Dark Earth Timeline

December
- The Indianapolis UFO incident is the largest yet and can’t be covered up effectively
- The Benelux states move ever closer together, being the only European states that don’t have multiple issues holding them back from economic integration
- A cure for diabetes is another advanced bit of medical progress, reflecting the role of magic and the butterflies from a bit more ancient knowledge surviving (Alexandria, Constantinople and Baghdad’s House of Wisdom)
- Schooner results in some trouble. The carnival train is a bit of a thematic reference to the HBO series Carnivale, among other works, whilst the New Vegas Courier Company refers to Fallout New Vegas, where the player takes the role of a courier. One of the best games ever made in my view
- The advanced children is a reference to The Tomorrow People and Chocky, in addition to other shows of that vintage
- Kennedy’s cabinet includes some very big names. His brother has gone to the Senate to prepare for a 1972 run. On the other side of politics, Rockefeller has shot his bolt and the nomination is Governor Ronald Reagan’s to lose
- Filming begins on what will become Sailor. It will be somewhat different, involving a combat cruise on a younger carrier in the full prime of her service life and something more of her escorts, including the guided missile battleship Hood. In addition to the captain, officers young and old, fleet master at arms, chaplain, doctor, it’s television entertainment (including a cleaned up Wilf) and the matelots, there will also be a bit more on the nuclear engineers working on her reactors (with a fair bit of censorship), the large and capable carrier air wing and the various defences of a ship going into harm’s way. Ark Royal will be crossing the equator, providing emergency aid after an earthquake and tidal wave, going through the Suez Canal, calling in at various Middle Eastern and Indian ports then making her arrival at Singers before operations off Vietnam
- Soviet Military Power appears early and in substantial detail; this sends a message East
- Big Concord orders are a shot in the arm for the British aerospace industry just when it looked like the Americans were beginning to roll over them. There are some more twists and turns to come, some courtesy of Barnes Wallis
- Mary Bell is sentenced to death due to the absence of any other option, putting the cat among the pigeons at the Home Office. The recommendation for mercy is very likely to succeed, given her age, but in that event, she won’t be getting out in 11 years or even double that; the idea of life imprisonment hasn’t really come up much in British sentencing. The very act of getting the ultimate sentence really succeeds in getting a reaction from the girl, but also the press. More than a few voices start asking whether this was really the best course of action and what can be done to at least expand sentencing options. Prior to her case, no one had really given thought to what might happen if a child came up on a capital charge, as it just seemed so darned unlikely. Once she and her accomplice were bought to trial, there was some realisation that some laws had not been repealed from back in the 1700s, but the comparative swiftness of the trial got inside the “reaction loop” of Parliament. I guess this is a bit of a convoluted way of showing how some aspects of Dark Earth are behind their own times, coloured somewhat by my legal interest in the interplay of obsolete laws and modern cases. Therefore, she won’t be famous for getting out anytime soon, but for the legal question raised; shades of the West Lothian question in some ways
- Foyle and Burnside make for an interesting if very unlikely team. The former ascends to the top job in the 1950s and has a reputation as one of the top cops in Europe, if not the world
- Richard Nixon as Chief Justice of the United States. It works both in universe due to the political machinations involved and out of universe due to the sheer difference involved
- Healey’s announcement is likely to be a correct one. This has the potential to change many of the well established ideas and indeed tropes of British economic performance by freeing up the extra funds for investment, tax cuts and more defence spending; there are also calls from the party’s Left for social spending to be boosted. This then becomes the defining internal conflict of Barton’s second term
- The US POW rescue operation is a success on Christmas Eve, timed to perfection for propaganda purposes. John Rambo is involved, along with a range of similar characters from action flicks: Captain James Braddock (Chuck Norris from Missing in Action), his cousin Lieutenant Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris in The Delta Force) and Sergeant Michael Ransom (Reb Brown from Strike Commando). Meanwhile, Marshal Stepin Berkoff is based on Steven Berkoff’s character in First Blood Part II
- The new RAF ICBM project aims to develop the fastest missile possible given its operational requirements
- The Japanese then throw the cat amongst the pigeons on the last day of the year, as has become traditional

Smaller than the big boys (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Greece) but punches so much above their weight that they stand as the best of the rest by a long way and are right on the cusp of being a genuine Power that is great in their own right. They are mostly out of the colonial ‘game’, but this hasn’t hamstrung them; some in Belgium and the Netherlands think wistfully on what might have been if they had kept the Congo and DEI/Indonesia, but the independence of both was a function of WW2.

That war taught many lessons, but for the Low Countries, the big one was that unity was the best defence.

