How can the invention of nuclear weapons be delayed till the 19650s or 60s ?

Petike

Petike

How can the invention of nuclear weapons be delayed till the 1950s or 60s ?

I need this for my upcoming TL.

What POD would you recommend ?

NOTES :

1. The reasons for delaying the bomb have to be different, than scientific. So... I need political, social, military or other reasons, why they won't be either discovered or used by the time of WWII.

2. The WWII of this TL ends earlier - in late autumn 1944.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
 
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Shimbo

Shimbo

Instead of the Nazis forcing Jewish atomic scientists to emigrate they round them up and kill them.

No Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, no Frisch-Peierls memorandum, no memorandum, no MAUD committee, no committee, no report, no Tube Alloys, and no Marcus Oliphant trip to the USA, no trip, no Manhattan Project = substantially delayed nuclear weapons.

The German project was going nowhere, and it's controversial that the Japanese project existed except in a few labs, anyway both will be gone when WW2 ends in 1944 (however you do that).

Eventually the Plutonium bomb will be discovered as a side product of nuclear power generation. If you can kill Enrico Fermi too that will slow things down even further.
 
Mad Bad Rabbit

Mad Bad Rabbit

Have Thomas Midgley Jr. (the guy who invented leaded gasoline and Freon) die or go insane from tetraethyl lead poisoning in the 1920s.

No Freon --> Roy Plunkett at Du Pont doesn't accidentally discover Teflon in 1938.

No Teflon in 1944 --> there's not a practical sealant that can handle uranium hexaflouride vapor ; so enriching uranium via gas diffusion is not feasible on industrial scales. They can enrich trace amounts via mass spectrometry, but not enough for a bomb.

No Teflon also means no good sealant that resists nitric acid, so chemical separation of plutonium from uranium fuel rods is also impractical.
 

Mark E.

Enrico Fermi only lived until 1954, so if Teflon is delayed, you have a good scenario to delay the Bomb. Eventually, polymer scientists will invent Teflon, but inventions of this magnitude can easily be delayed for two decades. Ultimately, we have a viable technical scenario for a delay into the sixties.
 
Fenrir_Angerboda

Fenrir_Angerboda

would, say, a radiation leak, or some other disater during the Manhatten project stop or slow dow the project?

for example, something goes wrong and most of the senor scientist are killed.
 

Mark E.

PMN1 said:
When people say all we have got out of space expenditure is non stick pans I really do like pointing out teflon predates the space race by many years.

:)
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But the 17-year patent had to expire before the invention became public domain. And generic Teflon is called PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene).
 
Fenrir_Angerboda

Fenrir_Angerboda

mowque said:
I dislike this idea that the 'top men' just stood around the main reactors at all times. It is constantly brought up in threads.
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well, i mean anything could have happened, not the
'well, they all stood in frount of the reactor and somebody hit it with a hammer' idea.

like, say, mind you this is a streach, but a few of the main scientist get deadly sick from something else, car crash, falls down the stairs, any number of things.
 

Derek Jackson

I recall a televison programme about the bomb. One of the things that came up was that refugee physicists in Britain had redone calculations as to the amount of fissile material needed. There had, if I recall correctly, been estimates which would have meant that an actual bomb would have to weigh something like 30 tons- totally impossible to deliver with WW2 tech.

If my understanding is correct and the previous estimate is still believed then there would have seemed little point in the Manhatten project.
 

Theodoric

Derek Jackson said:
I recall a televison programme about the bomb. One of the things that came up was that refugee physicists in Britain had redone calculations as to the amount of fissile material needed. There had, if I recall correctly, been estimates which would have meant that an actual bomb would have to weigh something like 30 tons- totally impossible to deliver with WW2 tech.

If my understanding is correct and the previous estimate is still believed then there would have seemed little point in the Manhatten project.
Click to expand...
This miscalculation was discovered quite quickly, I believe. Before WW2, if I recall correctly. I must dig up my book on banished German Jewish scientists. It's called 'Hitlers Gift', and has several chapters on the Manhattan project.
 
Petike

Petike

Thank you all ! You have been very helpful - and even given me a laugh here and there... :)

One more thing about the TL :

It's got a more isolationist USA, that doesn't even enter the European theater of WWII (they only fight the Japanese in the Pacific) and a technologically wanked up British and French Empire. :D Does that help change the whole history of reactor engineering and research for my needs ?
 

