Replace nuclear weapons with superheroes

I dig this. Minute Man and his son who took up his mantle, Titan, Trident, etc. I'd want to say nuclear reactors and space race rockets like the Soyuz and Saturn would also deserve recognition, if not as heroes than as hero organizations and professor X style non-superhero superheroes. Chernobyl would presumably be a Russian psychic asset that had a meltdown, as with three mile island.

This seems a bit overmuch, it would be more like having their powers locked down after decades of inaction, and forced into deep-cover civilian life disrupted by constant bureaucracy and oversight check-ups, and all but a select few heavy hitters being collared with power dampeners that they have to regularly return for upgrades. Essentially the life of the Incredibles if they were equivalent to nuclear deterrence, but with constant push to give them a harder time. Suitcase nukes and salted bombs would be the gritty new vigilantes and street level villains that terrify like the worst of the joker. Depleted nuclear material disposal sites, where its sealed miles underground, would be akin to asylums for supers that were messed up by power dampening or resistant to it.

Man of Steels proves this isn't true.

I think there's a comic book series about something like this. The Nazis make OP supersoldiers which keeps them in the war for longer and almost wins it for them, but then the allies steal their plans and make their own.

Uber is the name.

>Russian supers in Cuba under pretense of visiting Hemmingway
>Von Braun's old Astromen teams 1 and 2 that were minimally useful in the war
>Rosenbergs tried for feeding secret identities to the Russians
>they were planning to clear Orion for service, but decided he'd be too likely to ditch NATO for deep space

>powers locked down after decades of inaction, and forced into deep-cover civilian life
No verification.

Remember, the USSR demanded verification of B-52s being destroyed, so they were cut up with a guillotine and laid out in the desert in pieces to be checked from orbit.

Why not demand the same for supers?

Because Russia "lost track of" many of its supers, and the US won't do something like that even to the old retired farts if Russia can't and thus won't do the same.

>no verification
Sure, maybe decommission a particular "rogue" team like that, but constant bureaucratic book keeping and updates on whereabout means you actually have the super locked down. There's shit verification leaving a corpse in a desert for satellite pictures, you could have just laid out similar looking bodies from a morgue and falsified documents. You're just being morbid and fowl, don't be virt.

And of course, captured German scientists discussing the American's Ubermensh.

This. Who the fuck wouldn't at least consider this possibility with superpowers?

Fat man and little boy?

Bump

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Über_(comics)

For reference.

>But superheroes can just pound one another to dust without any of them getting to destroy civilian targets.
Says who? Different models of nuclear weapons have different yields meaning in a fight one would win. The end result would mean that we would actually have a situation not to dissimilar from the cold war situation in the 1950s-1970s.
>Some superheros are akin to nuclear bombers, they are the equivalent of lower yield nuclear weapons and are tasked with flying to a location and killing everything in sight
>Other heroes are akin to interceptors, they are the equivalent of high yield nuclear weapons and are tasked with chasing down and killing enemy superheroes before they can reach their target

WWIII Didn't happen because Germany wasn't trying to start a war

Played this in a Champions 'Golden Age' game. The big questions are frequency, strength and technology. In our game 'mutants' were common among mixed races. Most Americans counted. Paragons were from 'pure' races, generally with major upgrades and Tech. Techs were from industrialized nations and most closely resembled the Arms Race you cite. Each had a different build set with Techs being both the weakest and most common, operating in commando-like teams.

Paragons followed a storyline from 'the Elementals' comic and were not nice people for the most part. Russia installed control units that killed the wayward. The US shifted to a Suicide Squad pool of volunteers.

Mutants were initially caused by combined Axis terror missions that didn't work too well. The mutagen spread across the Americas and China (little effect there) at the start, but is spreading world wide. Again, genetically stable populations are less prone. Mutants are drafted, but it turns out few are worth training and many have to have strong wills and ornery attitudes to access powers. Less then 5% ever make it in the military, though a large number have working relationships. Unfortunately, the majority find mischief more appealing than helping.

