Night City Holocaust

The Night City Holocaust,Countdown to the Dark Future (#176,#261-5,#317,#327,#343) also known as the Arasaka Headquarters (AHQ) Bombing or AHQ Disaster, was a nuclear disaster in Night City that occurred on August 20, 2023.
==History==
===Prelude===
During the Fourth Corporate War, by August of 2023, Night City was under full control of the Arasaka Corporation, acting as their last bastion in North America. CEO Kei Arasaka was commanding his forces from the Arasaka Towers, trying to negotiate some sort of settlement with Militech and the United States government. In the meantime, Night City was being surrounded by forces from Northern California sent by Governor Denise De La Vega. US President Elizabeth Kress — former Militech CEO — had convinced the governor to let her send an additional division of elite special forces and air mobile troops from the U.S. Army as well as from Militech, all gathering on the highlands outside of the city and led by US General Patrick Eddington.
Finally, on August 20 of 2023, a Militech incursion team led by Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand were tasked with the mission of infiltrating the Arasaka TowersThe Fall of the Towers in order to copy or destroy the Reliquary Database Project, and erase the Soulkiller 3.0 program from the Arasaka network. 
Silverhand led Team Alpha, consisting of a few Militech SpecOps, a group of Aldecaldos known as the Lobos, the solos Rogue and Shaitan, the media Lyle Thompson, and a netrunner by the name of Spider Murphy. Their mission was to infiltrate the Soulkiller laboratories on the 120th floor in order to retrieve Alt Cunningham, who was trapped inside the Arasaka network, and destroy Soulkiller 3.0. Strike Team Beta's objective was to reach the Reliquary Database located in the subbasement, where the Arasaka Command Center was located, and to either retrieve the data or destroy it. The goal was to render the database project unusable for the rival corp by using a tactical nuclear device. Since it was located at the lowest point of the Arasaka Towers, inside a heavily shielded complex, the idea was that it would absorb the impact of the blast and prevent massive destruction. Finally, Strike Team Omega was led by Blackhand and consisted of a Militech elite strike force, including a combat borg unit, and Morgan's own covert operations team — Dexter Dobbs, Race Chapel, Fade, M&M, Dash Panther, the Faceless Man, and Militech's undercover spy Sphinx. Their mission was to act as fire support, reinforcement, and rescue if needed.
Not everyone knew about each teams' objectives. Unbeknownst to Johnny and his group, they were simply a decoy to attract the bulk of the Arasaka forces thanks to their high-profile composition of members. Both Eddington and Blackhand were aware of this, since the primary goal was not to destroy Soulkiller, though if accomplished it would be an important goal. The truth was that Soulkiller was appearing everywhere, and there were notorious doubts that destroying it from the network would be a lasting solution. Instead, the primary objectives were both the retrieval or erasure of the Reliquary Database, and the destruction of the Arasaka Towers. Morgan knew the first part, but was unaware of the second, a plan that General Eddington indented for the rest of the team to accomplish. Since the beginning of the war, Arasaka had taken its main computers at Night City offline, hoping to use all the information they had recompiled over decades. The world's major powers were aware of that, and knew that kind of knowledge could topple governments or give Arasaka a lasting power if exposed, especially with the DataKrash wiping the Net. For this reason both Militech and the US were willing to do anything to accomplish their objective.
===Assault===
During the night of August 20, Johnny's team dropped out of an AV on the top floor of the Arasaka Towers in order to secure a quick path to the laboratories ten levels down. It's unknown which path the Omega Team took, but the last of Team Alpha to see Blackhand during this time was one of the Lobos, who witnessed him heading down a stairwell with a heavy suitcase.
After breaching into the building, Alpha Team rushed to the labs, where Spider accessed the Arasaka computers to contact Alt and rescue her. After transferring her into Spider's data suitcase, the netrunner proceeded to download some kind of information into datachips, and uploaded a virus to destroy any information regarding Soulkiller 3.0 from the Arasaka network. When questioned by Thompson about the datachips, Spider lied to him saying they only contained information on the Arasaka development team and other basic corporate knowledge. While doing this, Arasaka discovered their position and Kei ordered for Adam Smasher and two squads of Arasaka troopers to be sent to deal with them. At the same time, he sent an additional team to the bunker at the subbasement, as another Militech team was going there. A worried Kei also ordered his people to ready the laser uplink of the database backup, and to prepare his evacuation AV just in case. Morgan Blackhand discovered Arasaka's plans and warned the rest of the teams about their compromised positions. He also led a strike force to the roof to deal with the laser uplink.
