Possible Russian & Japanese WW2 Super Weapons

The USA developed the atomic bomb. Germany developed the rocket. So what kind of super weapon would the USSR and Imperial Japan have developed. If they could have been bothered/had the funds?

Let your imaginations run free :D
 

Geon

Donor
Balloon Bomb Variant

One simple variant of the Japanese Balloon bomb could have been very ugly. Have the Japanese decide to load their balloons with several incendiary bombs instead of a few high explosive bombs. In addition have some of the balloons carry bombs with plague and smallpox bacillii. We know the Japanese were working on Bio-warfare agents which they had used in China. Imagine the ugly possibilities had they decided to load plague bacilii in their balloon bombs and just one of them had managed to release its load over a city on the West Coast!

Geon
 
One simple variant of the Japanese Balloon bomb could have been very ugly. Have the Japanese decide to load their balloons with several incendiary bombs instead of a few high explosive bombs. In addition have some of the balloons carry bombs with plague and smallpox bacillii. We know the Japanese were working on Bio-warfare agents which they had used in China. Imagine the ugly possibilities had they decided to load plague bacilii in their balloon bombs and just one of them had managed to release its load over a city on the West Coast!

Geon

They held off doing this in OTL due to the ease the US would have in containing such an attack whilst the inevitable US response could be potentially catastrophic.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
One simple variant of the Japanese Balloon bomb could have been very ugly. Have the Japanese decide to load their balloons with several incendiary bombs instead of a few high explosive bombs. In addition have some of the balloons carry bombs with plague and smallpox bacillii. We know the Japanese were working on Bio-warfare agents which they had used in China. Imagine the ugly possibilities had they decided to load plague bacilii in their balloon bombs and just one of them had managed to release its load over a city on the West Coast!

Geon


Plague is endemic to the Western U.S.
 

Geon

Donor
Bio War

Plague is endemic to the Western U.S.

It does not necessarily have to be plague and it doesn't have to be the Western U.S.. The Japanese were working on a variety of biowarfare agents including smallpox. We know they launched about 6,000 balloon bombs and over half of them reached the U.S. Some as far away as Michigan! It would not have taken a major leap for some of these bombs to contain biowar agents.

In fact..and here I will admit I may be entering ASB territory, how do we know that some of those that didn't make it or were never found (and that is not out of the realm of possibility according to some who have studied the Japanese balloon bombs)and may still be in some remote area in the U.S. didn't carry biowarfare.

In addition The Red, in reference to the "potentially catastrophic" response of the U.S., we are talking about a military [Japan] that had already thoroughly aroused the wrath of the U.S. by its atrocities, that had shown itself fully capable of launching kamikaze attacks, that was willing to commit itself to a suicidal defense of every strip of land it held, and had shown itself perfectly willing to use all forms of biological warfare in China. Given all of this and the fact that Japan was being bombed mercilessly by 1944 through 1945 and that even with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the invasion of the Soviet Union of Manchuria the Japanese Army still wanted to fight to the death, I would have a hard time thinking of anything the Japanese military wouldn't be capable of at this time.
 
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Not exactly a reliable source, but wikipedia says there are unconfirmed reports that the Soviet bioweapons program predated World War II, and that the Tularemia outbreak at Stalingrad might have been caused by a bacterial attack.
 
If the Japanese are going to have a superweapon it's going to have to be biological. They had no capacity to develop nukes, and chemical weapons aren't that great unless you're talking mustard or lewisite for area denial. Nerve gas isn't that great.

Japan experimented with plague, but it was not that effective, A genetically modified smallpox could do great harm, but I don't think this was feasible at the time and you'd have to get your whole population re-vaccinated for smallpox or suffer worse damage than you could inflict.
 

Sumeragi

Banned
They had no capacity to develop nukes
It depends on how you look at it. If Japan had consolidated its resources into a single project and centered it in Korea, there might have been a chance that Japan could have developed the bomb. Heungnam (Konan at the time) has plenty of uranium, and the energy from the dams could have helped with the electricity. I see it as a lost opportunity (not that I support Japan winning.....)
 