NUKER MAN

I wonder what /co/ would make of this? It's very much up their alley, and they have drawfags who would probably illustrate most of the nuke superheroes.

>Castle Bravo
a superhero who's only power is indestructibility

>Sedan
Can move and control earth/soil/rock

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)

Are superheroes born or manufactured?

First, nukes are very good at keeping peace because just one nuke that made it through will ruin an entire city or so. A dozen will destroy an entire country, even if it ends up winning. Even if you sit it out in a vault, you are still fucked.

Superheroes, in their traditional understanding are no better as deterrent as regular soldiers. They will meet at the border, fight, than one side will make it to the capital and force the enemy to surrender or something like this. There won't be end to world wars.

Now finally, realistically, any world where superheroes (Powerful, autonomous beings) are prevalent is a world ruled by superheroes. The world will likely carved up between superheroes controlling territory, who hold absolute power (Simply because they can beat up everyone, and nobody can beat them) and any civilian institution will only rule with their consent.

>captain france, shield is not all white.
I spot an imposter

Are superheroes manufactured in a way that allows nations to work on specific powers? Some kind of echo-location would have done wonders for the americans in Vietnam, and the russians in Afghanistan. What are the chances there could have been USSR vs USA friendly match-ups, with non-lethal duelling televised for both sides, a bit like the space race?

I thought Captain France was Batroc the Leaper

>Batroc the Leaper
That sounds almost as retarded as Slipknot, the man who can climb everything.

French guy who jumps, knows Savate, and is generally a merc.

He also has a daughter.

Nah he is a gives-no-fuck super-villain

Superman is milked everyday to produce powerful offspring.

In Russia Rasputin is the director of a Powerful Psykers School

Wakandias rule the world

I'd say they started out as folk and pulp heroes coming out of World War One, with dudes like The Maxim of the Queen and Tommy Gunn, Zepplin's brigade, etc., that get pumped up or replaced massive government superpower research during the Second World War. The competition and relative success of each belligerents nuclear program would be dramatized in the clashes of those pulp heroes and early superheroes against each other, with Fatman and Little Boy being the first of the new age of supers to be deployed as city busters, and arguably the first capable of doing so, though Liberties Torch, a pulp-era antihero and pyromaniac, gives them a run for their money. The Germans ironically fielded no true supermen, but lots of pulp style aces, and fairly gimmicky and dubious Wundermen towards the end of the war. Claiming to have taken your powers from one of the Wundermen is still popular among b-list villains, and it's a good way to get hit with a death ray. The silver age would coincide with peak nuclear testing, and came down to throwing around your superheroes against an agreed on set of super villains (mistakes) to show their strength to the world, and doing great works for the same reason. The Cuban missile crisis was a bunch of supers being ordered onto warpath roles like describes, with interceptor and city buster teams both on standby, possibly due to subconscious conditioning standard to superheroes to prevent them taking over and make them actually willing to fight an apocalyptic war exactly as prescribed. The same conditioning would lead to some of the larger than life personas of the age, based in national ideals and propaganda. Detente is the easing of actual interpersonal tensions between the supers, as arbitrated by international law, and promises to stop making ideological firebrands that jump to atomic readiness after reading a morning paper, and possibly the gistly killings of a few rogue teams like that other guy suggests.

>when you only come at him with savate and a smile, you get to keep your working limbs
Batroc, on fighting cap

It's called 'The boys'.

>Captain France

Reminder that the French have a shout of being war-crazy warmongers who will fight until they're either victorious or dead.

So Captain France would call out Ultimate Cap for being insufficiently chauvinistic and warmongering.

I hate that comic for how much the author wank Nazis, if he had any modicum of sense the war would've ended long ago and moved on to the cold war

Does this mean superheroes on floppydisks

Define superhero?
Doees every nation that has nuclear weapons have some or is it like every nation has their own like some kind of.. national Stand or what? what's the deal?