Despite the warning, when Alpha Team started their evacuation, they were suddenly assaulted by Smasher and a group of Arasaka troopers, taking down many of the Militech operatives and Lobos in the first attack, badly injuring Thompson, and pinning down the rest of the team in the labs. While both groups fired at each other, Spider snuck to her data suitcase in order to connect to the Net and scatter the various portions of Alt, each tagged with a marker with the hopes of finding them someday. During these events, Johnny, who barely managed to find cover, was conflicted about what to do. He felt that he had abandoned Alt last time, so the rockerboy assured himself he would not do the same again. With a Militech SMG in one hand and his Malorian in the other, Johnny left his cover, shouting and provoking Smasher, while futilely emptying his guns on the borg. Smasher turned around and fired his autoshotgun at him, cutting Silverhand in half. Shaitan, taking advantage of the distraction, grappled and immobilized Smasher, telling the rest of the crew to leave. Spider Murphy tried to reach Silverhand, but Rogue stopped her, telling the netrunner he was gone. Spider reached inside her jacket and pulled out a data slug Alt had downloaded to her a long time ago. Whispering that she was sorry to Johnny, Spider inserted the chip into the back of the dying rocker's skull. She then tried to reach for her data suitcase, but soon realized it had been destroyed in the crossfire. Wishing Alt good luck, Spider helped Rogue and the surviving Lobos to drag the wounded Thompson into the elevator. Spider knew Johnny would be avenged, and while touching the remaining datachips in her pocket, had the certainty that Rache Bartmoss would be as well.
In the building's basement, Beta Team was attacked by an Arasaka platoon assault team led by Haruko Kanawa.
With their mission complete, Alpha Team began their extraction, soon after joined by some of their allies, including Blackhand. Once on the top of the building, they got into the rescue AV. It was then when Smasher reappeared inside a power armor, waving at Morgan Blackhand with the biopod head of Shaitan, still alive. This took the solo by surprise, who stepped down from the AV to confront the borg. Morgan ordered his people to evacuate without him, and it was during the lifting off when Johnny's team saw Morgan Blackhand going on against Adam Smasher on top of the Arasaka Towers. A few minutes later, once the AV was quite far away from the building, a nuke went off.
===Detonation===
While the Militech SpecOps and the Arasaka troops were in a firefight, somehow the nuclear device prematurely detonated on the 120th floor of the eastern tower,Mike Pondsmith on Reddit 4 - "It was, to be accurate, an airdrop. Sort of. 1200 feet up in the Southern Tower." inside Kei Arasaka's apartment bunker where the Soulkiller laboratory was located. The explosion, with a yield of either 0.1 or 0.5 kilotons, instantly obliterated the Arasaka Towers, splitting them in half and causing both structures to collapse outward. The entire City & Corporate District turned into ruins within seconds, with almost everyone in the immediate area dying. The blast instantly incinerated over 12,000 people in the vicinity of the Towers, and fatally injured upwards of half a million more. Another quarter million died in the resulting aftermath over the next weeks and months.
As the detonation went off at roughly 366 meters/yards above the sea level, the explosion was technically an air blast, and while this lessened overall long-term radioactivity, most of what remained penetrated only the huge skyscrapers surrounding the blast area. Since much of the metropolis was built on fill, and because the elevation was originally very low, the nuke caused a minor earthquake that liquefied parts of the fill and flooded the inner city. The huge blast turned the tons of raw concrete and steel of the buildings into particulate debris that covered the entirety of Northern California and far out to sea for many months, as well as igniting a fierce firestorm that covered thousands of acres beyond Night City. The combined dust cloud spiraled up into the sky and turned it red with particulate matter for almost two years. Even many years after the explosion, suspended particles caused the skies at dawn and dusk to glow a lurid red, inspiring people who lived through that timespan to call it the Time of the Red.
