Background
As mentioned in the collected "Block Mania" and "Apocalypse War" Titan reprints, the writers felt that Mega-City One had essentially grown too big. When Judge Dredd started, the Mega-Cities boundaries were not exactly set in stone. Eventually it became established that MC-1 spanned the entire Eastern Seaboard, from the Canadian Border in the north, to the tip of Florida in the south.
The result was a storyline designed to bring Mega City back to a more reasonable size. Most of the southern part of the city was nuked out and four hundred million citizens killed, resulting in a much smaller city centred on the North East. Since this story the population has hovered around 400 million, rising to 420 million in stories set in the early 2110's before losing another sixty million after "Necropolis."
The story was somewhat set up with one previous Dredd tale. Over a year earlier the story "Pirates of the Black Atlantic" ended with the revelation that a seemingly independent nuclear attack on MC-1 had been the work of the Sov block, and East Meg one is forced to destroy one of its own sectors to appease Mega City One. However at the end MC-1 looks to its defences and the Sovs reveal that their plan to attack the American megacity is not ready yet.
Fallout from the war dominated the strip for the next couple of years with the slow re-building of the city, occupying at least a background role in many stories. The post Apocalypse War status quo has remained in place ever since. Occasional stories have focused on Sov efforts at revenge (either from East Meg 2, or rogue groups), culminating in the events of "Satan's Island" in which nearly 900,000 citizens lost their lives at the hands of a bio-weapon released by Orlok.
Read more about this topic: Apocalypse War
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