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After looking at some of the preliminaries to Gwen's "Soviet Deng Xiaopeng" timeline, I began to wonder about what effects signifigantly reduced tensions would have in the Middle East, one of the main fronts of the Cold War. My own readings suggest that the Arab nations were receptive to Soviet...

Too early to tell. Right now, we aren't really sure whether nobody in THIS administration knew about the plans for 9/11, or whether the info was known but ignored. I feel that for any good scenario based on current events, we'll have to wait a decade or so, when we're less caught up in the...

I would also recommend "Stalin" by Edvard Radzinsky. You can find out more about the book here. It's about 400 pages, and the author does give a slightly different spin on the man. It's also more relaxed in structure than the average biography, but still worth a read. Remember, research is...

Out of curiousity, how exactly did the Japanese nuclear program go? I was under the impression that it was using the same basic technique as the Nazi project (which wasn't as good as the Manhattan project), and while some stuff was shipped to Japan on and off, the Japanese military leaders...

Well, in the United States, the development of the railroads helped to spurn growth of cities in the Midwest in the 19th century. If certain corporate interests get their way, it could have been that Omaha, Nebraska becomes a small town, while the capital of Texas is Jefferson.

This is the thread for the discussion of Turtledove's new book, Curious Notions, the sequel to Gunpowder Empire. More info about the book can be found at Amazon.com here. Thoughts?

I just saw this yesterday, and I'm still trying to figure out how history was altered for this one. I'm also trying to figure out how those planes could hit the water without their wings snapping off, but that's another story... I found it kind of odd how advanced Totenkopf's (great name!)...

Yeah, for a lot of it's history, China occupied a hunk of territory roughly equivalent to the eastern half of modern China. And it did have a tendency to splinter into little kingdoms when the dynasty fell.

Wow...the first thread I started that has gone over 40 posts! I'm so happy...

Well, the new government of North Korea would be a military dictatorship for several years, but if the Chinese play their cards right, and don't start crackdowns or ethnic snobbery or something, you could probably expect to see some improvement from OTL North Korea. Of course, now the Chinese...

If we're looking for weapons that could have been develped more, how about the A7V Sturmpanzerwagen, the first tank the Germans developed in WWI? While they could dish out, and take more, damage than the Allied tanks of the time, they were slow, bulky, and the Reich didn't have enough manpower...

I suppose the question depends on what exactly Rasputin was more interested in: Mother Russia or himself. From what I've read, I get the impression that he was mostly interested in building a little "nest" for himself in the upper social echelons of the capital, and using his influence on the...

I know. I figure cars will still be necessary for those who live in rural areas. For larger transits, maybe a rental car system might work.

I was sitting on the bus, stuck in traffic, and was musing about how much I, and many others, loathe gridlock. So now I'm wondering: is there any way, with a POD of no earlier than 1850 AD, that public transit would become the norm in North American cities, with cars still existing, but not...

Well, in "West of Eden", most of the dinosaurs stay bascially the same for the next 65 million years or so, but a new species of land-dwelling sentient reptiles evolved from mosasaurs (big swimming reptiles around in the Cretaecous) takes over the planet (and becoming quite adept at...

Sadly, that particular anatomical condition seems to be prevalent in the plots of AH-based games such as "Red Alert 2" (Soviets building missiles? But they're our friends!) and "Freedom Fighters": "Hmm...the Soviets have taken over the Old World, placed missiles in Cuba, and are invading...

Well, I fel that for this to work, you ae probably also going to need to change some of the thinking going on at the upper echelons of the American cabinet. While it seems that Bush was perfectly all right with going to war, he probably could have been talked out of by a persuasive speaker...

I'm certain that all of us here has come across some form of alternate history with some type of idea so fundamentally flawed it makes you want to scream. My question is: what is it, and why? For me, it's anything involving a long-term Nazi-Soviet alliance based on cooperation. Both of...

On reading a biography of Khrusechev, specifically the part dealing with the set-up for the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the points the author made is that the Soviets didn't have to make the missle placement in Cuba a secret. Apparently, even Castro himself thought that, as this was a...

Exactly. Unfortunately, by the time he was in office, his hands were more or less tied by the Senate and the governors, so there wasn't really anything he could do. And after the Detroit and Atlanta Riots of '71 started, it was just the final step on a slippery slope towards total chaos.