>Ultimate Cap
Oh boy.

/pol/ & eugenics. Massive breeding programs

There's literally nothing wrong with eugenics

aside from the fact that there isn't a definition of who isn't worth breeding aside from "everybody we don't like"

There are traits that are and aren't beneficial to a modern society. For example, I can't think anyone would disagree that a society having a higher average IQ would be all-round more beneficial. Or what about using eugenics to make sure bone cancer is a thing that doesn't happen anymore, who would oppose that?

The big problem is that the term has been polluted by association with the G*rmans and their desire to turn the entire planet as savage as them.

So what were bioweapons and chemical weapons?

Japanese used bioweapon first on the Chinese.

>Or what about using eugenics to make sure bone cancer is a thing that doesn't happen anymore
user, you do know that bone cancer, or even cancer in general, is not hereditary? Everyone can have cancer, even if no other of their ancestors had it
And while IQ seems partly hereditary we also don't know what other effects it would have.
Just look at dog breeding. The purer the breed, the higher the chance of their bodies having enormous defects, like lessened intelligence, weak bones, bad circulatory or respiratory system, etc.

Also:
>G*rmans
seriously, nigger?
Americans were also big on eugenics

Kaiju or mecha

Well, cancer itself isn't hereditary per se but there are certain genetic traits that significantly increase the chances of getting cancer. Filtering those out of the gene pool would already go a long way in reducing its prevalence. Though perhaps cancer is a bad example and I should've used some other disease that's actually fully hereditary.

>Just look at dog breeding. The purer the breed, the higher the chance of their bodies having enormous defects
These dogs are bred for the most retarded traits though. Look at the genetic monstrosities that are pugs, they are bred for the sole purpose of being monstrosities. If you look at for example Border Collies, generally assumed to be the most intelligent dog, you'll also find that they're the dogs who are the least likely to have health issues. Because they aren't bred for retarded shit or pure aesthetics.

>Americans were also big on eugenics
Everyone was, the Germans just poisoned the well. Now merely bringing up the concept makes you a goose stepping nazi.

Seeing as chemical weapons were big in WW1 it would work to have them be various monsters and Frankenstein creations.

>Just look at dog breeding. The purer the breed, the higher the chance of their bodies having enormous defects, like lessened intelligence, weak bones, bad circulatory or respiratory system, etc.

Pugs didn't have their breathing issues until they started breeding those into the line during the early 20st century, user. The breed used to look a lot less like they had a cartoonish car accident way back. Same shit happened to other breeds, and the MEINE PURITY-stance of the whole breeder community is going to prevent those issues from being addressed on a genetic level.

>Americans were also big on eugenics

First into the fray as far as laws, interest groups and forced sterilization was concerned. Only thing that stopped them from going all the way's the fact that as a people they're visionless penny pinchers who want all of their shit for free.

Japs were bioweapon masters with 731, so would 731 be a kaiju experimenting facility?

Hell yes

>But superheroes can just pound one another to dust without any of them getting to destroy civilian targets
>What is collateral damage

That might be more useful than you think. Drop from a scyscraper onto an escaping vehicle and emerge unscathed.

Average IQ is 100 by definition fuck tard.

>Wakandias
?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakanda_(comics)

Thanks

I think the biggest problem with this idea is that superheroes are reusable while Nukes aren't, and a superhero could be instructed to avoid collateral damage way more easily.

I mean, to go with the initial example, assuming little boy and fat man are the first two superheroes, one gets air dropped to Hiroshima. They can easily just destroy all the actual war related stuff in the city and leave the civilians unscathed. Then, you can have them make their way back or get picked up and then you have 2 supers to drop on Nagasaki, but again only destroying all the war related stuff.

Japan still surrenders, because they still can't even touch these guys (might take a few more cities, but still, no collateral), but then what? There isnt the same threat of total annihilation.

Unit 731 was known to use rats in plague bombs, so maybe rat kaiju instead?

