 1962 Javelin and rapidly expanded their use across their lineup. GM pioneered the use of turbocharging with the Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire in 1961, while radial tires were first seen with the Javelin and the Corvette Sting Ray in 1963, their clear advantages over former cross-ply tires resulting in Goodyear, Firestone, BFGoodrich and General Tire all quickly developing rivals, even as European makers Michelin, Pirelli, Dunlop and Continental and Japanese makers Bridgestone and Yokohama began to make inroads in North America. Fuel injection, first seen in General Motors vehicles in 1956, swelled in use, and cars from Chevrolet, Dodge, Packard, Westland, Auburn and Stutz were by 1963 using engine-driven superchargers. Many of the newer muscle cars gained high-energy ignition systems and multiple-carburetors on specially-designed intake manifolds. Disc brakes were followed by the development of anti-lock braking systems (another GM first, this time in the all-new 1968 Corvette), and suspension designs improved dramatically - by the early 1970s, the solid rear axles and leaf springs of many previous Detroit cars had all but disappeared, and independent suspension was showing up even on pickup trucks.
The later 1960s brought major changes as lead was phased out of gasoline (in Canada, it became illegal to use leaded gas on the street in 1971, and the United States and Mexico followed the following year) and emissions-reductions systems conspired to have a dramatic effect on the power of cars. The automakers, however, were able to move beyond this by the use of more modern engine designs, and by the mid-1970s General Motors had developed a number of turbodiesel engine designs that would prove famous for their indestructibility, which forced Ford, Chrysler and Westland-Reynard to seek outside help for responses and resulted in a whole line of Mack-developed "Bulldog" engines in AMC cars by the late 1970s. Multilink and double-wishbone suspensions and rack and pinion steering were almost de rigeur for cars by the mid-1970s, and performance cars by this time almost always had remote-reservoir shock absorbers and adjustment systems that allowed the suspension firmness, steering assist, brake balance and shock absorber response to be adjusted from the driver's seat. Aluminum and fiberglass bodywork were common by the late 1960s, with dent-resistant plastic panels over top of spaceframe body structures first being seen at Westland-Reynard in the late 1970s and becoming immensely popular there as well as at General Motors and American Motors by the mid-1980s. General Motors' development of cylinder deactivation for Cadillac in 1981 was, once the bugs were worked out, used across much of the lineup of cars.
The Energy Crisis led to a massive groundswell in the use of alternative-fuel vehicles in the 1960s, with gasoline engines converted to run on alcohol (either ethanol, isobutanol or methanol, with the former being much more common) and diesel ones converted for the use of biodiesel. This worked further into the development of electric vehicles, with these first being seen in modern forms in the form of concept cars built by Ford and Auburn in the late 1960s, these concepts using the then-newly-developed Nickel Metal Hydride batteries and using multiple electric motors. While these primitive designs made headlines, it was until the early 1980s that the first practical electric cars began to be developed, though original plans focused on the use of batteries and electric motors for hybrid car applications, which became very common in larger vehicles by the late 1980s. General Motors' famous EV1 sports car, introduced in 1985, was the first of what would be many incoming electric cars for the world of the automobile, and the development of multiple new types of batteries in the 1980s and 1990s - from Japanese-developed lithium-ion batteries, Australian-developed UltraBattery technology (which combines ultracapacitor and conventional lead-acid battery technologies in one) to American-developed aluminum-ion batteries (which became a rival to lithium-ion batteries by the late 1990s) - made the prospect of fully-electric cars possible, and by the late 1990s this was indeed happening at a rapid pace.
The ever-improving transportation systems of the Amigos had by the 1980s made the automobile for many city dwellers an option or a toy, and it showed in the sorts of cars that proved popular. While the off-road vehicles of the 1970s ultimately spawned the modern sport utility vehicles in the 1980s, the Chrysler and AMC minivans introduced in 1984 rewrote the rules of family haulers, while regulatory changes in the 1980s concerning smaller-volume automakers led to a massive growth in smaller car companies in the Amigos in the 1980s, with famous DeLorean company (whose first car, the famed stainless steel-bodied, gullwing-doored DMC-12, was introduced to massive fanfare in 1980 and would sell better than 80,000 units between 1981 and 1989) was the vanguard of a long line of people who sought to make their own special cars, from exciting sports cars built by the likes of Panoz, former tuning companies moving into the production of their own vehicles in Saleen and Callaway, ultra-luxury sedans from Excalibur and exotic supercars from the likes of Vector and Cizeta. These makers made numerous splashes in the 1980s, and established places like Braselton, Georgia (Panoz), Lordstown, Ohio (DeLorean), Torrance, California (Vector) and Spencerport, New York (Excalibur) as places to be seen outside of the automakers based in Detroit (GM, Ford, Chrysler), Chicago (American Motors), Toronto (Westland-Reynard) and Mexico City (ACM).