===Aftermath===
Night City was barely habitable within 24 hours of the detonation. Lots of Night Citizens were unaffected by the initial fallout as they were mostly cybered up or had radioactivity filters installed in their bodies already. However, the firestorm destroyed a large portion of the city's housing, forcing people to move over to either the suburbs on the other side of the bays, or to the areas further out. The liquified shaking soil caused by the explosion broke gas mains, water pipes, and electrical grids.
Then US President Elizabeth Kress blamed the Night City attack on the Arasaka Corporation. However, she was soon able to determine that the actual weapon used had been supplied by a Militech strike team. The Big Lie pushed forward by Militech and the US was that Arasaka themselves had blown up the Corporate Center of Night City in an area denial attack to stop Militech from seizing control of the Arasaka Towers. The truth is it was never formally decided who had triggered the explosion. In the public's eyes, the reasoning for the nuclear detonation was never uncovered. Some believed it was Militech's overzealous desire to crush Arasaka, while others believed it was an area denial weapon set off to protect the Arasaka Towers.
Within hours of the disaster, President Kress nationalized Militech through the expedience of their CEO, General Donald Lundee, and his reserve commission. Militech was placed thoroughly under the control of the still sizable United States military, and banished all Arasaka forces from the continental USA under the threat of a retaliatory strike on Arasaka's Tokyo headquarters. Other nations swiftly followed the US's lead, nationalizing and/or interdicting assets of both participants of the Fourth Corporate War.
===Legacy===
During the rebuilding of Night City, much of the radioactive rubble was tossed into Del Coronado Bay, while the ground zero of the nuclear explosion became known as the Hot Zone, an area of Night City filled with the ruins of the disaster. By 2045, much of the radiation had subsided, but it was still present to some level.
During the Time of the Red, a young independent media known as Trace Santiago managed to obtain information about what truly went down in 2023, writing several exposes and books about the Fourth Corporate War and the AHQ Disaster. With this story published, the Big Lie — the deception created by President Kress and Militech to blame Arasaka for the nuclear detonation — completely crumbled. This publication backfired spectacularly against Militech and the New United States of America, driving Night City to realign itself with Arasaka rather than the United States. Despite this, many Night Citizens still believed Arasaka was responsible for the nuke, or at the very least they were responsible for the incident as the corporation was the reason the war reached Night City, since the metropolis was Arasaka's North American center of operations. After these revelations, opinion was very divided, with many hating on Arasaka while others preferring to see the return of the Asian corporation rather than submit to the federal rule of the NUSA government.JGray on Reddit - "Official lore here: · Many people believe Araska is responsible the nuke in Night City. Even with Trace publishing an expose plenty of people still believe it. · Even if they don't think Night City is responsible for the nuke, they know Araska is why the war happened in Night City to begin with as it was the center of their North American operations.· The Japanese government banned Arasaka from operating overseas following the war. The ban is still in place in 2045."
In 2077, Hanako Arasaka cited the initial death toll was around four thousand Arasaka employees and Night Citizens.Play It Safe
==Arasaka Nuclear Device==
The bomb that destroyed the Arasaka Towers was from Militech, but Arasaka had a much more powerful thermonuclear device hidden beneath the building's foundation at the time of the explosion. According to Michiko Arasaka, this nuke was planted in the Towers in case Militech managed to overrun its defenses and take possession of the secrets hidden within. Only a handful of people at the top of the corporation knew about it, such as its current CEO at the time, Kei Arasaka, and his father Saburo.Black Dog (story)
Shortly after the incident, Kei sent people to find if the bomb that had detonated was theirs, eventually finding out it had been a Militech device instead. They searched for their device but to no avail. Concluding that only someone very strong could have taken it, the search team used radiation scanners and found a trail that led outside of the Hot Zone and to the garage of a borg named Samantha Stevens. While the team was searching for the bomb, Kei Arasaka was killed, and the search team was left without instructions on how to proceed. Ultimately, it was decided to simply leave the device where it was, but keeping a close watch on Samantha and the garage until the bomb was moved. In truth, Samantha had accessed the Hot Zone to explore a wrecked bunker in the Towers' ruins, only to find the lifeless body of Johnny Silverhand and an undetonated nuclear device. She tossed the bomb into Del Coronado Bay, and used its heavy casing to hide Silverhand's body.