Blue Max

Well, some ideas:

No WW2 or WW2 is a small incident: if there is no WW2 then the exploratory projects for understanding nuclear technology would not begin with the primitive technology available--it would wait, instead, for advanced computers to handle many of the calculations. By 1970, someone would have to have pulled off a nuclear detonation, although its probably not well understood.

Foundations of Atomic Theory are missing: What happens if John Dalton's ideas on atomic theory are never written? Or if Henri Becquerel never attempts to use uranium salts and discovered their emitted radiation? A weaker or dysfunctional atomic model might make a critical round of understanding chemistry essential before any nuclear attempt can begin. There are many discoveries before Manhattan that could avert the entire project.

Projections of Expenses are Prohibitive: If, for once, the apparent costs are massively excessive, it might not be possible to support the project in the first place. The United States could certainly afford a great deal of projects--but if instead of recommending the Nuclear Bomb, Einstein confidently predicts that the science is beyond the capacity of the United States--then, this could create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Uranium not Found: Although the PoD might be centuries old, Humanity never discovering Uranium or Thorium, or discovering it much more recently, would not be a major PoD--an Orange Glaze not developed and eyepieces not manufactured, not a big deal.

But by 1930, these problems would make nuclear technology entirely theoretical--Marie Curie might find Radium and Polonium, but besides releasing radiation these are loser isotopes.
 
Fenrir_Angerboda

Fenrir_Angerboda

Blue Max said:
But by 1930, these problems would make nuclear technology entirely theoretical--Marie Curie might find Radium and Polonium, but besides releasing radiation these are loser isotopes.
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and instead of conventual Nukes, we get Radiation bombs, ala 'The man with the Iron Heart'.
 
Petike

Petike

Blue Max said:
Well, some ideas:

No WW2 or WW2 is a small incident: if there is no WW2 then the exploratory projects for understanding nuclear technology would not begin with the primitive technology available--it would wait, instead, for advanced computers to handle many of the calculations. By 1970, someone would have to have pulled off a nuclear detonation, although its probably not well understood.

Projections of Expenses are Prohibitive: If, for once, the apparent costs are massively excessive, it might not be possible to support the project in the first place. The United States could certainly afford a great deal of projects--but if instead of recommending the Nuclear Bomb, Einstein confidently predicts that the science is beyond the capacity of the United States--then, this could create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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I think these two would be the best... The second and fourth were just... not very fitting for my TL... and not very believable... If it was this, those two would seem more logical.


But I shudder to think what becomes of my TL when people will go naively hurray-optimistically bonkers about "the immense usefulness and harmless nature of Atomic energy" in the late 60s (OTL 1940s and 1950s propaganda style !)... :rolleyes: I also feel a little uneasy, since there will be no Cold War as we know it - America and the 3 Russian states have either none or very few nukes and nuclear facilities, and the traditional European powers will each have their own arsenals by time. Britain and France will have them for sure. The Japanese and Chinese will get some later on as well... Who knows, what will the world look like with this entirely different distribution of world powers and nuclear weaponry ? :eek:
 
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Shimbo

Shimbo

Derek Jackson said:
I recall a televison programme about the bomb. One of the things that came up was that refugee physicists in Britain had redone calculations as to the amount of fissile material needed. There had, if I recall correctly, been estimates which would have meant that an actual bomb would have to weigh something like 30 tons- totally impossible to deliver with WW2 tech.

If my understanding is correct and the previous estimate is still believed then there would have seemed little point in the Manhatten project.
Click to expand...

Theodoric said:
This miscalculation was discovered quite quickly, I believe. Before WW2, if I recall correctly. I must dig up my book on banished German Jewish scientists. It's called 'Hitlers Gift', and has several chapters on the Manhattan project.
Click to expand...

The correct calculation of the necessary amount of U235 was Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls vital contribution. Everyone else had got it wrong including Heisenberg (hence low priority German project) and Szillard/Einstein (hence US project had very low priority until the visit of Marcus Oliphant evangelising the MAUD report, which built on Frisch-Peierls calculation). That's why I posted that killing them off is vital to slowing the bomb.
 
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