It is June 1964 in the altered timeline of a world in which the Cuban Missiles Crises went disastrously wrong and the swinging sixties never happened. ‘Ask Not of Your Country’ is the fourth verse of the American story of Armageddon.

To its friends and enemies alike the United States seems to have emerged from the October War battered, bruised but invincible. However, twenty months after the cataclysm terrible wounds remain unhealed and the nation of liberty is riven by conflict.

What price unity when the war-ravaged states of the American North West and the Great Lakes already feel like the battlegrounds in the next war? Or while racial tensions erupt across the South and civil war threatens in Illinois and Wisconsin, Congress and the Administration are deadlocked as the old alliance with the British disintegrates.

Paralysis rules in America, in the Middle East as the Red Army surges south towards the Persian Gulf in Philadelphia the Kennedy Administration turns a blind eye, pandering to the most virulent strain of the ‘America First’ movement in what is election year.

The survivors had honestly believed that the World had gone mad in October 1962. Now they are beginning to ask themselves how much worse things can get?

Tragically, the answer is that things can get a lot, lot worse.

Never was Jack Kennedy’s inaugural appeal for all Americans to ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ but to ‘ask what you can do for your country’ more apposite.