I got to thinking about the other Earth we see after rewatching 'Another Time, Another Place'.
In it Bergman says that Earth has been knocked off its axis by 5-6 degrees, Europe is in an ice age, North America is desert, and large swaths of radioactive ash.
I can understand the changes in climate due to the Earth's axis shifting, but what about the radioactive ash?
Then it occurred to me, what if the radioactive ash was fallout from the Moon's nuclear waste dump explosion.
The waste dump had to be facing Earth in order for the moon to be thrown out of orbit; if it had been any other direction, the moon would have been pushed into Earth.
Any radioactive debris would have fallen to Earth and contaminated both the atmosphere and surface, hence the radioactive ash Victor finds in his scans.