Chapter 2 : Fighting for the skies of our Fatherland: The KLVNCH’s Air War
The Không lực Việt Nam Cộng hòa or Republic of Vietnam Air Force had humble beginnings, starting as an extension of the French colonial forces flying transport and liaison aircraft before the French withdrawal of 1954-1955 after their catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu. After Ngo Dinh Diem’s rise to power and the formal establishment of the Republic of Vietnam in October 1954, the fate of this small air force was almost sealed. President Ngo Dinh Diem was insistent on prioritizing bolstering the ARVN’s ground forces and the RVN’s civilian police to fight the nascent Viet-Cong insurgency rather than building up an Air Force.The South Vietnamese president was also quite hesitant after witnessing and hearing of the disappointing performance of the French Armée de l’Air during their operations against the Viet-Minh. The French’s air efforts had failed to quell the growing strength of Ho Chi Minh’s forces and, despite their bravery and skill, were unable to save the day at Dien Bien Phu, suffering terrible casualties in planes and crews due to well concealed AA emplacements.
However, General Nguyễn Văn Hinh, a South Vietnamese officer who had been initially considered as Chief of Staff for the French backed Bao Dai government, had other plans. General Hinh was a World War II veteran who had flown combat missions with the Free French Forces, ending the war as the commander of a B-26 squadron. During that period, he had befriended many Allied pilots and had stayed in touch with them after the war. Those friendships allowed him to travel across the Allied countries during the 1940 and 1950’s to learn about modern air power before returning to Vietnam right before the French defeat. General Hinh’s reputation led many members of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party to support him and petitioned for him to meet with President Diem in 1955.
Despite initial distrust and skepticism from the president, General Hinh was able to impress on him the importance of a modern air force and how it would help in fighting the nascent Viet-Cong guerrillas. At this point, the RVNAF had mostly inherited F8F Bearcats and H-19’s from the French but the general successfully that, if given proper training overseas in the US or its close allies such as Mexico or Canada (the general admitted in his memoirs that he prefered sending Vietnamese pilots to Mexico or the US due to their climates being similar to Vietnam, fearing that his men might have difficulty with Canada’s winters despite their familiarity with French), South Vietnamese pilots could put these to good use in aiding the ARVN’s immediate battles against the Viet-Cong in the short term but would need more modern equipment and facilities in the long run. After a series of discussions and meetings between President Diem, General Hinh and the general’s Vietnamese Nationalist Party backers, the general would become the first commander of the Republic of Vietnam’s Air Force.
President Diem would petition the Americans and their allies in 1957 for more modern aircraft, equipment and training. General Hinh’s efforts that same year proved the validity of using fixed wing and rotary aircraft in fighting against a guerrilla campaign. There were still many deficiencies in the early RVNAF however. Primitive communication systems, lack of skilled personnel, worn-out aircraft and training made coordination with the ARVN initially difficult during operations but there was a growing professionalism in both branches that made General Hinh’s efforts slowly more successful. Having witnessed American experiments with helicopters both in the Korean war and in tests in North America led by American General Hamilton Howze and his Canadian and Mexican colleagues, General Hinh and his staff created an early form of medevac for the RVNAF that would save countless lives both for civilians and military personnel as the Viet-Cong ramped up their campaign in the South at the Politburo’s orders during the late 1950’s.
The modernization of the South Vietnamese Air Force came about in 1958 when a series of crashes grounded the rapidly aging air fleet of F8F’s and H-19’s for a month. In addition, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, wanting to shore up the North Vietnamese allies to pressure the Republic of China on its southern borders, had secretly begun to train pilots for the new VPAF shortly after the French withdrawal with the first Mig-17’s arriving in North Vietnam in 1958. There were rumors that the CIA was looking into that the VPAF was to be equipped with IL-28 bombers capable of striking cities in the RVN and Southern China. Such rumors made their way to both the South Vietnamese and the Chinese governments who were enraged that such a threat loomed over their nations, causing both nations to urgently petition Western states for modern fighters for their nascent air forces. Their successful efforts led to South Vietnamese and Nationalist Chinese air force senior officers going on a tour to determine which planes would best suit their needs.
The South Vietnamese commanders determined that due to the fairly small size of their territory and climate, the nimble A-4 Skyhawk would be ideal for ground support missions while the F-4 Phantom II would be an excellent interceptor for stopping the North’s theoretical bombing campaign.
