Earliest Tube Alloys bomb
- Thread starter fastmongrel
- Start date
IMO the best way to do it is for Germany and the UK to make an uneasy peace in 1940. The US rearms as OTL, but is wary of the UK because of the peace deal, so no Tizard mission or MAUD report reach the US. Meanwhile, the UK is rearming after Dunkirk and in the expectation of renewed war, but without an actual war there's more money to be thrown around on longer-term projects. This might enable a bomb to be ready by late 1945...
...but ITTL Stalin would surely not be so blind to Hitler's intentions, and Germany would probably get chewed up in the East by attacking a prepared USSR without strategic surprise and so the war would probably be over in 1944ish, with the UK rejoining late on to meet Soviet troops on the Rhine.
...but ITTL Stalin would surely not be so blind to Hitler's intentions, and Germany would probably get chewed up in the East by attacking a prepared USSR without strategic surprise and so the war would probably be over in 1944ish, with the UK rejoining late on to meet Soviet troops on the Rhine.
Except the OP has the British (apparently) fighting Germany, Italy, and Japan. What are the British going to divert resources from, exactly?
Fighter Command?
The Royal Navy?
Bomber Command?
The British Army in the UK?
The Mediterranean Theater?
The Southeast Asia Theater?
India?
The Pacific?
Trying to help keep the Soviets in the war through the North Russia convoys and Persian Corridor?
Come on - in 1938, in terms of total relative industrial potential (100 percent being the UK in 1900), the numbers are:
UK - 181 percent (of UK in 1900)
Ge - 214 percent
SU - 152 percent
Japan - 88 percent
Italy - 46 percent
Want to guess the figure for the US in 1938? 528 percent...
Figures are from Bairoch via Kennedy, page 201 of the 1980 paperback edition of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
Again, worth noting, if the British wanted or needed a deterrant, they had Bomber Command functioning (1,000 plane raids in 1942, after all) and they had development paths to biological and chemical weapons that were significantly less expensive as atomic weapons and, frankly, about as horrific as one would care to have them be...
Of course, Bomber Command needed L-L to function (POL from the US was much cheaper and easier to get to the UK than POL from, say, Iran - even after the Soviet-British invasion in 1941.)
An all-British atomic weapon in the 1940s with a starting point of 1941 and no US in the war is about as likely as, well, ZEELOWE in 1940.
Best,
well strangely enough the first nuclear reactor to function outside of the us was in Canada on sept 5th 1945(with little or no help from anyone else)..........soooooooo........a bomb wouldn t be too far behind.
and I think you missed the point....IFF the only way to survive is to have a nuclear bomb then all else is redundant.
Interestingly, the original MAUD report sold the atomic bomb as a really cheap way to blow up cities. Now that isn't quite true in reality, but it was believed in good faith - and the OTL Bomber Command sucked up truly huge amounts of resources. The best number I've seen for it is £2.78 billion (source - the whole document is well worth a read as it covers a lot of areas not normally considered), equivalent to $11.2 Billion in WW2 dollars. The OTL Manhattan Project cost around $2 billion, so if Bomber Command were to decide to take the nuclear option they could easily cut back a bit (~20%) in order to afford it. The decision in any case would be taken pretty early on, before the real expansion started in Bomber Command so the pain wouldn't really be felt in the UK - more losses in the bombing missions they do undertake, but probably lower in absolute terms.
Furthermore, a great deal of what Bomber Command consumed (high octane aviation fuel, for instance) was imported and paid for in dollars, so getting hold of specialist equipment and materials from the US wouldn't be a major problem. If anything, the foreign exchange problem might be slightly less bad.
Delivering it would also not be a major problem - if they took the decision in say 1940-41 then diverting design resources away from the Lancaster to the Barnes Wallis Victory Bomber isn't hard, and that has broadly the same performance as the B-29 if not slightly better in terms of speed and altitude.
Ummm... maybe. The thing is, the big supposed mission for heavy bombers in the US before their involvement in WW2 was bombing an "invasion fleet" (quite apart from any discussion on how plausible such an invasion would be). Now, that requires a certain level of accuracy which is hard to achieve at the very high altitudes the B-29 was designed for - and particularly considering the weak fighter escort such an invasion fleet would have, the B-17 would most probably be more than accurate.
Having said that, the B-36 was designed from 1940 onwards as a true intercontinental bomber, and has the performance to comfortably deliver a nuclear bomb. It's also in many ways less advanced than the B-29 - so if the US does decide to develop a long-range bomber that's probably what they'll get. Interestingly it's pretty much also immune to interception from anything before reheated turbojets come on the scene (it flies too high for any less advanced aircraft or guns, and the early SAMs prior to the SA-2 don't seem to have been regarded as a threat) - so if the US did export it to a British Empire with nuclear weapons that's pretty much an unstoppable superweapon!
Of course this also raises ther question: what sort of delays does the Manhattan project face from the loss of the research, personnel, and resources that aren't transferred from this time line's Tube Alloys project?