Fifteen years later, Michiko Arasaka followed the group that was tasked with moving the crate to New Mexico, where she intercepted them and told the truth about the device. Knowing how dangerous it would be if any of the factions within Arasaka got their hands on it, she decided to help the group reach Los Alamos Labs to safely dismantle it.
Apart from Samantha Stevens, Angel was the only other person that knew the device's contents had been tossed into Del Coronado Bay. At some point during the Time of the Red, someone managed to find and retrieve the bomb, although it is not known who.Mike Pondsmith on Reddit 5 - "There were actually two nukes. The first one was a pocket nuke around 1KT--basically the equivalent of the old Davy Crockett battlefield ordinance. That was man carryable. The second one was an area denial nuke that went off to create the world of 203X--but since that is no longer canon, it never went off. Instead, there's a roughly 4KT nuke roaming around loose in the Cyberpunk Red universe. Somebody has it, but I'm not telling who..."
==Database Entry (2077)==
==Development==
Mike Pondsmith commented about the event on Reddit:
*Ah, The Nuke. I spent way too much time with fallout and destruction tables to make sure this worked. To save making you guys read all that (40+ pages), I'll sum up. The suitcase nuke was based on a prospective terrorist bomb concept, which was about .5Kt. I used San Francisco as the target model, siting the blast at about Coit Tower. It went off halfway up the Tower, which absorbed the blast and put it around 1200 feet up. The Towers were surrounded by equally huge and tall structures that absorbed much of the initial shock wave (and fell outwards, causing much of the secondary destruction, but limiting the scale of impact). The Nuke was a "clean" device, so radioactive fallout was minimized (the point was to wreck the Arasaka database, not the City). About 15K were instantly killed in the blast, with upwards of 100K dying over time from aftereffects like radiation, firestorms, building collapse... As I was doing this research and using fun tools like Alex Wellerstein's Nuke Map site (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/), I seriously expected the feds to kick in RTG's doors and arrest the lot of us.Mike Pondsmith on Reddit 1
*Yeah, I did way too much research, but the topic fascinated me. For most of my life, I lived with the idea that WWIII would wipe humanity out (clock is still ticking, BTW). The NC Nuke was me working out exactly how bad a nuke really can be. I also wanted to show that almost any Corp could have gotten a nuke--it was symptomatic that both of these guys, born out of a WWII background, could seriously consider atomic weapons as an option. There is an entire short story I wrote that happens at Ground Zero that day, and how Samantha (the full conversion firefighter) ended up with Johnny's body. I was planning to put it into Aftershocks, but the day I finished the story--in fact, about 20 minutes after I finished--somebody flew a plane into the last of the Twin Towers (I had CNN on) and suddenly it was no longer appropriate to release it in the face of so much real world death.Mike Pondsmith on Reddit 2
*Read the Black Dog story in Cyberpunk Red. There were all kinds of nasty devices planted around the Corporate Center (war zone, remember?) Arasaka even had a BIGGER bomb stashed in the basement. We will probably never know which one was detonated. But realistically, Morgan Blackhand wouldn't be detonating a bomb under his own feet , would he? There's a lot of unknowns here. And we planned it that way.Mike Pondsmith on Reddit 3
==Notes==
*Originally, the Arasaka area denial nuke created a second nuclear explosion, leading to the timeline. After the introduction of , the story was changed so that this device never detonated in the main timeline.
==Trivia==
*The bomb is said to have a yield of 0.1 or 0.5 kilotons:
**The power of the bomb had 0.5 kiloton, about 1/30 of the 15 kiloton of the Hiroshima bomb.
**The nuclear device was basically a tactical nuke not much larger than a suitcase bomb, similar to a 1950s Davy Crockett backpack nuke with an overall yield of .1 kiloton. It was based on a terrorist bomb concept with about .5Kt.
*The explosion was technically an air blast, as the detonation went off at roughly 366m/yds. Little Boy, in comparison, had a detonation height of about 579m/yds.
==Gallery==
CP77 Arasaka Memorial Entrance.jpg|Arasaka Memorial of the event.
==See Also==
*Love Like Fire - Interlude between Act 1 and , that replays the events of Night City Holocaust as according to Johnny Silverhand.
==References==
Category:21st-century conflicts