What was the Sixty Minute War?

The Sixty Minute War was a catastrophic global battle that took place thousands of years before the events of the Mortal Engines Quartet and the Fever Crumb Series.

The chilling 60-minute name conveys that the apocalyptic war took only an hour to begin and end. This incredibly short duration was due to the sheer speed, technological efficiency, and terrifying power of the weapons of mass destruction used by the warring factions.

Mutually Assured Destruction

This rapid annihilation occurred because of the fundamental way nuclear war scenarios work.

Say Country A decides to wipe out Country B. Country B has the technological capabilities to immediately detect the launch from Country A.

They have just enough time to understand that even though their country is about to be entirely wiped out, they can still get their own bloody revenge on Country A.

So they will launch their own missiles at Country A, ensuring that the aggressor is destroyed too. This grim military doctrine is called mutually assured destruction.

While the former Soviet Union played dangerous brinkmanship games with the US (think about the Cuban Missile Crisis), no modern country has crossed the line because they know there is a massive chance that they will lose everything themselves. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the historical exceptions, simply because only the US possessed such weapons at the time.

So in the lore of the book and movie of Mortal Engines, there was a massive global 'cold war' between various advanced superpowers, primarily the American Empire and the Greater China Co-prosperity Sphere. This intense political friction directly led to the war's explosive start. The mutual self-destruction concept played out perfectly, and when the very first strike was launched, all the other nations immediately responded in kind.

Once the arms were deployed, with some launching from hidden land silos, some raining down from orbiting satellites in space, and maybe the odd deep-sea submarine, the so-called 'war' was entirely over and done with in an hour.

The Old Tech Arsenal

This was the classic doomsday scenario leading to a desolate Earth where most of humanity was destroyed. The weapons used were far more advanced than standard nuclear bombs. They included quantum energy weapons and tectonic devices that literally cracked the Earth's crust, causing massive volcanic eruptions and permanently reshaping the continents. This geographical upheaval ushered in a dark era known as the Black Century, setting the stage for the nomadic Traction Cities to eventually arise.

Two of the most devastating weapons from this era were known as the MEDUSA, a directed-energy weapon which features heavily in the first novel, and the ODIN satellite, which is first featured in the third novel of the Predator Cities Quartet, Infernal Devices.

The ODIN weapon was later commandeered and used by Stalker Anna Fang in A Darkling Plain to great effect when she went on a rather magnificent, apocalyptic rampage and destroyed all in her path from orbit.

The original novel also noted on page 7 that 'tailored virus bombs' were used alongside the explosives. We can only begin to imagine the biological horror that those specific weapons delivered onto Earth's remaining population. The lore also hints at 'Slow Bombs', terrifying devices designed to tick quietly away in the mud for centuries before finally detonating and wiping out unsuspecting scavenger towns.

The devastating Old Tech weapon MEDUSA firing from London City

What is the Dead Continent?

The Dead Continent is the grim name given in the lore to what we would consider modern North America.

As the geographic center of the mighty American Empire, it was a primary, heavily targeted zone during the infamous Sixty Minute War. It absorbed the absolute brunt of the orbital bombardments and tectonic strikes.

By the time of the late Traction Era, it was regarded by almost all surviving humans as a barren, irradiated, desolate, and completely unhospitable land, entirely lost to time and poisonous fallout.

Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal notoriously claimed to have adventured and explored the Dead Continent, and he wrote a very popular book about his fictional travels there. The truth was that only a few highly secretive people were actually in the know. In reality, many of the crucial Old Tech parts for the MEDUSA weapon were actually sourced from covert scavenger expeditions to the continent.

In the climax of Predator's Gold, the novel finished with Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw deciding to flee the hunting grounds and settle in Vineland. This was an isolated area of the Dead Continent that was shockingly discovered to be habitable, green, and sustainable in the long term, proving that the legends of total irradiation were slightly exaggerated.

As to what the author Philip Reeve had to say about the true state of North America and what he thought was actually going on across the ocean:

"I think it's actually highly unlikely that the US is a 'dead continent', however badly knocked about it was, it would have been re-seeded with plants and animals by the time of Mortal Engines. So I expect Valentine and other explorers have missed a lot of thriving low-intensity settlements and secret airbases.

I was thinking of secret airbases full of pirate airships etc, but who knows, maybe there are whole underground societies which went into deep bunkers when the bombs started falling and are still waiting for the all clear."