It is generally accepted that Israel has a bare handful of superheroes, likely developed with South African assistance. Geared for localized but immense destructive power, regional stability requires Israel to neither confirm nor deny their supers. In any event, the supers lead normal lives alongside an extensive array of aces and badass normals.

I think there's a Graphic Novel that has Kaiju as Atomic Bombs, with Little Boy and Fat Man as giant godzilla-esque reptiles.

I was imagining the destructive energies being caged and thrown around by superheroes are always listed in megatons. Fat Man and Little Boy mighty have had Einsteinian-esque space warping powers to give them their Silver age level super strength and super speed. Both could and did produce several relativistic impacts in their engagement, with all the deadly effects of such, and Castle Bravo is seemingly a killer flying brick. They might have avoided a radioactive firestorm that flashes the city away, but those same cities were still left as mostly irradiated rubble.

Fat Man and Little Boy were meant to demonstrate the full destructive potential of their powers, first seperately, then together on their third mission. Part of the threat was that America could just keep dropping more supermen into your cities, and continue instructing them as to targets for destruction until they drop, which requires an equivalent superman or men. Little Boy was to secure the city against the enemy and tear out the war infrastructure entirely, then wait for reinforcement by Fat Man, who would also take a city on arrival. Thin Man was to join them, and the whole thing was meant to read as the invasion force landing and the beach head being theses city killers. Japan caved too early for it to get that far, but they already had the equivalent of the memetic flash and hulk holding two of their cities.

>racemixing makes mutants more likely

Why? I honestly can't understand your reasoning here. It's not like there is such a thing as a genetically stable population of humans that never experiences variation or mutation.

How are you supposed to judge the drop, though? You think that the bank robbers are going to go down a certain street, how are you going to get there ahead of them, climb all those steps with your regular human legs (or take the elevator, real cool), work out the correct window, and try to time your jump (and aim correctly) from at least 5 stories up to smack right into them?

Shit-tier plan. If the goal is just to hit the vehicle with your body, get a fast motorcycle, drive close to them, and throw yourself at them. But of course, good luck as a dude with regular human reflexes successfully pulling off that chase scene.

Because it's standardized that way, mate. There is such a thing as a Flynn effect that makes a society overall more intelligent, and that should be encouraged. However, some countries like France have a *negative* Flynn effect. This means that between 2000 and 2010 France got *dumber*. Average IQ being standardized at zero does not change this.

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615000653

Read up on the probable causes for this, and you'll see that what France and many other Western countries are doing right now is straight up *dysgenics*. Even if you believe that eugenics is morally wrong, you also have to say that dysgenics is wrong.

My bad, it's behind a paywall. Here's the full thing.

That's like saying we gotta make gift-giving illegal because we surely are punishing robberies and surely some gifts must be absolutely unwelcome.

Look, the main issue with eugenics is that it isn't scientific, it's a class-based endeveaur in which the people with enough leisure time and cash to engage in the movement will make sure that everything's stacked in their descendant's favour, even if they're absolute mouthbreathing retards who only survive because everybody around them has grown to tolerate their behaviour over the span of decades. Arabs and their American allies may love their class-system, but everybody else thinks that it's a nuisance that needs to be pruned regularily unless it strangles the tree of nationhood. Ossified classes will absolutely equal their class' interests with the nation's interests after all.

Class stratification is an emergent feature of people bunching up into nations, yes, but so are air pollution and waste disposal issues. We regulate that shit for reasons.

What's more, IQ can be raised by means of education, improved nutrition and limiting environmental pollution, which will result in an overall smarter, healthier and more productive population. And really, you need every level of society to be at their best if you wanna get anywhere, even the maladjusted top generally depends on everybody else for the most basic services.

>That's like saying we gotta make gift-giving illegal because we surely are punishing robberies and surely some gifts must be absolutely unwelcome.
I don't even begin to understand how this analogy works.

