It makes sense, though. In our universe, the Korean War lasted two years, but the show M*A*S*H lasts eleven seasons and shows multiple season changes, indicating that in that universe, it lasted much longer.
Wartime is often a time of huge technological advancement, as shown with the medical techniques created at the 4077 (e.g. the vascular clamp that led to better arterial operations). This means that by the time their Korean War ends, there would have been significantly more progress made in scientific fields. Additionally, if the M*A*S*H universe is unfortunate enough to have a Korean War and a Vietnam War, the anti-war sentiments would have been great. This could have pushed forward the social reforms which lead to Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets.
Keep in mind, I only found out about this in November
We know the major wars of the late 20th Century are different in the Trek universe; for example, they had the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, which we didn’t have. Nor could we have, because we weren’t even CLOSE to doing genetic engineering on humans in the 1990s, but they obviously were. Or you couldn’t get Augments like Khan and the rest.
…the M*A*S*H cast are largely medical personnel so you could probably come up with a justification for at least one of them to be tangentially connected to the experimentation that created Khan and his fellows, leading to World War Three in the ‘90s and a few decades of low-level post-apocalypse
before the Vulcans showed up and we managed to just barely qualify for their help by launching a warp-capable manned breadbox at them
genuinely unsure if this would make M*A*S*H feel more or less dark than situating it within the presumption of real history!
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