Crowdsourcing the Timeline

[Shepherd]

Mark Skarr wrote:

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That’s been my boggle that I was sleeping on: How to make this war happen without the Earth being rendered uninhabitable.

We’re about to have a major world power that’s had 25+ years of unrestricted and unmonitored eugenics research become a primary belligerent in the most destructive war the planet has ever seen. Hence the “World War III” moniker.

Keeping the Earth habitable is easy. some ultra powerful super with ecologically based superpowers died undoing the damage. Also, the United States supposedly destroyed its nuclear arsenal in 1987 (GURPS IST pg. 99), so I doubt America would be willing to lob nukes at China, as that would prove they lied to the world.
Regarding China's 30-year plan to breed cosmically-powered supers (GURPS IST pg. 72), note that metahuman genes were only tentatively identified in 1985 (GURPS IST pg. 98) and the war starts 15 years later in 2000. Beyond that, info regarding the plan was revealed in 1989 (GURPS IST pg. 99). What we don't know was if the plan had been ongoing for 30 years, had just started and was projected to last for 30 years, or was made up completely by the defector (unlikely with the potential for telepathic interrogation, unless false memories were planted within the defector by Chinese agents who wished to intimidate the United States with a nonexistent 'ghost' program).
Even if the program had been ongoing for 30 years at that point (41 by the time of the war), without some sort of forced growth or temporal acceleration going on, you've only got 3 or 4 generations in the program at most, and most of them would have been in the program before genetic testing for metagenes became a reality. If they're pushing things hard using surrogates or iron wombs, just have unknown hormones passing through the metahuman mother's placental barrier prove to be a catalyst for proper power development, therefore resulting in iron womb/surrogate birth metas being less powerful than normal.
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"Anyone can be a winner if their definition of victory is flexible enough." - The DM of the Rings XXXV