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It might seem tasteless, but without the Chernobyl cataclysm we would never have had Star Trek V: The Undiscovered Country, or at least it would have been a very different film. Shatner's script was unsubtle and the ending was essentially recycled from Star Trek II - with Kirk sacrificing...

I remember the late 1990s. Back then the stock enemies were rogue Russian generals, or Balkan insurgents, or to a much lesser extent the Chinese. Notably the Operation Flashpoint games, which predated the war on terror slightly, had a mixture of rogue Russian generals, Balkan guerrilla groups...

I was going to suggest Buenos Aires - Argentina was one of the world's richest countries at the dawn of the last century, although it suffered from a "resource curse". Furthermore my hunch is that mega-cities grow from old-school blast-furnace-style industrialisation, which requires the...

I suppose it depends on the method of dispersal. My understanding is that with chemical and biological agents the key problem is delivering the agent over a wide area in a tight timescale. If for example there had been a fire in a research station leading to the dispersal of anthrax spores into...

I've read Final Cut, and there's a short vignette where the writer has a meeting with a Famous Director and asks him for advice - the plan was to sound out the idea of him taking over the film, but in a polite way. The book doesn't identify the director but I always assumed it was David Lean...

From what I remember the Encarta engine was similar to Hypercard, Director, other early hypertext/multimedia authoring systems. HTML took off because it was portable, simple, no-one owned it, and it was similar enough to SGML that academics could grasp it. Microsoft was famously slow to embrace...

I realise I'm quoting myself, but I pondered the water situation in post number two, way back on page one of this thread. I've always assumed that the Germans would manage to get at least some soldiers across, in the first wave, and perhaps some more in the second. I don't know how they would...

I learn from Wikipedia that "amongst the requirements of Specification B.1/35 was a speed of no less than 195 MPH while flying at 15,000 feet, a range of 1,500 miles while carrying a payload of 2,000lb of bombs" - it was issued in 1934. My hunch is that the end result would have been a...

I've booked a holiday to Hong Kong in October and I've been reading up on Hong Kong. I learn that I need an Octopus card otherwise I won't be able to function. According to the World Bank's incredibly useful website Hong Kong's GNI per capita in 2018 is $46310 vs $8690 for China. The relative...

I'm not sure about forever, but suppose the British cut a deal with China whereby they would agree to pressure the United States to drop its recognition of Taiwan in exchange for China overlooking the 99-year lease, or extending it, or adding a fifty-year leaseback agreement or something along...

I know it's a spoof, and it's also topic drift, but were there any plans - or any chance - of the Germans launching some kind of "spectacular" against Britain, along the lines of Otto Skorzeny's rescue of Mussolini or the SAS raid on Peddle Island in the Falklands? A strictly limited operation...

I draw a blank. I learn from Wikipedia that the US had conscription during the Korean War, but it seems to have been uncontroversial, or at least nowhere near as controversial as with Vietnam. The war reached a stalemate before The Wild One and Jack Kerouac's On the Road etc, at a time when the...

Not exactly an early death - she was 64 - but I wish Delia Derbyshire could have lived a few more years. She worked at the BBC Radiophonics Workshop in the 1960s and was responsible for arranging the first Doctor Who theme tune, with a mixture of oscillators and tape loops. She was an electronic...

This is strangely familiar - you made essentially the same thread here six months ago: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/ahc-make-big-budget-horror-movies-possible.456758/ And the counterarguments are the same - family-friendly non-bloody non-scary horror is difficult to pull off.

I've always assumed that the key problem from fallout wasn't the intensity so much as the fact that certain isotopes continue to present a low-level hazard for decades. After it settles on the ground the fallout leeches into the soil and is then absorbed into the food chain. It gets sucked up by...

This was essentially the scenario in John Hackett's The Third World War, and also Harold Coyle's Team Yankee, which took place in the same universe. In both books NATO manages to blunt the Soviet attack, at which point the Soviet army starts to run out of supplies, so the Soviets nuke...

It's unlikely if only because Prince Charles wouldn't want to collaborate with chavs. He strikes me as too principled to pretend to support a movement he doesn't agree with. He's not an obvious choice for a chav-type political party. Princess Anne is more plausible as a chav monarch - not...

I'm reminded of one of the great ironies of the 1988 campaign. Bush had a genuinely impressive military career - he was shot down in air combat - but he just looked ridiculous posing in that tank. His tall frame hung out of the hatch like a scarecrow, and his ballistic helmet was too small. He...

On the other hand, the range was such that the Argentine strike aircraft were only likely to come from one direction. If they knew precisely where the British fleet was at any given time, and had the ability to navigate precisely over water in all weather, they could have delivered simultaneous...

On the subject of nuclear errors, I'm currently reading Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is fascinating. I've got to the part where the Nazis have kicked out all the Jewish nuclear scientists, thus depriving Nazi Germany of an invaluable pool of knowledge while simultaneously...