I think it's best to believe that WWIII was a conventional war until some idiot decided to use nukes. This idiot happened to be the leader of the ECON. In retaliation and with much better targeting systems, the Allies launched a nuclear salvo that effectively destroyed the Middle East and much of Asia. A more comprehensive history needs to be established about this era on screen or in the books (even though they're not considered canon, it would at least be one explanation). I think a conventional war that was ended quickly with nuclear warheads makes the most sense. The West and its allies were the victors but it was a high price for them. The East was utterly crushed.
Seeing as Colonel Green wasn't an Asian but a Caucasian, it's more like the other way around.
Green was a genocidal madman, true, but he apparently had nothing to do with the ECON. His areas were ecoterrorism (IAMD) and extermination of radiation victims (Demons/Terra Prime). His allegiance, such as it was, was only to himself.
More like he'd be AGAINST the Econ, which is pretty much what I said.
And forget Enterprise.
Yes, we ARE discussing the Trek one, and we know from the Trek one it's not going to change. But then, you seem to like simply deleting and not answering the points that prove them.
I'm truly sorry for you if you feel you have proven "it's not going to change" for a television series that is all
about the premise that it is going to change.
I'm truly sorry if you don't grasp the concept of continued simple nuclear use until well into the 22nd century and even 23rd. It's little episode called Balance of Terror.
You seem to have gotten the entire process backwards. What is established as a Trek fact is that WWIII had the end results of 37 or 600 million dead, depending on whom you ask and how. That is something you have to accept. You cannot go and claim that "in fact" billions died, because that is simply untrue in the Trek universe. No matter how much "proof" you pile on to support the claim of billions, you are still dead wrong and do not even deserve any sort of point-by-point rebuttal.
Except that Star Trek tells us that many did indeed die, or Q's courtroom would never have happened.
Voyager: Standard, present-day like first manned Mars mission with NO artificial gravity in the 2030s.
Emphasis mine. Error yours. Ares IV was not the first manned mission to Mars by any Trek account.
As for the other points of "no gravity manipulation seen", they are simply pre-empted by the Trek fact that antigravity did exist and was available to the builders of the DY-100 series of spacecraft, which were considered outdated by the 21st century.
That would be YOUR error, not mine. Voyager states it was the first manned mission to Mars in a dedicated ship to get to Mars, whether you like it or not. And nobody who has artificial gravity is going to send a manned mission to Mars without using it. The astronaut we saw, was floating around in zero-g. Mars was uninhabited, not already colonized, whether you like it, or not. Voyager tells us Mars isn't colonized until the 2100s, whether you like it or not. So no, there is NO anti-gravity in the 2030s and a good chunk beyond. Nor are planets already being colonized. Whether you like it, or not.
How was the Apollo program visible in ST4? It wasn't. Doesn't mean it didn't exist in the Trek universe - indeed, other Trek pieces establish it as having happened, although possibly not exactly in the manner it happened in our universe. Bits of Trek establish interplanetary manned flight in the 1980s, while no bits establish it didn't happen back then.
The Apollo program not visible in ST4? Are you nuts? Have you seen the hospital Checkov was brought to? The ship he fell off of? The computer that Scotty drew up the plans for transparent aluminum on? More than half of all the technologies you saw, were that far ahead because of the Apollo program.
And that's just ffing indirect technologies.
Artificial gravity... boy! You have NO IDEA how utterly and totally the world will change having that, the hospitals for one thing, the ships. But most notably there would be no HELICOPTERS! No airplanes like you and I know anymore. All of that would be gone replaced with speedy, and cheap planes and flying craft based upon artificial gravity. Hell, there will probably be anti-gravity using flying "cars".
Not a single shred of it could be seen anywhere in ST4. It was simply our world, our time, and no exotic technologies around anywhere.
That is of course a workable hypothesis. Perhaps ENT changed things? Oh, wait...
