WIKI TIKI WEDNESDAY - THE REPUBLIC OF NAURU

There will be spoilers for this TV-GPS…..

'MADAM SECRETARY'
"THE NEW NORMAL"

From the IMDb:
When a super typhoon threatens a small Pacific island, Elizabeth and her team must find a way to relocate the entire population before landfall.  

CHIEF OF STAFF RUSSELL JACKSON:
Latest tracking from NOAA has [Hurricane] Blessing making a hard swerve away from the Marshalls, so Uncle Sam will get a soaking - but nothing worse. 
STEVIE McCORD:
So no landfall? 
JACKSON:
Looks like it's headed for the Republic of Nauru. It's your mother's problem now.

From Country Holidays Inns & Suites:
Nauru is a tiny island country in Micronesia, northeast of Australia. It features a coral reef and white-sand beaches fringed with palms, including Anibare Bay on the east coast. Inland, tropical vegetation surrounds Buada Lagoon. The rocky outcrop of Command Ridge, the island's highest point, has a rusty Japanese outpost from WWII. The underground freshwater lake of Moqua Well lies amid the limestone Moqua Caves.

From Wikipedia:
Nauru, officially the Republic of Nauru (Nauruan: Repubrikin Naoero) and formerly known as Pleasant Island, is an island country in Micronesia, a sub-region of Oceania, in the Central Pacific. Its nearest neighbour is Banaba Island in Kiribati, 300 kilometres (190 mi) to the east. It further lies northwest of Tuvalu, north of the Solomon Islands, east-northeast of Papua New Guinea, southeast of the Federated States of Micronesia and south of the Marshall Islands. With only a 21-square-kilometre (8.1 sq mi) area, Nauru is the third-smallest state on the list of countries and dependencies by area behind Vatican City and Monaco, making it the smallest state in the South Pacific Ocean, the smallest island state, and the smallest republic. Its population is 11,347, making it the third smallest on the list of countries and dependencies by population, after the Vatican and Tuvalu.

Settled by people from Micronesia and Polynesiac.  1000 BC, Nauru was annexed and claimed as a colony by the German Empire in the late 19th century. After World War I, Nauru became a League of Nations mandate administered by Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. During World War II, Nauru was occupied by Japanese troops, who were bypassed by the Allied advance across the Pacific. After the war ended, the country entered into United Nations trusteeship. Nauru gained its independence in 1968, and became a member of the Pacific Community (SPC) in 1969.

Nauru is a phosphate-rock island with rich deposits near the surface, which allowed easy strip mining operations. It has some remaining phosphate resources which, as of 2011, are not economically viable for extraction. When the phosphate reserves were exhausted, and the island's environment had been seriously harmed by mining, the trust that had been established to manage the island's wealth diminished in value.

To earn income, Nauru briefly became a tax haven and illegal money laundering centre.  From 2001 to 2008, and again from 2012, it accepted aid from the Australian Government in exchange for hosting the Nauru Regional Processing Centre, an offshore Australian immigration detention facility. As a result of heavy dependence on Australia, many sources have identified Nauru as a client state of Australia.

For the rest of the Wikipedia entry, click here.

This alternate Toobworld, colloquially designated as Toobworld-Dalton (because it has a different President of the United States than the main Toobworld, which always has the same POTUS as the Real World), has always been different from Earth Prime and Earth Prime-Time, beginning with the President being Conrad Dalton and not Barack Obama and Donald Trump.  Plus the star of the series, Tea Leoni, is the Secretary of State and the show will probably end with her being the next POTUS.

But they took the differences a step farther with this episode. 

In the past, many TV series created fictional countries for their characters to deal with – like ‘Mission: Impossible’ and ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’  But in this case, they mostly use actual nations and change their histories and current situations, just as is standard procedure with fictionalized America. 

Here comes the big spoiler….

By the end of this episode, the Republic of Nauru was wiped off the map by a powerful storm.

This is the overhead view of where Nauru used to be.

I’m wondering how the people of Nauru felt about the episode?

As far as I can assume, this only happened to the Republic of Nauru on Toobworld-Dalton.  (I would not be surprised to find out that it also happened to the Nauru of Disaster Toobworld.)  As for the main Toobworld, Nauru still exists as it does in the Real World.

BCnU!