In Avengers: Red Zone, the Red Skull launched a chemical attack on the United States and almost succeeded in starting an all-out war with Wakanda.
Wakanda has always shared a secretive relationship with the outside world and has remained guarded even with the United States, but in the 2003 Avengers storyline “Red Zone,” the two nations almost went to war. In the end, the Avengers averted this possible disaster when the team proved it was a plot by the Red Skull, who had ingrained himself in the United States government and pulled strings from a political position.
The story took place in the pages of Avengers #69-70 by Geoff Johns, Oliver Coipel, Andy Lanning, Chris Sotomayor and RS & Comicraft’s Albert Deschesne. The series opened with a horrific moment, as red gas flowed out of Mount Rushmore. When it reached the population, it immediately began eating away people’s skin and killing them. The U.S. government showed up to help get things under control, and the Avengers soon followed. What was shocking to see was the military officials try to tell the Avengers they were not cleared to save lives at the outbreak.
Captain America was there, and he wasn’t listening to that nonsense and took his team in. This included himself, She-Hulk, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Jack of Hearts, and Ant-Man. Carol Danvers, who went by Warbird at the time, remained with the military and took control there. As the heroes soon discovered, this wasn’t an act of foreign terrorism but was an American base under Mount Rushmore that was a United States’ bio-weapons lab that created the contagion for its own use. The next step was to figure out who released it upon the American people.
The perpetrator behind this turned out to be the Red Skull, and that was also the reason the United States government was so instrumental in trying to stop the Avengers from helping. The government hid his involvement because the Secretary of the Defense was a man named Dell Rusk, and he was working with Henry Gyrich to gather information about the Avengers to use in the country’s best interest. However, it turned out that Rusk was the Red Skull, and he had infiltrated the U.S. government months earlier to put his plan into motion.
What was most disturbing was the Red Skull’s ultimate plan. When his identity was discovered, he fought Iron Man, Black Panther and Captain America and revealed that he was no longer interested in the Fourth Reich. Skull explained that he had fallen in love with the United States of America and was ready to take over using the country’s resources and the “attitudes laced within.” Like his previous attempts at taking over the world, the entire attitude was built on Skull’s inherent racism. The contagion was originally designed to kill all non-white citizens, but as Ant-Man revealed, that was impossible since everyone is basically the same.