>Look, the main issue with eugenics is that it isn't scientific, it's a class-based endeveaur in which the people with enough leisure time and cash to engage in
Not exactly, we can make it scientific by keeping our parameters as objective as possible. "Less health risks" and "increased intelligence" are such things, things which clearly benefit a society. Nobody, not even the biggest pinko, will tell you that a society benefits from becoming dumber and more diseased.

>What's more, IQ can be raised by means of education, improved nutrition and limiting environmental pollution
They can, but there's a widely reported on "g-factor" which is a genetic element of IQ. If you read the article I posted, you'd see that education and nutrition are mentioned as possible causes, but so are mass-migration from low IQ areas of the world as well as the dysgenic effects of the welfare state.
>B-But black people can be just as intelligent as white people under the correct circumstances!
You mean like in the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study? Where an IQ gap between the races was insignificantly narrowd but remained somewhere around one standard deviation?

As machines start to take over menial labor from man more and more, we're moving towards increasingly knowledge based economies. Encouraging dysgenic practices that lead to lower IQs in such a society is just as self-harming as cutting off the hands of all peasants in a medieval society.

interesting article.

oulu.fi/yliopisto/node/46820

>The investigation team unanimously finds that, in the light of the report received, Edward Dutton has obviously acted in the present case in violation of the research ethics guidelines and thus has been guilty of a research-related insult in the publication "A negative Flynn effect in Finland, 1997-2009".

>"What the fuck is this fairy speak?"
>Google translate
>It translates the sentence, but "Finland" is somehow turned into "Canada"
That said, that's a pretty good point. I'm going to assume his studies in Finland and France are comparable because there's no reason not to assume that. I didn't know this.

That said, that brings us back to a state of ignorance. Which is a shame, considering studies relating to this subject are so controversial most creditable scientists don't dare touch it.

and Ed Dutton seems to publish with Richard Lynn quite often, who to say has a mixed reputation would be quite charitable.

The sample size was also pretty small, it'd be really good to have a way bigger sample size. I'm not sure I buy dysgenics per se, seems like something with a shitload of potential factors, and there is some strong and consistent critique of authors like Lynn.

Only thing to do is keep reading I guess.

>the superheros are largely irrelevant
aahahhahahahaha. It gets even better once you do superior number ganks, to ensure long term superiority trough support numbers

>Not exactly, we can make it scientific by keeping our parameters as objective as possible.

Won't happen. We've seen how it works out already, we got no reason to think that third time'll be the charm.
Meanwhile we saw that increasing the population's wellfare and education works every time. Plus with "dumb jobs" allegedly dying out, we got absolutely no reason to not try and see where the ceiling for that methode is.

>You mean like in the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study? Where an IQ gap between the races was insignificantly narrowd but remained somewhere around one standard deviation?
Babbie will be retard if mommie has been exposed to heavy metals and other industrial waste, bro, which apparently happens to nonwhite communities rather frequently in the US. They most likely didn't account for that in their study. Never mind the general health of the mum.

>Nobody, not even the biggest pinko, will tell you that a society benefits from becoming dumber and more diseased.
Tell that to the Republicans, Bro. And to large parts of the Dems as well, while you're at it, because they don't really think it matters in the least.

>which apparently happens to nonwhite communities rather frequently in the US
Sauce?

/thread

>the superheros are largely irrelevant next to the 6 million man strength of the red army
For the sake of comparison, there are many Marvel/D.C. superheroes who make the characters of Dragonball Super look like chumps. Dragonball *Super*. In the original Dragonball, Goku as a kid singlehandedly destroyed the Red Ribbon Army, a military deemed superior to the military of the global monarchy.

The superheroes aren't irrelevant next to the Red Army, but vice versa.

Thse tremendous loses would be caused predominately by nukes by mid-50s point, aka the time Soviets were in any shape and condition to start the war, but Western Europe wasn't.
Plus conventional fighting. And US with UN forces already being right after the disastrous for Western morale Korean War.