I expect there'll be some, but wouldn't like to say if thats a few months or a couple of years.
Exploring ideas even further, I note that nobody really started investigating nuclear power generation until after the war. WI Tube Alloys decided to concentrate on nuclear reactors for naval propulsion rather than a bomb? Could this lead to HMS Vanguard being the first (and possibly only) nuclear battleship? (I'm not saying that with the benefit of hindsight that would be a sensible idea, but it's certainly one that a Royal Navy with the possibility of nuclear ships might consider.) With a later pooling of technology, is there a chance of a nuclear-powered Vanguard being able to fire a broadside of 8 14" nuclear shells at some point in the early 1950s (like the later stages of a longer Korean War maybe)? I certainly don't think this would be a sensible weapon system, if only due to it's extreme vulnerability to any similar vessel, but again, it's the kind of thing that might be considered. It's a sort of 1940s Death Star.
I expect there'll be some, but wouldn't like to say if thats a few months or a couple of years.
Exploring ideas even further, I note that nobody really started investigating nuclear power generation until after the war. WI Tube Alloys decided to concentrate on nuclear reactors for naval propulsion rather than a bomb? Could this lead to HMS Vanguard being the first (and possibly only) nuclear battleship? (I'm not saying that with the benefit of hindsight that would be a sensible idea, but it's certainly one that a Royal Navy with the possibility of nuclear ships might consider.) With a later pooling of technology, is there a chance of a nuclear-powered Vanguard being able to fire a broadside of 8 14" nuclear shells at some point in the early 1950s (like the later stages of a longer Korean War maybe)? I certainly don't think this would be a sensible weapon system, if only due to it's extreme vulnerability to any similar vessel, but again, it's the kind of thing that might be considered. It's a sort of 1940s Death Star.
Actually, you've got the probabilities back to front. The early US programme was always concentrating on nuclear reactors for power generation ("uranium boilers") while the British were interested in the bomb from the start. The US bomb programme got started for real when Marcus Oliphant was sent over from the UK to find out why the US was ignoring the MAUD report, found that Lyman Briggs had locked it up in his desk without showing it around, and started banging on desks. If for whatever reason this doesn't happen (most likely because of a worse US-UK relationship), the UK would continue with Tube Alloys while the US would head down the road to nuclear reactors - at least until they realise that a nuclear bomb is both inevitable and they need one, at which point you'll get the Manhattan project kicking off. It might be quite a lot cheaper if they've got working reactors by then though - they'd stick to the Plutonium route as the British did postwar rather than putting huge amounts of money into enrichment.
Fair enough, I was going by OTL introduction of working technologies, with USS Nautilus in the early 1950s.
In that case, if the US goes down the reactor route, would the first nuclear vessels be subs as in OTL, or surface ships? I'd suspect that without the post-war chance to go through battle reports and intelligence, not to mention a lack of knowledge of the atomic bomb, then nuclear powered Midway class carriers might be a possibility, as might (albeit more remote) a redesign of the last two Iowa class battleships to nuclear propulsion. Of course these did have nuclear shells available for their main guns (the W23), albeit not until 1955, and only in small numbers (at least in part because they were gun-type weapons using highly enriched uranium).
I think that's actually pretty hard to justify, for two reasons.
Firstly, the advantages of nuclear propulsion for a submarine are profound. You don't need to surface, and the submerged speed you can maintain is radically improved. With surface ships the advantage is much more limited, merely giving you independence from the need for refuelling (if not resupply of other consumables).
Secondly, submarines of the time are pretty small vessels meaning they can use a single reactor (and the early ones weren't very powerful). The early surface ships powered by nuclear reactors were either relatively small or used multiple reactors in parallel to deliver the power required.
The need for a compact reactor in a submarine drives you towards enriched uranium, incidentally, but that doesn't necessarily have to happen in the first generation. It does rather suggest that the reactors will be used for land-based power until after the start of any bomb project though...
Firstly, the advantages of nuclear propulsion for a submarine are profound. You don't need to surface, and the submerged speed you can maintain is radically improved. With surface ships the advantage is much more limited, merely giving you independence from the need for refuelling (if not resupply of other consumables).
Secondly, submarines of the time are pretty small vessels meaning they can use a single reactor (and the early ones weren't very powerful). The early surface ships powered by nuclear reactors were either relatively small or used multiple reactors in parallel to deliver the power required.
The need for a compact reactor in a submarine drives you towards enriched uranium, incidentally, but that doesn't necessarily have to happen in the first generation. It does rather suggest that the reactors will be used for land-based power until after the start of any bomb project though...
marathag
Banned
No reason more could not have been built. Around 2000 203mm gun type warheads were made. Only a handful of 280mm cannons were built, so had few warheads to go with them
The USN got another case of the 'Me too!' so got the Mk23 for the 16", that wasn't much more than a saboted 280mm