1969

January
January 1: The USSR recalls its ambassador to Japan for consultations in the aftermath of the suspected nuclear test. Tokyo publicly denies that it has tested a nuclear weapon.
January 2: The News of the World is bought by British tycoon Sir Denzil Carey, beating off a bid by an Australian newspaper proprietor.
January 3: Confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Richard Nixon as the new Chief Justice of the United States in an extraordinary session of the Senate.
January 4: Moroccan liberation militias attempting to attack the Spanish exclave of Ifni are repulsed by artillery fire from the well prepared Spanish garrison, with the lightly armed forces having little protection against gas shells.
January 5: The Royal West Indian Air Force deploys its first fighter squadron into combat, operating Hawker-Siddeley Phantoms out of Thailand over South Vietnam and Malaya.
January 6: Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos is assassinated by a Communist gunman in Manila on live television, leading to a state of emergency and widespread international shock.
January 7: Lieutenant William 'One-Eye' Clinton is assigned to his previous unit of A Company, 4th Battalion, 222nd Infantry Regiment, 42nd Infantry Division as a staff officer, having lost his left eye in a Viet Cong mortar attack the previous October.
January 8: Four FBI Special Agents are shot and killed whilst trying to apprehend a dangerous bank robber in Maryland, the most ever lose in a single incident. It leads to a number of changes to FBI and general law enforcement armament in reaction to the tragedy, in addition to providing support to those calling for the formation of a specialist armed response team within the FBI.
January 9: PVO Strany missiles shoot down an unidentified flying object 400km north of Krasnoyarsk at 0328. KGB troops take the craft and its occupants into custody. An emergency meeting of the Politburo is called in the early hours of the morning.
January 10: The ailing Saturday Evening Post is purchased by a mysterious benefactor just as it looked on the verge of folding.
January 11: USAF B-47 and B-52 bombers begin preliminary bombardment operations against suspected Viet Cong base areas in Cambodia in the build up to the invasion.
January 12: Swiss food scientists in Geneva unveil a new highly advanced food bar that can provide a four course meal and the equivalent of 1200 calories in a single 150g bar.
January 13: Establishment of Samsung Electronics, the latest expansion of the Samsung chaebol in Korea.
January 14: 25 sailors are killed after an explosion on board the atomic supercarrier USS Enterprise near Hawaii starts a major fire.
January 15: Noted revolutionary Carlos Marighella narrowly escapes a shootout with Brazilian police in Rio de Janeiro.
January 16: Consolidated Railroad's Super Metroliner breaks the record for the Washington-New York City journey, covering the 362 miles between Union Station and Pennsylvania Station in 52 minutes.
January 17: A madman sets fire to a French schoolhouse, endangering the lives of 110 pupils who are miraculously rescued by a caped and striped-shirted superhero who also apprehends the villain before he can inflict further damage.
January 18: The Royal Syrian Army forms a sixth armoured division, bringing the collective Arab regular military forces to a total of 50 divisions.
January 19: US Space Force satellites report that operations have commenced at three large new integrated steelworks in Central China, the latest step in the burgeoning industrial progress taking place behind the Great Wall.
January 20: President John F. Kennedy is inaugurated for the third time in Washington D.C. His speech focuses on the progress made in foreign and domestic policy, calling for victory in Vietnam to be matched by victory for all at home.
January 21: A nuclear meltdown at the underground Lucens nuclear reactor in Switzerland is narrowly averted by swift action by gnomish engineers.
January 22: Home Secretary James Callaghan commutes Mary Bell’s sentence of death by hanging to imprisonment at Her Majesty’s Pleasure on the grounds of her tender years.
January 23: British Ministry of Forestry dendromancers report the eradication of the final known cases of Dutch Elm Disease in the British Isles; plans are formulated for foresters to expand their protective efforts to the Continent.
January 24: A U.S. Joint Intelligence Committee report states that the military industrial capacity of the German Democratic Republic continues to defy logic and previous predictions and that the only rational explanations for the 'Mystery of East Prussia' appeared to be that the Soviets were subsidising its military forces well beyond the levels of its other satellite states and that the Thalmann regime was maintaining an unsustainably high military posture.
January 25: Launch of a nuclear research mini-submarine in Groton, Connecticut; it is noted for its striking red paint, which contrasts with the bright yellow submarine operated by the Royal Navy for research purposes over the last two years.
January 26: Whilst on his Journey of Mastery through India, English wizard George Harrison, 25, is hailed as a hero after rescuing a village from a landslide through a combination of swift thinking and skilful magic.
January 27: Two Iraqi divisions move up to positions around Baghdad as part of maneuvers designed to test the Royal Iraqi Army's capacity in urban warfare, temporarily obstructing traffic between the capital and RAF Habbaniya.
January 28: An accident on a oil drilling rig six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, California leads to the largest oil spill in U.S. history, with the blowout leading to thousands of barrels of oil gushing out into the ocean.
January 29: Australian weather sorcerers begin large scale rainfall enchantments over Central and Western Australia to stimulate expansion of arable land and long term development of the centre of the continent.
January 30: The Committee of Imperial Defence approves the third stage in the Long Range Missile Defence of the United Kingdom plan, authorising the procurement of the third and fourth tranches of the Violet Friend anti-ballistic missile, full deployment of the Black Beauty medium range missile, development of twenty new Blue Sky short range defensive missile sites and four Skyguard energy weapon facilities. Further interception sites are to be built in the Low Countries and Scandinavia pending agreement with the relevant foreign powers.
January 31: World premiere of The Two Towers, the second picture in David Lean’s epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings in London. The 269 minute film is immediately hailed as a masterpiece, with the set piece Battle of Helm’s Deep attracting particular praise for its scope and spectacle.

There is a difference between a weapon and a device, albeit a semantic one.

It is. As of 1969, he is still very much confined to Australia, having not even been able to jump the Tasman.

Given that he has been on the Supreme Court for many years, was never VP in the 1950s and has had a very different career trajectory, yes. As a SC Justice, he never had to face the issue of any re-election at all.