So it's the classic "Europe falls, Brits maybe hold out, Americans and Soviets are too far away to do each other anything else than nuclear attacks".
Because when you face a choice between sending a bomber carrying 10 tonnes of conventional bombs and one carrying 3 nukes, the choice is pretty straighforward.

The Flynn water crisis is the most popular case, there's also the native american pipeline protest and a couple of articles that point out other cases of enviromental hazards being moved as close to nonwhite communities as possible.
Happens to poor white communities as well though. Really, just google it.

>irrelevant

Maybe if the superhumans were Spider-Man level but once you hit JLA level its the humans that become irrelevant.

At that point, they can breath in space, break the laws of thermodynamics, can change mass and impulse at will, ignore the square cube law and have access to unlimited energy they can losslessly convert into anything. They're also immortal.

At that point, the universe as it is becomes irrelevant to them.

>Megatons become the power levels of this universe

I can roll with that.

The interesting thing about this setting is that the nukes now have personalities and discrimination.

Unless Fat Man and Little Boy are psychos they're not going to cause near as much damage taking Japan as their real world counterparts. Just having them blast military targets while no selling everything the military can throw at them is going to cause Japan to surrender. Bonus points if the people think they're kami.

>Eugenics not scientific

You wat mate?

Its the same principal that allows us to breed different traits into different dogs and horses. Humans aren't any more special than other animals. Jews do this voluntarily to keep hereditary diseases from killing their kids.

I know you attach a lot of baggage to eugenics but no one wants to line up Forest Gump against the wall and machine gun him. Voluntary, peaceful eugenics is a possibility. Offer low IQ criminals some money to take a vasectomy. The benefits would pay for themselves.

>Minnesota Trans-Racial adoption study

I'm fully open to the possibility of racial differences in general IQ (and I'm pretty sure there are, not through "muh cold winters in the Northland" but because of cultural breeding practices). But the Minnesota study was largely a meme that produced weird results (like the Asian kid scoring lower than the Whites)

>The universe as it is becomes irrelevant to them

The last enemy the JLA fought in the Grant Morrison run was a living super weapon that POOLS CLOSED two generations of gods and was powered by crushed dreams and anti-sunlight

Human conflict at this level is akin to making sure the babies in the nursery don't hurt themselves.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

No, really, this. If you have somebody on Superman levels that is out to wreck your city, there's only so much your Supercomrade can do to prevent destruction. And what are you going to do if they start teaming up? Their Quicksilver just needs to grab Cyclops, carry him into a population center and let the eyebeams do their thing. Supers can do a lot of destruction with very little notice, at least above-streetlevel ones.

Issue being that they aren't planning to breed people for specific behaviours, gaits or body shapes here and that the former two are completely pointless as you can easily train people to rock this way and walk this way.

The sort of breeding we do on animals would only be useful in overall useless edge cases on humans, like athlets, where gunning for specific types of muscle fiber is useful. And even there you could probably just dope another ten dudes into performing on a similar level cheaper and faster.

You're acting like IQ isn't incredibly heritable. It's a trait like anything else, you can breed for it.

Hell we've been breeding behaviors and intelligence into animals for a long time. It's why a dog will follow you with its eyes while a wolf won't.

We're just animals made of genes user.

>You're acting like IQ isn't incredibly heritable. It's a trait like anything else, you can breed for it.
It's pretty easy to erase that. Just poison the baby and make sure that it isn't fed and socialized properly. Happens all the time IRL and works reliably.

>Hell we've been breeding behaviors and intelligence into animals for a long time. It's why a dog will follow you with its eyes while a wolf won't.
You're getting Neoteny mixed up with intelligence there, bra. We've been reducing aggression and stretching the period of social bonding and learning in dogs. Adult wolves are allegedly pretty damn good at independantly solving problems, but they suck at learning in a social setting and at not ripping up your couch and dry walls.

Let's try and get this thread back on track.