Do remember, though, that DY-100 remains a feature of the VOY universe as well. Not only is the model seen as a cutesy set decoration piece, the not-first Mars flight described for the 2030s is said to have been followed by a rescue mission that took a week to get to Mars. That's DY-100 performance for you, and flat out impossible with the sort of real-universe technology that you rather absurdly seem to cling on to.

Your brilliant, I gotta give you that. Brilliantly thickheaded, but still, it's brilliant. In one breath you claim later than first manned mission to Mars, at a time when artificial gravity ships left and right zipping about, colonizing planets everywhere, actually happend, a mission with no artificial gravity, no anti-gravity, no impulse-like engines. Yep, NASA decided to make a mission in archaic pile of junk to an already colonized planet - although no such colonization was shown anywhere, when they could have sent a ship that easily could have avoided the gravity elipse that swallowed that mission whole. A ship where the Astronaut wouldn't be desperately, slowly, floating about in Zero-g. Yep, a heavily government funded ship is a slow, not using gravity, archaic pile of junk, while left and right private ships zip about using artificial gravity, waving at the foolish not gravity using, floating astronauts in their slow as snails ship.
Yep, uhuh, can so see that happen.
What's the point, really? You can't hang on forever. There will be no Cochrane born in the 2030s, no warp drive breakthrough in the 2060s, in our universe. There aren't any Vulcans for real. But all those things will happen in the Trek universe, which is different.
Oh, sure, just not as different as you seem to think.
Thank you, oh thank you, for finally telling what exactly in "EaF" makes you think billions died on Earth.
You are, of course, completely wrong. (In saying that your interpretation is the only correct one, as usual, of course. In saying that it is a possible one, you would have a point. But you'd still be wrong about the body count.) What we see in the court is never even hinted at being a global phenomenon. As you say, Q could have picked any kangaroo court from Earth's past; that he picked one from 2079 tells us exactly nothing, except that the writers of "EaF" dared be innovative.
As for Q's charges of savagery, he never claims that the 2079 court would have been the source of his charges. For all we know, he felt this court to be one of the more equitable and acceptable incarnations of humanity... What Q has on trial is the entire history of mankind, which certainly features far more barbaric acts and settings than the (relatively orderly) apocalyptic courtroom seen here.
Wrong again, and once again you delete where I proved the above already wrong.
Pure semantics, and dubious ones at that when the one speaking is making a sales pitch. We know the planets were opened to us in the 1980s already, but we also know there wasn't enough incentive to go there a second or a seventh time. The same with the Moon: people in the 2050s had been there, done that, gotten the t-shirt - but there was no New Berlin there yet.
Wrong again. We know the mission seen in Voyager is the first manned mission as the episode tells us. The planets were not visited in the 1980s, least of all using artificial gravity ships. We got artificial gravity ships, there's no missions to mars, there's hotels in space, hotels on the moon, etc. etc. The moment you got artificial gravity, going beyond the Earth becomes cheap. Cheap that exploitation becomes possible. Everyone with even a little bit of money can buy tickets to the moon, to Mars, and what not. And New Berlin would have formed right there.
You have to admit that the late establishing of the first Martian colony in 2103 cannot have been the result of technological problems as such, because surely it could have been done basically overnight already with the technology of the 2050s that allowed Cochrane to make his test flight. Moreover, if Cochrane's technology did represent a turning point, why the 40-year gap? As per Troi's sales pitch, Earth recovered before Mars was colonized, so colonization of space cannot have been a major deciding factor in the recovery process.
Which is the entire point, isn't it? Why the 40-year-old gap? Because Earth was still recovering and didn't have the population required to build off-planet colonies. The only missions to space to mine asteroids and such, would not be full fledged growing colonies but small numbers of people going back and forth with loads of oar. Given our numbers increasing, and with your technology golden-age Star Trek version those numbers would probably be even higher, 600 million dead would still leave more than our present day numbers. Getting off the planet as soon as possible would be a thing of necessity as it still would be overpopulated, yet they didn't and probably couldn't. So we're back to: the real number of people having died, is much greater than numbers given.
