Turtledove
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The Treaty of Moscow was the peace agreement negotiated between the Race, represented by Ambassador Queek, and the Greater German Reich, represented by Ambassador Paul Schmidt, and mediated by General Secretary Vyacheslav Molotov of the Soviet Union. It concluded the Race-German War of 1965.

The Race's explosive-metal bomb strikes against the militarily and politically powerful but geographically small Greater German Reich's major cities effectively decimated the German leadership. At one point, the senior surviving official of the German government was Major General Walter Dornberger, commander of the Reich Rocket Force. Dornberger assumed the office of Führer and Reichschancellor and immediately instructed Schmidt, in Moscow, to request a ceasefire through the offices of Molotov, an old enemy of the Nazis, rather than the United States. Molotov passed along the request to Queek, the Race's ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the two ambassadors met in the office which Molotov reserved for meetings with Race officials. (He never admitted Lizards or their human agents into his real office for fear that they would plant listening devices that were beyond the technological capacity of the Soviet Union to detect.)

The terms of the treaty were harsh. Schmidt complained, “If we do accept [the terms], we go from a first-rate power to one of the second or third class.”[1] Germany lost control of France which had been under German rule since 1940,. The French Fourth Republic was restored to nominal independence but under the influence of the Race. Germany was also forced to give up explosive-metal weapons and her space-travel capabilities.  

These terms temporarily put the Race at a great advantage in its cold war against the several independent Tosevite not-empires. It allowed the Lizards to establish a significant presence in Europe, a continent on which they had previously held only the peripheral colonies of Spain and Portugal and, most importantly Poland, which they had administered as a buffer between Germany and the USSR. They now had a presence in France. Germany's hitherto ally Finland turned to the Race for an alliance in response to Soviet territorial claims.  

The balance of power was also tipped in the Lizards' direction globally. The elimination of one of the three human superpowers left the remaining independent human nations vulnerable to Race aggression, with fewer allies with whom the human powers could pool their military resources at need. This allowed the Race to pursue an aggressive course against the United States later that year, when it discovered President Earl Warren's role in the nuclear strike against the Colonization Fleet in 1962. Warren, having seen how the Race was still able to devastate a human great power, acceded to the Race's demands for punitive measures, though he shrewdly allowed them to destroy a city (Indianapolis) rather than scrap the US space program.

The advantages the Race won at Moscow were short-lived, however. Germany quickly found ways to circumvent the treaty, as it had the Treaty of Versailles fifty years earlier. By the turn of the 21st century, Germany had both returned to outer space and publicly unearthed long-hidden caches of nuclear weapons. Combined with the capacity of the American, Soviet, and Japanese space agencies to build interstellar craft and visit Home and, finally, the Americans' technological surpassing of the Race, by the early 21st Century the Race's position on Tosev 3 had become a weak one indeed.

References[]

  1. Down to Earth, pp. 617-618.
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