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Something I'm curious about but don't have the knowledge to say myself. :o I'm sure we've all heard of the Business Plot, but it's OTL incarnation seems to have had, speaking generously, no chance whatsoever of succeeding. But, with a PoD of 1927 or later, how bad could things get in the US...

This is something I've been wondering about. If President Nixon hadn't been so badly distracted by a certain other issue - and you know the one I mean - how successful could Project Independence have been? Project Independence was the rather optimistic name for a plan to get the United States...

According to Alvin Weinberg's memoirs, John McCone offered him a seat on the Atomic Energy Commission. He doesn't specify a year, but this would be 1958 to 1961, given when McCone was on the AEC. Weinberg turned it down, preferring to remain in the field as head of Oak Ridge. What if he...

I don't know much about US congressional history, so this may be a stupid idea, but here goes... The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was a somewhat unique institution in congress, especially in its first seven years. Its primary task was overseeing the Atomic Energy Commission, but it went...

I've been reading Sailing the Farm (1981), which is the origin of the word "seasteading", and wondering about the possibility of a significant cultural movement based around the idea. At least in this book, the plan wasn't for a floating city or anything like that. The idea was, instead, for...

Short of nuclear war or other global catastrophe, how bad could the oil shocks of the 70s get, with a PoD of 1945 or later? Specifically, measured in terms of how high oil prices stay for how long. (Changing when and how the oil shocks start is allowed.)

We've had plenty of threads and TLs about super-fast fighters and bombers. I'm working on something that involves a different aspect of airplanes: their size. My question for you is, given economic incentives to make bigger airplanes, just how big can they plausibly get? Here's what I have...

This was suggested by TheMann in the More Advanced Earth thread. Skimming the wiki article, Jack Northrop claimed the plane was killed by Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington because Northrop refused to merge with Convair. It also says the plane had severe stability problems. Could...

So, I'm reading a book about Soviet espionage in the US before and during WW2, and came across something interesting: Elsewhere, the book discusses how Gutzeit's plan included buying American newspapers, bribing journalists to write pro-Soviet articles, and using bribes and campaign...

As I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone, oil has been the resource of the last sixty-odd years. And, when the supply is curtailed, as happened in the two oil shocks of the 70s, that has serious economic and political consequences for the consuming nations. My question is, are there other...

With a PoD during or after the Trinity nuclear test in 1945, have the Acheson-Lilienthal plan - or some approximation of it - succeed. The key metric of success is whether any nation or other entity is stockpiling nuclear weapons or weapons material. For those unfamiliar with the plan...

What if Klaus Fuchs' espionage was discovered in early 1944? This was after he'd been transferred from the UK to New York to work on the Manhattan Project, but before he was sent to Los Alamos. Could this lead to other Soviet agents in the US government being unmasked? What effect would...

Urban dispersal is one of the more bizarre proposals for restructuring society to cope with the threat of nuclear war that circulated in the late 40s and early 50s. Sociologists and urban planners, mostly notably William Ogburn, seriously proposed breaking up our large cities and turning the...

Between the 20s and the 60s, the Soviet Union famously politicized genetics, when Trofim Lysenko gained effective control over the argonomic sciences in the USSR. Since Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics and was generally a complete fraud, but enjoyed the confidence of Stalin, this did...

This is kind of abstract, I know, but hear me out. Let's say some unspecified scientocratic type of group gains influence in the US - not in terms of a revolution or anything like that, but rather by influencing public discourse through think-tanks, academic conferences, popular literature...

Edward Stratemeyer was the mostly unknown genius who created Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Rover Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, among numerous others. He operated a sort of fiction factory, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, analogous to the Dumas group (or Tom Clancy today), and was...

Space travel costs too much. I think we can all agree on this. An argument I've seen around the internet is that a big part of the problem with space access costs is scale: there's just not enough demand for launch services to generate economies of scale, either by mass-producing cheap...

What it says on the tin. Could the technical problems be solved? What would the consequences be, both for UK politics, US-UK relations, and the structure of the strategic deterrent? Could this lead to ALBMs as a key part of the nuclear forces, perhaps even one of the legs of the Triad (or...

In April of 1961, when the Generals' Putsch against De Gaulle began, a nuclear device was present at the CSEM nuclear test site in Algeria. The device was detonated in an effects test on April 25, just as the attempted coup was starting to collapse. For decades, rumors have circulated that...

Senator Brien McMahon, also known as "Mr. Atom" and "The Atomic Senator", was the first chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and sponsor of the 1947 McMahon Act creating the Atomic Energy Commission. He also had presidential ambitions, making a brief run for the Democratic...