Thus in 1959, the first KLVNCH pilots and ground crews were sent overseas to train on their new jet aircraft while the last propeller driven fighters were flying their last missions against the communists. The new jet fighters and crews returned to South Vietnam in the mid-1960's where they would carve their famous reputations of daring, fearless romantics that endures to this day in Vietnamese popular culture.
Author’s notes:
Bit of a short chapter this time but an important one in my opinion due to how much the timeline changed. General Hinh, in our timeline, was supposed to be the Chief of Staff of a French puppet state in Vietnam as mentioned but here, due to the fact that President Diem has more of an open mind due to having more varied advisors, retained the General’s services and expertise. The real one ended up serving in the French air force after leaving Vietnam, ending his career in 1975 and living a quiet life until his death in 2004.
I also tweaked his career a bit to reflect how the Allied powers are more inclusive to justify why he’d have contacts in the Allied countries that could help him set up the KLVNCH as a modern force.
Ngo Dinh Diem did express reticences towards forming an air force early on due to exactly the factors I’ve mentioned.
The real VNAF was a ground support only air force for a good period of the war, operating second hand French F8F Bearcats until 1960 after which a series of accidents due to their age caused Diem to ground all F8F’s and demand new aircraft. In our timeline, they received multiple variants of the A-1 Skyraiders and A-37 Dragonflies. The first true jet fighters only arrived in 1967 and were early variants of the Northrop F-5 Tigers with more planes arriving later in the war. F-4 Phantoms had been demanded but due to the lack of North Vietnamese air attacks, the F-5 Tiger was deemed sufficient. Sadly, according to the research done by George J Veith in Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam 1973-1975, the final batch of F-5’s were involved in a fiscal mess. Despite them being supposed to be a purchase by the US Air Force , the USAF backed out of paying it and handed the bill to Congress which then gave the bill to the South Vietnamese before paying them by redirecting the funds destined for spare parts, munitions and fuel to the South Vietnamese Air Force to fund them, more or less gutting the budget for spare parts in a time where the air force was running itself ragged trying to support the ground troops in the final year of the war.
As for the North Vietnamese IL-28’s, they actually were in service in the North Vietnamese Air Force during the war and attacked Laos in 1972. I did however move up the year when they started receiving MiG’s as they only started getting them in 1964 compared to 1958-59 here in order to pressure the Republic of China. Interestingly enough, one of my acquaintances in the Vietnam reenactment groups found a story about some North Vietnamese attempts at bombing the South during the Tet offensive using IL-14 transport planes, complete with declassified CIA documents and research confirming that it happened. The attempt was unsuccessful due to the bad weather, the planes' limitations, the North Vietnamese AA gunners not being notified and firing on said aircraft thinking they were enemy bombers. IIRC, 3 planes were lost, two at sea after an unsuccessful attempt at bombing the ARVN 1st Division HQ at Hue, thwarted by poor weather and flying out to sea to jettison their payloads. The third crashed into a mountain due to poor weather. They were considered such a non-threat that the CIA didn't bother warning the USAF/VNAF. IL-14's were also involved in dropping supplies and apparently paratroopers in the northern parts of South Vietnam which were somewhat more successful.
There was also an attempt at equipping the South Vietnamese with 4 B-57 Canberras but the whole program fell apart after significant difficulties in training the South Vietnamese crews on it who cited physical limitations that hampered their ability to fly them and a series of accidents, including a fatal crash that killed the South Vietnamese general in charge of flying it.
Yup. Took your suggestions. Otherwise, I'll be working on a new section soon featuring VNAF pilots.
Awesome. That's great work, man.
For the VNAF, do remember that an increasingly-competent air force will here have better and better access to equipment that is in active production. That was why I advocated for the Phantom and Skyhawk - they both have active production lines, so getting the aircrews and maintenance personnel trained up will take longer than delivery of the aircraft themselves. I'm also anticipating the Vietnamese having access to other stuff if they need or want it - Hueys and/or Sea Knights, Chinooks, Hercules, Skyraiders, perhaps even Cobras - as well as stuff from the Commonwealth.
With the Amigos, UK and Commonwealth in on the fighting in Vietnam, remember the VNAF will have access to AWACS, which is a big advantage for then if they can learn how to use it well, and I'm anticipating Vietnam being a trial by fire for a bunch of Western air force equipment outside of the US - the Avro Arrow, Handley-Page Victor, Avro Vulcan and Blackburn Buccaneer will all see their first combat service here as well as American equipment, and I'm anticipating there being much more of an air element to the defensive operations, as well as lots of search-and-destroy type ops for the troops along the line as well as the Vietnamese.
The next idea I'm working on is an VNAF retaliatory strike on the North's SCUD base where they'll be flying in with Mexican and Canadian support.