On January 16th a peace meeting between the Zeon Archduchy and EFG was held in Antarctica. The resulting treaty, called the Antarctica Treaty, banned both sides from using ABC weapons against the other's civilian populations. By now, however, both sides' military forces had been so exhausted that neither one could gain a true advantage. The war degraded into a stalemate. The Zeons took advantage of the lull in combat to launch a massive invasion of Earth.
On March 1, 0079, the Archduchy military staged its first drop operation. The 1st Terrestrial Mobile Division is dropped at Lake Balchas and the Aral Sea, to the north of the Tien Shan mountain range. The force captured the Federal Forces's Baikonur spaceport, and then headed around the west shore of the Caspian Sea into Europe, and around the east shore into the Middle East. Three days later, on March 4th, the Archduchy military droped a resource mining unit commanded by Ma Kube at the north shore of the Caspian Sea. Several days later on March 11th, The Archduchy military staged its second drop operation. The 2nd and 3rd Terrestrial Mobile Divisions are deployed on the west and east coasts of North America, respectively. Within two days, the 2nd Terrestrial Mobile Division captured the Federal Forces' California base.
The Zeon Archduchy military staged its third and final drop operations on March 18th and April 4th. The 4th Terrestrial Mobile Division was deployed at three points in southeast Asia and Australia, while its reserve forces, the 5th Terrestrial Mobile Division, was dropped at the Red Sea and the shore of the Persian Gulf, and fanned out into North Africa and the Middle East. This division is the Zeon foreign legion, consisting of spacenoids who volunteered to fight for Zion after the start of the war.
The EMF, on the other hand, implements their "V-plan." A secret research base on Side 7 begins to work on developing a mobile suit for the EMF that is superior to anything the Zeons have. To aid in this task, two new discoveries have been made available to the Side 7 engineers. The first is a special metal from the moon called "Lunar Titanium," which is several times stronger than any metal previously known. The second new development was beam weapon technology, which was a by-product of Minovski particle research that the Zeons never bothered to pursue. This new technology could be used to create a MS weapon that had the equivalent power of huge battleship weapons. This new MS rifle was called the Beam Rifle. A further refinement of this technology led to the development of the Beam Saber. The Beam Saber was a melee weapon which could cut through several feet of steel in less than a second. Unfortunately, both these weapons had bugs in them that occasionally caused them to loose power or break down completely. These problems would not be solved until the closing days of the One Year War.
The result of the Side 7 engineers' efforts was well worth the wait, however. In July of U.C. 0079 the prototype RX-78 Gundam MS was completed. The Gundam was the best thing that could have happened to the EMF at the time. No Zeon MS could penetrate the Gundam's armor or match its firepower. The RX-78 Gundam would turn the tide of battle in the EMF's favor, and eventually contribute greatly to the defeat of the Zeon Archduchy. Kido Senshi Gundam, the first Gundam series, begins at this point.