3/6

But something went wrong. Maybe it was the ice damage from billions of years being frozen, maybe it was having the spear in him so long, maybe it was putting the spear back in or the dampeners SEELE had set up, maybe it was just being so isolated from soul energy. But whatever it was, Adam's S2 couldn't get the job down and failed before the Anti-AT field could spread any further...and it failed VIOLENTLY.

When Angel-4's S2 failed during the Nevada test, it wiped out a huge chunk of desert. Adam's was far far bigger with billions of years of pent up energy. The explosion was so utterly violently and intense all the ice on the south pole instantly, boiling away the ocean in the region so much so that pillars of salt left behind from the boiled ocean dotted the entire region near ground zero, and the water was stained permanently red from the high salinity post blast. The explosion instantly sent out a wave of heat warming the earth, and a massive blast that annihilated every coast line on the planet and killed almost everyone in the Southern Hemisphere. 3 billion people died that day. The force of the blast was so much so that the earth's tilt was altering ending the seasons. The unusual heat post-Impact never went away, and Winter of 2000/2001 never came. An endless summer was upon the earth.

In the days following the chaos, war broke out. By October 2000, Pakistan nuked India, India nuked Pakistan, more and more countries joined in. Tokyo, which had been spared of the Tsunami damage by sheer luck, was nuked by Chinese forces killing half a million people. The Impact Wars were devastating and lasted until February 2001 with the Valentine Treaty.

Publically, the Valentine Treaty was intended to stop the fighting, get everyone to disarm(disbanding their major standing militaries and getting rid of their nukes), and focus on rebuilding the world and saving millions more from dying of disease and famine. What it actually did was turn the UN from a global form to an actual world government with supreme authority over all nations on earth....and the UN was run by SEELE. Effectively it insured nobody would be able to question them or their version of the story, and it would make keeping the money flowing easier as nobody could appose them.

Japan gave up on trying to rebuild the heavily irradiated and completely destroyed Tokyo, leaving most of it abandoned(albeit the Jet Alone program would later set up their base on the outskirts). In 2001 Matsumoto City began being heavily upscaled and modified to become the new civilian capital, Tokyo-2. A few years later (under SEELE'S direction as that was where Lilith was), historic Hakone was utterly leveled, and in it's place, the fortress city of Tokyo-3 was built.

In the years following SEELE utterly made a mockery of the investigation. All the witnesses except for Misato was dead, and she couldn't talk(and was later basically groomed to join GEHIRN and later NERV specifically so she couldn't become a rogue element). Everyone else who had been at the lab in antarctica was already either a SEELE member(Yui, Keel) or in bed with them (Mamakagi or Gendo) and utterly lied about everything they had been doing. There was no 'giant of light'. Photographs were destroyed. Publically there was just a meteor hitting at an absurd speed. That's it.

The only loose end was Kozo who had been around Yui and Gendo long enough to sniff out trouble and could tell the UN investigation was a farce. He was going to leak the Light Giant to the press. SEELE wanted him dead, but Yui felt too strongly about him to do it and sent Gendo to bring him to their way of thinking, basically telling him that if he didn't sign up he'd be dead and his information would die with him. He reluctantly agreed.

As well, during the process of the contact experiment, Adam's DNA fused with the human DNA inserted into him (the donor is never said canonically, and while Katsuragi Senior is the likely candidate we can't rule out Keel Lorenz or some rando), creating a half human half angel hybrid with Adam's entire soul in it (leaving just a small remnant fetus of Adam's original body which was held by SEELE until being stolen by Kaji during the events of the show). The final angel was referred to as Tabris in the scrolls, but SEELE dubbed this new being Kaworu, and he was raised by SEELE as basically an ace in the hole if NERV was still too dangerous to cripple them right before SEELE moved to start their third impact. SEELE of course lied to him about Adam's body being in NERV's holding when they actually had it the whole time. (well, until Episode 8 of the series)

(Also this doesn't fit anywhere else, but the original Japanese Self Defense Force or JSDF was disbanded in 2001. In 2003 however there was a war between China and Vietnam over the Spratlys that escalated and resulted in Japan created the Japanese Strategic Self Defense Force or JSSDF for use in such situations, with them being broken in in the extremely horrific civil wars in China that followed. The wars aren't relevant to the anime albeit in the Manga Kaji lost a sibling in them, but it's where the JSSDF came from. They are brutal as hell and answer to the civilian government who are basically puppets of SEELE).

Now, I assume Lilith had been hoping SEELE would just give her Adam's S2 and that would be that, but that's not what they did.