Timeline 10/27/62

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn't end peacefully and the '"swinging sixties" didn't happen. On Saturday, October 27, 1962, American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of Timeline 10/27/62.

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn't end peacefully and the "swinging sixties" didn't happen. On Saturday October 27th, 1962 American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of Timeline 10/27/62.

It is December, 1963, and the tensions that have been simmering since the October war came to a boil in an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion so poisonous that nobody in England or Washington, DC, realize that in the background, there is a third, malignant force at work.

It is January 1964 in an alternative timeline in which the Swinging '60s never happened. A little over a year has passed since the Cuban Missile Crisis of late October 1962. Red Dawn, spawned as Josef Stalin's answer to America's atomic monopoly in the late 1940s, has fomented full-scale insurrection in Washington, DC, and almost sparked a war between the world's two remaining nuclear superpowers. But the real fury of Red Dawn - Krasnaya Zarya - is unspent, and time is running out. Now is a time for charismatic leaders to come forward....

It is February 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. The atomic mushroom clouds over the Mediterranean have dispersed, and now, as the world teeters on the brink of a new thermonuclear war, it is dawning on the "victors" that their "victory", far from being absolute, was tragically pyrrhic. In the uneasy half-peace, the United States stirs from its post-Cuban Missiles War slumber. But will it awaken soon enough to overcome its own divisions to confront the new and terrible forces unleashed by Red Dawn's first paroxysm of violence?

It is April 1964 in a world in which the ‘swinging 60s’ never happened. War is chaos; and chaos is war. The post-October War world is at a bloody crossroads; betrayal and confusion preoccupies and distracts the West to the disasters about to befall newly remade, desperately fragile alliances as long kept secrets surface. The impenetrable fog of war spreads across the Mediterranean. Even while Malta burns and the survivors of the savage naval battle off its coast fight for their lives in the wreckage-strewn iron grey waters....

It is April 1964 in a world in which the ‘swinging '60s’ never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are poised to pour down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates like wolves upon the fold. The Shah is dead, and Tehran has been destroyed by a nuclear strike; in Iraq, there has been a coup d’état, and civil war has broken out. Only a handful of British tanks and a few thousand widely scattered troops around the oilfields of the Middle East stand between the Red Army and mastery of the Persian Gulf.

It is April 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are pouring down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers like wolves upon the fold. In the United States, the overwhelming popular mood is one of "America first". The "victory" of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction, and grief more futile, than it does in the second week of April 1964. Only one thing is certain: The world is about to be turned upside down again.

A little over 20 months have passed since the cataclysm of October 1962. It is a minute before midnight in Philadelphia on July 4, 1964, in a world stumbling inexorably toward a second, even more catastrophic nuclear war. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom have stepped to the edge of the thermonuclear abyss; who will blink first? In All Along the Watchtower, the main series and the USA series of Timeline 10/27/72 merge into a single global narrative of the most desperate hours in human history.

It is January 1965 in a world in which the Cuban Missiles Crisis went horribly wrong and the "swinging sixties" never happened. In the United States, a new president has entered the White House; in Britain, the country will shortly be going to the polls for the first time since the October War. But with the return of "normal" politics, there is no return to the "normality" of the old, now-lost world order.