It depends on how you look at it. If Japan had consolidated its resources into a single project and centered it in Korea, there might have been a chance that Japan could have developed the bomb. Heungnam (Konan at the time) has plenty of uranium, and the energy from the dams could have helped with the electricity. I see it as a lost opportunity (not that I support Japan winning.....)


The Japanese had a problem with the oil embargo of the US. But what if they pumped lots of ressources into the research of nuclear power plants and later ships ? That might delay the war, and we might see the atomic battleship Yamato, which sounds like a superweapon to me.
 
Japan had anthrax

The problem was the British sic sic the Americans had much more sophisticated anthrax and more effective delivery systems and would have exterminated the entire Japanese culture in retaliation (in Churchill's case quite gleefully)
 
It's widely believed the Soviet rocket program began post war with German science. What is not widely known is the Soviets were actually quite advanced in the field of rocket research pre-war. There were V-2 like proposals but these were rejected for a variety of reasons, but the concept was not alien to them. It's not inconcievable they could've developed much more advanced rockets than the Kaytushas. Perhaps something like the V-1 or a smaller V-2.

Japan actually had a superweapon. They intended to drop biological agents by floatplanes from their I-400 aircraft carrier submarines. San Diego was to be targetted to disrupt the troop build up for Operation Downfall. This very well could have happened had Japan fought on a little longer.
 
It depends on how you look at it. If Japan had consolidated its resources into a single project and centered it in Korea, there might have been a chance that Japan could have developed the bomb. Heungnam (Konan at the time) has plenty of uranium, and the energy from the dams could have helped with the electricity. I see it as a lost opportunity (not that I support Japan winning.....)

It's only a lost opportunity until you realize how massive of an undertaking a project would have been and how many of their resources would have been diverted for the effort. Meanwhile all those great resources from Korea would have been diverted from war production for the sake of building something that:

A. Japan is likely to be beaten to by other, more advanced powers.

B. The innovation is likely to come too late in the war for Japan to make any serious difference, as in the Soviets are banging on Korea's door just as some Japanese scientist is saying "EUREKA!"

Not to mention the fact that Japan's internal security was severely compromised by the presence of multiple Soviet spies who would've fed information on the Japanese a-bomb program back to Moscow.

Whole lot of cost, and the benefits are unlikely to come in time for Japan to put them to any decent use, meanwhile the Soviets roll over Japanese possessions in mainland Asia as OTL and grab up every last thing from the project that they can.
 

Faeelin

Banned
For the Soviets: Perhaps a tank with a 76 millimeter cannon that they can produce in 1941? Could they put enough sloped armor on it that it defeats most German antitank weaponry?

Hrm. Can we handwave this weapon so that it's fairly simple to mass produce? Maybe we could see the Soviets swarm west and defeat the German invasion with hordes of better tanks.
 
For the Soviets to have the luxury to develop superweapons means that at minimum their armies have to seriously blunt the inevitable German invasion well west of Minsk. IOTL the USSR was too busy fighting for its life to focus on superweapons and turned out loads and loads of regular weaponry that proved a lot more efficient than Hitler's attempts to leap into the 1950s. So the changes that would let the USSR invest in this require much bigger changes in the wider war.

The same factors for different reasons apply to Japan: their victories were easily won against both the GMD and CCP and for that matter also the warlords in China, so they went to expanding their production too late in the war for them to remotely match the earlier, less spammy US Navy and by the time they would have potentially made use of such weapons they were a mite too busy trying to stave off invasion of the Home Islands. Bio-warfare's never been seriously used because germs don't respect lines on maps.
 
The Japanese did deploy some chemical weapons in China, and they would work pretty well until the wind started blowing in the other direction. Also, Strategos' Risk: I wouldn't count the Char B1 as a superweapon because it wasn't more than an ordinary heavy tank. This, however...
 
The Japanese did deploy some chemical weapons in China, and they would work pretty well until the wind started blowing in the other direction.

They also may have done bio-warfare experiments in China as well. Nobody in Europe was willing to use it as IIRC it was the one weapon Hitler refused to authorize in use in warfare even on the Eastern Front against enemy soldiers.
 
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