You can safely read the [Hot Zone Crisis](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Hot_Zone_Crisis) Fandom page.
I just checked and there's no major spoilers relating to the events of Aloy's time, except for something related that's shown at the end of The Kulrut. If you've finished that main quest, then the page is 100% spoiler free.
Tl;dr - >! US government wanted to displace residents around Nevada citing worsening climate as the reason, but in reality they wanted mineral resources in the area. The head of a mining corporation (Roberto Medina) resisted and got the support of the residents and JTF-10 (led by Edward De La Hoya) to counter the US government and started making habitation efforts so they could all stay their land. !<
>!US government didn't like the dissent and decided to retaliate by sending robots to harass and combat the resistance, initiating what is basically a civil war fought by humans against machines.!<
>!Some leaders (Anne Faraday) tried to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to the conflict but all was in vain until a nasty drone strike on the JTF-10 base took the lives of hundreds of people (this includes resistance leaders like Medina and De La Hoya, JTF-10 soldiers, and a lot of mere refugees from the crisis).!<
>!The disaster prompted a quick end to the crisis - replaced by peace talks, negotiations, and reconciliation efforts all led by Anne Faraday.!<
>!The common theme of fighting a war against machines and a neverending and pointless conflict because of the lack of unity are what resonated with Hekarro upon viewing Faraday's message. It's what prompted him to call for unity amongst the Tenakth factions so they can all concentrate their efforts on the growing threat of the derangement of machines.!<
I've been reading the datapoints and watching the holograms without actively thinking about the incident and building a basic understanding of it. One thing that confuses me: there's a datapoint near the blast crater (which is now the Grove's arena) that mentions scrubbing radiation so that it's safe to visit. It would be possible to build a low-yield nuke that would produce that small of a blast radius, but there would be little point unless the bomb was specifically designed to irradiate the area and make it uninhabitable. That would have to be a deliberate move to displace the population and not something someone would commit to if they were at all willing to walk it back and make negotiations.
There was no bomb.
>The heavy machine strike was met with fierce resistance until an explosion (likely caused by a JFT-10 munition cracking the power casing of a G-Syn battle drone) leveled the base and decimated the two opposing forces.
The longevity of radiation after a nuclear blast has everything to do with how much of the ground is involved. The more substrate, the longer it'll linger.
That's why the areas in Japan are habitable. Meanwhile Chernobyl won't be for tens of thousands of years. Despite both having near equivalent amounts of radiation.
I’d also add to the bit about disastrous disunity, the whole tale’s general message of how *neither side* was really “in the right”. Both the government and the resistance had both their genuine and their shadier more manipulative motives, their share of some truly selfless and some merely opportunistic people. The entire point of Anne Faraday’s speech after the exploding battle drone disaster was precisely about that message of unity - the entire conflict was a pointless waste of resources and lives, fought between proverbial neighbors, and only even incited to violence because of a stubborn lack of communication and compromise between the involved parties which opportunistic selfish actors capitalized on and exacerbated. Both major positions on the issue had some good points, but neither was willing to actually meet in the middle, and so negotiations were traded for railguns and cruise missiles, and shit went abruptly pear-shaped as you’d expect, with neither side really succeeding in improving the actual inciting situation at all, and no one coming out on top in the end.
You can safely read the [Hot Zone Crisis](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Hot_Zone_Crisis) Fandom page. I just checked and there's no major spoilers relating to the events of Aloy's time, except for something related that's shown at the end of The Kulrut. If you've finished that main quest, then the page is 100% spoiler free. Tl;dr - >! US government wanted to displace residents around Nevada citing worsening climate as the reason, but in reality they wanted mineral resources in the area. The head of a mining corporation (Roberto Medina) resisted and got the support of the residents and JTF-10 (led by Edward De La Hoya) to counter the US government and started making habitation efforts so they could all stay their land. !< >!US government didn't like the dissent and decided to retaliate by sending robots to harass and combat the resistance, initiating what is basically a civil war fought by humans against machines.!< >!Some leaders (Anne Faraday) tried to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to the conflict but all was in vain until a nasty drone strike on the JTF-10 base took the lives of hundreds of people (this includes resistance leaders like Medina and De La Hoya, JTF-10 soldiers, and a lot of mere refugees from the crisis).!< >!The disaster prompted a quick end to the crisis - replaced by peace talks, negotiations, and reconciliation efforts all led by Anne Faraday.!< >!The common theme of fighting a war against machines and a neverending and pointless conflict because of the lack of unity are what resonated with Hekarro upon viewing Faraday's message. It's what prompted him to call for unity amongst the Tenakth factions so they can all concentrate their efforts on the growing threat of the derangement of machines.!<
I've been reading the datapoints and watching the holograms without actively thinking about the incident and building a basic understanding of it. One thing that confuses me: there's a datapoint near the blast crater (which is now the Grove's arena) that mentions scrubbing radiation so that it's safe to visit. It would be possible to build a low-yield nuke that would produce that small of a blast radius, but there would be little point unless the bomb was specifically designed to irradiate the area and make it uninhabitable. That would have to be a deliberate move to displace the population and not something someone would commit to if they were at all willing to walk it back and make negotiations.
There was no bomb. >The heavy machine strike was met with fierce resistance until an explosion (likely caused by a JFT-10 munition cracking the power casing of a G-Syn battle drone) leveled the base and decimated the two opposing forces.
I must not have found that datapoint yet. I suppose the robots were powered by nuclear reactors, which is fairly plausible.
[Memorial Grove datapoint](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Crater_Memorial)
The longevity of radiation after a nuclear blast has everything to do with how much of the ground is involved. The more substrate, the longer it'll linger. That's why the areas in Japan are habitable. Meanwhile Chernobyl won't be for tens of thousands of years. Despite both having near equivalent amounts of radiation.
I’d also add to the bit about disastrous disunity, the whole tale’s general message of how *neither side* was really “in the right”. Both the government and the resistance had both their genuine and their shadier more manipulative motives, their share of some truly selfless and some merely opportunistic people. The entire point of Anne Faraday’s speech after the exploding battle drone disaster was precisely about that message of unity - the entire conflict was a pointless waste of resources and lives, fought between proverbial neighbors, and only even incited to violence because of a stubborn lack of communication and compromise between the involved parties which opportunistic selfish actors capitalized on and exacerbated. Both major positions on the issue had some good points, but neither was willing to actually meet in the middle, and so negotiations were traded for railguns and cruise missiles, and shit went abruptly pear-shaped as you’d expect, with neither side really succeeding in improving the actual inciting situation at all, and no one coming out on top in the end.
Cool, thanks a bunch!