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In 1951, Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh proposed a deal with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to share profits 50/50 between the company and the Iranian government, in line with existing arrangements between oil companies and the governments of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. The AIOC...

Originally, the Project 627 (NOVEMBER class) submarine was supposed to have been built for the Soviet Navy with an armament of one enormous (1550mm) nuclear-armed torpedo - the T-15 - for attacking ports and naval bases. Just two 533mm torpedo tubes, without reloads, would have been carried for...

IOTL, after the PRINZ EUGEN broke away from the BISMARCK during their Atlantic sortie, the cruiser was found to have mechanical troubles which forced her to return to port. What if the machinery problems never materialised, and she was able to continue her raiding sortie?

Well, only a little bit lucky. Let's say that the bomb-thrower has better timing and the Archduke's car is blown up. He is seriously injured, losing a leg and seeming in danger of death for some time; his wife survives, whilst the other two occupants of the car are killed. How does this effect...

In the 1990-1991 Gulf War, the Coalition expected heavy fighting and considerable casualties in the liberation of Kuwait. Instead, the Iraqi armed forces (sensibly) turned tail and ran. What would it take for them to stand and fight, and what would be the consequences.

I was musing on Hillary Clinton's public perception in the United States, and got to thinking that the nearest British equivalent to her run for President would be if Cherie Blair became Leader of the Labour Party. So, that's your mission, with a PoD after 2 May 1997 - i.e., after Tony Blair...

In OTL, the newly-promoted Rear-Admiral Beatty was offered the post of second-in-command of the Atlantic Fleet - under a certain Rear-Admiral Jellicoe - in 1910. He refused, preferring to wait on a post that was more convenient for his social and domestic lives in the Home Fleet. This refusal...

The QUEEN ELIZABETH class were rather controversial in their day. Let's say the naysayers win and the RN instead gets four REVENGE class battleships and a repeat TIGER - let's say LEOPARD - in the 1912 programme, completing in late 1914/early 1915. In the 1913 programme, four more REVENGE class...

Tom Clancy's Ryanverse might not have started out as alternate history, but between Denver getting nuked, Israel making peace with the Arabs, and Japan deciding that the odds against it in WW2 weren't bad enough, it sure finished up that way. With a plausible PoD no earlier than 1950 - the...

IOTL, Hyman Rickover managed to get parallel positions as head of Naval Reactors and on the AEC, carving himself out an empire that ruled - for better and worse - USN submarine development and operations for thirty years. What if instead he is appointed elsewhere in 1952-1953, at the end of...

For the uninitiated, Operation ROBOT was a 1952 proposal by the Treasury and Bank of England to restore convertibility for non-resident Sterling currency by allowing the exchange rate for the pound to float. The objective was to relieve pressure on the British balance of payments, but it was...

IOTL, the British government made a number of sub-optimal procurement decisions in order to send work to Shorts Aircraft and Harland & Wolff in Belfast. The objective was to keep employment high in Northern Ireland, thereby reducing the possibility of civil unrest. What if this isn't done...

What if one of the combatants in WW1 had developed a weapon meeting the definition of an assault rifle, and issued it on a large scale as a standard infantry rifle? There are plenty of candidates, but the obvious ones to me are the Russian Fedorov Avtomat, and the French fully-automatic...

Your challenge is, with a PoD after 10th June 1921, to make Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark - the future Philip Mountbatten, and eventually Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh - the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Bonus points if you can do it with...

With a PoD after 1945, how far can you make the United Kingdom fall in economic and diplomatic influence? The United Kingdom must be recognisable as such. No significant territorial changes within the British Isles, and the general parliamentary form of government must remain. Abolition of the...

The F-16 is one of the most widely exported aircraft of modern times, with operators on every continent except Australasia and Antarctica. What if the export restrictions brought in by Jimmy Carter in 1977 had stayed in effect, and the F-16 was only made available for export in the...

In 1959, French President Charles de Gaulle proposed a tripartite directorship of NATO, under which the USA, UK and France would jointly direct strategy, control nuclear weapons, and exercise command of NATO forces. Of course, this was mostly aimed at giving France a seat at the 'top table' of...

When the British nuclear weapons program was (re)started after WW2, the initial thinking was for a graphite moderated, water cooled plutonium-production pile of 300 MW(t) output, similar to the US facility at Hanford. Two sites were identified as suitable on remoteness grounds for production...

Electrically powered milk floats were widespread in the United Kingdom for local deliveries, especially of milk, for much of the postwar era. For the typical European driver, the limited range of electric vehicles isn't seriously prohibitive, since distances are much smaller than in the United...

On the evening of 9th December 1941, Force Z was within five miles of the IJN's 7th Cruiser Squadron, comprising five heavy cruisers and three destroyers. An IJN reconnaissance flight dropped a flare having misidentified the cruiser CHOKAI as the PRINCE OF WALES; this prompted Admiral Philips to...