C.E. 71 was undoubtedly a year worthy of remembrance in human history.
After Heliopolis, a colony satellite of neutral Orb, was raided by Rau Le Creuset of the ZAFT Army and exposed for secretly developing new warships and MS units for the Earth Alliance, the situation had continued to spiral out of control.
Whether it was the ZAFT Army wiping out the Eighth Fleet in Earth orbit during the pursuit, the enormous losses inflicted on the ZAFT Army by the Archangel's counterattack, or especially the total collapse on the North African battlefield, each had escalated the war again and again.
In the end, the Atlantic Federation disregarded its own soldiers' casualties and directly activated the "Cyclops" system, killing a thousand enemies at the cost of eight hundred of its own. That tore through the final veil.
It signaled that the war would continue in an even bloodier, crueler, and more unscrupulous fashion.
Just as the Whole World was gripped by intense unease, a sudden coup within P.L.A.N.T left everyone utterly bewildered.
Soon afterward, Sakura adopted an unprecedentedly hard-line stance and used nuclear missiles to clear the way, destroying the military forces deployed in Europe by one of Earth's strongest nations—the Eurasian Federation.
Nearly every major military base proved helpless before the terrifying Nuclear Blast.
Europe then fell beneath the conqueror's feet. The capital-backed interest groups that had fanned the flames and profited from the war, along with those politicians who could do nothing but wag their tongues and incite populism, were all arrested one after another under the judgment of the ZAFT Army, put on Trial, and stripped of all their property. The rest fled across the border in droves.
Reality once again proved that before truly unreasonable, pure violence, the capital that could command the winds and rains across