The Fourth Corporate War Explained: Arasaka vs Militech, the Ocean War and the Nuke

The Fourth Corporate War was a global conflict from 2021 to 2025 that began as a takeover fight between two ocean corporations and turned into an open war between Arasaka and Militech. It ended with a nuclear bomb going off in Arasaka Tower in Night City on 20 August 2023, and it shaped everything that came after, from the Time of the Red to the Night City of Cyberpunk 2077. The full war is told in R. Talsorian's tabletop books, so most of this page comes from them. (Firestorm: Stormfront; Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)

What caused the Fourth Corporate War?#

It started with a bankruptcy. Early in 2021, IHAG, a megacorp in underwater shipping and technology, went under, and two aquacorps, CINO and OTEC, both moved to take over its assets. The fight started on the stock markets, then turned violent: in November 2021 an OTEC strike force stopped CINO's negotiators reaching acquisition talks, and CINO's netrunners hit financial exchanges to sink OTEC's stock. (Firestorm: Stormfront; Cyberpunk RED)

Neither side knew that EuroBank was quietly pushing both of them deeper into debt, hoping to scoop up IHAG, CINO and OTEC together and make Europe the world's dominant sea power. (Firestorm: Stormfront)

Underneath it all was an old grudge. Arasaka and Militech had been rivals for the world arms market for decades, and their heads, Saburo Arasaka and Donald Lundee, had come to hate each other personally, each seeing the other as the man standing in his way. (Firestorm: Stormfront)

The ocean war and how Arasaka and Militech got in#

After about a year of stalemate, both aquacorps hired bigger muscle. OTEC brought in Militech, the American arms maker and security force, and CINO answered by hiring Arasaka. At first neither of the security giants wanted a direct war. Then accidents piled up: an Arasaka adviser was killed by Militech guards at an OTEC site, and an automated Arasaka torpedo system sank a Militech ship running supplies through CINO waters. (Firestorm: Stormfront)

By February 2022 governments were seizing isolated CINO, OTEC and IHAG property, and the pressure pushed the two ocean companies to the table. They cancelled their security contracts on 22 February and signed a peace accord a few days later. Arasaka and Militech kept fighting anyway. (Firestorm: Stormfront)

From shadow war to hot war#

On 6 March 2022 Arasaka tested a new version of Soulkiller on a Militech executive, and the information it pulled from his captured mind led to an assault on Militech's Night City office. That began three months of covert strikes. By June it was open war: Arasaka hit a Militech factory in Virginia while Militech-backed mercenaries massacred workers at an Arasaka plant in Yokohama. (Firestorm: Stormfront; Firestorm: Shockwave)

What followed was the worst of the war:

• Fighting spread to orbit, wrecking space travel and business. (Firestorm: Shockwave)
• Militech killed everyone in Arasaka's Paris office with an aerosol toxin pumped through the air system. (Firestorm: Shockwave)
• Street fighting in Chicago escalated to air and orbital strikes. (Firestorm: Shockwave)
• Hong Kong was left in ruins, and Rio de Janeiro was reduced to rubble in a battle that lasted hours. (Firestorm: Shockwave)
• At the same time the Net itself started to break, with data changed at random. It was the start of the DataKrash, which ended the old Net and led NetWatch to build the Blackwall. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)

By late 2022, governments had had enough. Southern California and Texas nationalised every Arasaka and Militech facility within their borders, Europe followed, and Japan moved on Arasaka at home. In the US, President Elizabeth Kress, a former Militech executive, reactivated Lundee's military commission and ordered Militech to stand down. That left one front still burning: Night City, where Kei Arasaka, Saburo's son, held out with whatever Arasaka forces were left in North America. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)

The nuke in Night City#

On 20 August 2023, a Militech-backed strike team raided Arasaka Tower. Johnny Silverhand led one team, there mostly to free Alt Cunningham, and Morgan Blackhand led another. Adam Smasher killed Johnny in the tower's labs, and a small nuclear device brought in by the Militech operation went off inside the tower, destroying it and the corporate centre around it. The full story of that night is on our Arasaka Tower 2023 page. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)

Cyberpunk RED puts the cost at more than 12,000 people killed in the blast and hundreds of thousands more dying of their injuries, radiation and fires over the following weeks and months. Dust from the explosion turned the sky red for almost two years. (Cyberpunk RED)

How the war ended#

Within hours of the blast, Kress used Lundee's reserve commission to bring Militech under the control of the US military, and ordered Arasaka out of the continental United States, threatening a strike on its Tokyo headquarters if it didn't go. The last Arasaka resistance in the US was cleared out, and with fighting finally put down across the country, the war was declared over in 2025. (Cyberpunk RED)

Kress blamed Arasaka for the bomb: the official story was that Arasaka had set off a failsafe nuke when it was clear it couldn't hold the tower. She used the crisis to rebuild the country as the New United States under a state of emergency that never really ended. Years later, the journalist Trace Santiago published the truth: the bomb had gone in with the strike team. (Cyberpunk RED)

Japan restricted Arasaka to operating inside Japan for the next decade, and Night City was left to rebuild around a radioactive hot zone. (Cyberpunk RED)

Where the sources differ#

The tabletop books and Cyberpunk 2077 don't tell the same story, and the 2020-era books and Cyberpunk RED don't always agree with each other either. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED; Cyberpunk 2077)

• Who set off the bomb. Cyberpunk RED says it was a Militech device brought in by the raiders and that nobody formally established who triggered it. Cyberpunk 2077 shows Johnny arming a nuke and sending it down a lift, then being captured and put through Soulkiller, but presents this as Johnny's own scrambled memory, and the game's database entry says the only undisputed fact is the date, with everything else, down to the death toll and who was responsible, left to rumour and corporate PR. (Cyberpunk RED; Cyberpunk 2077)
• Arasaka's own bomb. Cyberpunk RED adds that Arasaka had a much bigger device of its own hidden under the tower, in case Militech ever overran it, and that it never went off. (Cyberpunk RED)
• The death toll. Cyberpunk RED gives large, specific numbers. The 2077 database refuses to commit to any figure. (Cyberpunk RED; Cyberpunk 2077)
• How much of it 2077 shows. The game skips the ocean war and the global fighting entirely. In 2077 the war survives as history, as the reason Night City sits next to a rebuilt Arasaka Tower, and as the act that made Johnny a legend. Arasaka's return to Night City came after a later conflict, the Unification War. (Cyberpunk 2077)

For where the war sits in the full chronology, see the Cyberpunk timeline. (Cyberpunk RED; Cyberpunk 2077)