It wasn't until much later when the number of people on Earth reached sufficient numbers, a permanent proper base/colony existed on the moon, that colonization of other planets became viable.
I'm not making bullshit rationalizations, I'm making pointed observations.
Yes, I know. Like "Cochrane took a perfectly ordinary Titan II from the 2050s and modified it on his free time so that it outperforms a Saturn V". Not really an observation, but speculation, and baseless at that - but that's just semantics, and I decided to be lenient with semantics above already.
No, that would be you, you mentioned the Titan II, not I, I simply used your mentioning of it.
I also know you have a perfectly rational explanation for why Cochrane didn't become the richest man on post-apocalyptic Earth thanks to these fantastic skills, and didn't retire to his tropical island as planned.
No, actually, because you as I, apart from him moving to Alpha Centauri and then what happened in Metamorphosis know what happened to him. We don't whether he got rich or not, we don't know whether he retired to a tropical island before moving to Alpha Centauri or not. We don't know jack shit about Cochrane.
But once again, you're engaging in ass-backward deduction: you know the right answer, but you still start from the evidence, and when it gives you a different answer, you ditch the right one.

That's an amazingly good one. Maybe you should reread what your wrote there, friend, because you're pretty much saying that use the evidence properly.
Indeed, it rather proves you, who apparently does things differently, is the one who does things ass-backward, as your ideas have shown. Like a mission to Mars in 2030 with technology 50 to 60 years out of date.
Try doing it in a slightly modified way: accept the right answer as a bit of evidence in an iterative process. You will then observe whether the process is missing an occasional bit of evidence, an omission that biased your earlier attempts which provided the incorrect answer.
I must accept the "right answer" beforehand, and then iteratively make up all missing evidence, or delete all evidence contrary to the "right answer"
Yeah, that would be ass-backward.
That only proves my point even more. Timo mentioned the Titan II being used, not me. So his whole bit about the Titan II being much more than it could, is a pile of bullshit.
Darling, I was only trying to be kind to you. The missile we saw was a Titan II recast in a science fiction role. You wanted to argue that Titan II and its realistic ilk is what the future Trek folks will have. But the fact of the matter is that what they have is something they call Titan V (offscreen, that is), a missile that outperforms all of today's (or yesterday's) rockets by such an absurd margin that today's laws of physics must have been broken.
No, I didn't, not even a little bit. But then, that's the problem with people who can't read.
No matter how hard you fight, Trek as a setting is about a fictional future, not about a factual present or past.
No, I don't fight that, you do. You seem to be stuck on a version of Star Trek's history despite evidence in Star Trek to the contrary.
Trek as a message may be about today's woes, but the message is carried by technologies we can barely dream about.
??? Technologies we can barely dream about? Most of the technologies on Star Trek we're already starting to build, or research is done into them. Hell, at the moment there's multiple researches in a power source that makes matter/anti-matter annihilation look pathetic in comparison - it's called Zero Point Energy. (Yes, it actually exists, it isn't just a term Stargate SG-1 dreamt up.)
And these technologies often hold the promise of great destruction, as apparently witnessed in WWIII (like you say, the 2008 nuclear arsenal would have been unlikely to give a globally disastrous outcome, and would have had trouble kicking up a real nuclear winter, too). But Trek as a setting or as a message does not overrule Trek as a pseudohistory, in which we know that 37/600 million people died, a court approximately like Q's existed, Cochrane discovered warp, the Vulcans came, and Earth united. This is what did happen, and a thread discussing how it happened cannot start from the premise that it did not.
Except of course, that I never claimed any of those things didn't happen. In fact, you are the one who has pretty much said that Q's courtroom didn't really happen. Oh, in some tiny little country somewhere (completely disgarding the dialogue that was all about us in our entirety and globally, but eh), but not REALLY.
The numbers instead, I said were just a subset by some certain criteria and official number - and thus in some ways correct - just that there were even many more. Just like our official number of the people having died in WWII doesn't even come close to the real number that died during it.