10 More Changes That Star Trek Hoped You Wouldn't Notice

The timeline of the Eugenics Wars and World War III have always been pretty ambiguous in Trek.

When these wars were first mentioned in the Original Series episode Space Seed, Spock referred to the 1990s as the era of Earth's last world war, which was then described as the Eugenics Wars by McCoy.

Of course, when this line was written, no one believed that Star Trek would still be releasing new episodes by the 90s (let alone as far as the 2020s), so they didn't worry too much about making accurate predictions that far forward. However, as the years went on, the 90s came, and it became difficult to reconcile this bit of Trek history with reality.

According to showrunner Terry Matalas on Twitter, that period of Earth's history (from around 1990 to 2065) was extremely sketchy in Starfleet's records due to a series of EMP bursts kicking everyone back decades. This seems to imply that the Eugenics wars didn't kick off until decades later, and Spock was simply mistaken. Yet, given the fact that Starfleet ships routinely visit the 20th century (both accidentally and intentionally), this seems unlikely.

The story became clearer in the second season finale of Star Trek: Picard, Farewell, which was set in 2024. In it, Adam Soong opened a classified file titled 'Project Khan', that was dated 'June 7 1996'. This implies that the Eugenics Wars initially began as a secret government program involving renowned scientists like Dr. Soong, which resulted in the creation of genetically modified tyrants like Khan and the other first Augments. Apparently, this was only the beginning, and the continuation of the project after 2024 was what eventually led to the Second Civil War, another Eugenics War, and the official start of World War III.

This still doesn't explain why Khan was said to have controlled more than forty of Earth's nations from 1992 to 1996, but let's just assume it's because of one of those pesky EMP bursts Matalas mentioned.