Joe-1: First Soviet Atomman who took his codename from Joseph Stalin. Also known as "First Lightning". At an energy output of 22 kt he was modestly powerful but heralded the start of the Soviet's Atomman program.

Joe-1 is a Red Army conscript, a simple commune farmer just trying to do what he's told is right. He's under no illusions that failure or betrayal means the swift execution of his farming village. But he has made it clear to his handlers that he can only be made to go so far in the service of his country. Generally he's a good Communist through and through having been told all his life about the glories of the Soviet Union. Think of him as Boxer from Animal Farm.

His sub-ability to control electricity was designed specifically to counter Fatman and Little Boy by giving him a way to attack them besides raw power output. He can snuff out the electricity inside people's minds as easy as turning off a lightbulb.

Trivia

Plan Totality was Eisenhower's plan to invade the Soviet Union with nukes. In the Atomman setting The Totality is the name of America's front line Atomman Fighters. The "Justice League"basically. The name is chosen to project total superiority.

It came as a shock to the Soviets that the Americans were able to detect Joe-1. They underestimated American nuclear detection technology. It's possible that America might have learned how to develop a new kind of superhuman- "sensitives" who can detect Atommen.

Early Soviet weapons were named RDS. Joe-1 was RDS-1 for instance. It was an arbitrary designation and wikipedia has listed several backronym explanations for it. In the Atomman setting RDS is the name of the Soviet counterpart to The Totality.

And to give some idea where the setting is heading...

Tsar: The king of the Atommen with an obscene, nearly cosmic energy output of 50 MT. After the dissolution of the USSR and the establishment of The Indivisible Empire of Siberia in 1960 plans were drawn up for the creation of a "super-superhuman". The IES was starting to feel itself come apart at the seems much like the previous Soviet Union. It was decided that the only way to keep the IES from balkanizing and the dreaded scenario of a Earth slowly transforming into a neo-feudal world ran by Atommen that a King had to be created.

There was no human involved in the transformation. No human could become an Atomman so powerful. Instead a massive underground supercomputer was bathed in Atomman radiation until it transcended its creators.

A joint offensive of Totality and RDS forces attempted to stop the activation of Tsar but were too late. The mighty king of IES was born, and fortunately for everyone involved had little interest in throwing his weight around. For all his power Tsar is very meek.

Tsar spends his time roaming the solar system. Unable to find anyone like himself on Earth he probes the stars. He is a quiet, melancholic being. He has never used his power to harm another person. He doesn't have to. The very threat of him taking action is enough to keep the IES together.

So the dates of the game setting are roughly 1949 (activation of Joe-1) to 1961 (activation of Tsar).

The issue is that we know enviromental factors are important and we have experience manipulating them to increase the population's IQ.
We also know that eugenic movements usually only end up applying to a minority that is barely breeding at replacement rates to begin with, so investing at the top is a waste of time, money and effort. In fact, investing into the top's going to push more folks away from the peak, which means that statistically speaking our overall population will be getting dumber with every dollar spent.

Environmental factors, like education and early childhood nutrition, are low-hanging fruit. Once they're controlled for, virtually all the variance is genetic.
For example, the number of people getting a top 10% on vocabulary tests is unchanged since the 1960s, despite the number of college graduates roughly tripling.

Environmental factors have capped out, and this is viewable in SES-corrected longitudinal studies. The better off different genes are in SES, the less environmental noise there is interfering with the genetics. Contrast e.g. black and white SAT scores or crime rates of equal SES.

Investing in IQ directly via in-vitro selection or directly manipulated SNPs seems to have diminishing results on the individual scale, capping slightly past 2-3 standard deviations, because at that point tradeoffs appear. But there's no cost for the first few.

Even so, such selection would still add 1 to 1-5 SD to the population in two generations. That would boost GDP (not to mention general cultural tone and technological complexity/stability) considerably.

>Try to get people to contribute to an interesting game setting idea here
and and >They just want to talk to me about IQ and genetics because I posted
and God FUCKING damn it.