Beria tried to discredit and destroy Zhukov at the end of the war. There's a story that Beria set some NKVD goons to arrest Zhukov at his dacha on some phony charge of treason and Zhukov chased them away at gunpoint (Stalin thought it outrageously funny) . The two men loathed each other and even...
H.P. Willmott wrote a hypothetical third wave in his book on Pearl Harbor. He believed that the wave wouldn't arrive over Pearl until late afternoon, (allowing for recovery, quick repairs, rearming, etc.), by which time the target would have been badly obscured by smoke and failing light and the...
If he only hadn't dropped that football, right before the '74 election. It was his Michael Dukakis-as-a-chipmunk moment, his Jimmy Carter menaced by a killer rabbit.
LBJ died of a heart attack in January '73. He once remarked that the men in his family died young of heart disease. Given the terrible stresses of office, a heart attack or stroke might have felled him during his second term. Would Humphrey have been his VP?
I forgot about Trinity. If Trinity and or the Nagasaki plutonium bomb failed would the US have become more reliant on the uranium gun barrel design? The latter seems to be inherently much more dangerous.
It might have some interesting implications for post-war nuclear strategy. A failure rate of 50% (or 33.33% if the 3rd bomb is successful) might give planners pause about the reliability of nuclear weapons. No doubt there would be accusations of sabotage during the Red Scare era.
Might be interesting to see how relations between USSR and China develop. Since the split was in progess long before K's ouster, his reforms may have aggravated relations between the two countries even more. The late 60's border clashes might have come earlier and been much more dangerous.
The big problem for a Canadian SSN is lack of political will. I recall the Mulroney plan to buy SSNs in the 1980s. The level of public debate was disappointing, to say the least. There seemed to be a willful refusal to distinguish nuclear power from nuclear weapons, and supposedly intelligent...
Stalin was increasingly paranoid in his final years. The Doctors' Plot was the opening of a new purge. If Stalin remained even partially in control after his stroke he would have ramped up the repression and terror. He was convinced that a war with the western powers was inevitable so he might...