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  1. Would the USA have bothered with such high investment in the sciences if they were ahead in every stage of the space race?

    While LBJ had some... consistent views his election win in 64 might be credibly butterflied if the zeitgeist isn't shocked in the years prior. I suppose the broad question must become one of how to get the Truman administration to have sophisticated, ICBM-centered ambitions. Unless there was an...

  2. Would the USA have bothered with such high investment in the sciences if they were ahead in every stage of the space race?

    I've got to bow before your knowledge of the history of rocketry and admit that I can't add anything you haven't adequately covered there besides some enquiries about the impact on the other side of the conflict of swapping out Malenkov, Bulganin and Khrushchev for more... conservative options...

  3. Would the USA have bothered with such high investment in the sciences if they were ahead in every stage of the space race?

    I'm reading Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education and it argues, quite elaborately, that Sputnik 1 triggered an immense panic among the 85th Congress, spurring the creation of DARPA-precursor ARPA and boosting funding such that the USA had over 4...

  4. Are there any modern timelines where a single country has multiple currencies?

    This is kinda niche, but I've been reading some of Jane Jacobs' books and she suggests that second-tier cities in a nation are crowded out economically by having to share a currency with first-tier cities in the same way that an oil boom destroys the other sectors of an emerging economy. e.g...

  5. What if OBOR was proposed to be a joint US-China endeavor?

    I watched a recent talk John Thornton (currently at Tsinghua University, formerly director of Goldman Sachs) gave at the University of Texas (link here, the anecdote is from approx 21:00-23:00). He tells an interesting story at one point: It must have been shut down because of either fears of...

  6. Would some combination of central/eastern European states go nuclear if NATO never expanded past Germany?

    Let's, please, for the purpose of this thread, stick to the thread topic instead of discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As early as 1991, many central/eastern European countries expressed an interest in joining NATO. In the 1990s there were referendums which returned majorities in favor...

  7. Is America guaranteed to have a veto of Allied policy during World War II regardless of when it enters the war and the circumstances of said entry??

    The USA had a bigger economy than France and the UK combined before the war, at every day during the war, and after the war. The USA had more destroyers and cruisers than every other navy in the world combined by the midpoint of the war. The USA had more troops in Britain 1 day before D-Day than...

  8. What was the last point in time that the Roosevelt administration would have accepted something other than unconditional Japanese surrender?

    Peter Zeihan's first book, The Accidental Superpower, strongly implies in it's first chapter that, from the American perspective, total Japanese defeat was taken as a given by June 1944. Regardless of the military long-term projections available to the Americans at that point, what was the last...

  9. Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire

    This quote tells you all you need to know about the Duma of today.

  10. WI: North Yorkshire Moors nuked in 1970?

    Would anybody else love a TL where this almost goes ahead only to get cancelled at the last minute due to the backlash described and the scandal not only heavily damages a few careers and slightly changes the various anti-nuclear, leftist and localist movements of Britain but also through the...

  11. Could Japan have purchased Guam? Would the US have accepted?

    Obviously this question doesn't apply to some point in time after 1930 but what about much earlier, say 1917/18/19?

  12. If Austria-Hungary doesn't declare war on, or attack, anybody in 20th century, does anybody DOW/attack her?

    Does the annexation of Bosnia count as an attack?

  13. Britney Spears commits suicide in 2006-2007: What would her legacy have been?

    Ehh.. it all really depends on whether details of daily life emerge or not. If so, might mean semi-conspiratorial public outrage interest in the lives of Bynes, Lohan, Olsens etc and maybe even the Depp/Heard clusterfuck. That said, the US is actually pretty corrupt WRT to the families of...

  14. WI: Gunpowder invented in Sumer 3000 BC

    This entire thread has failed to consider sapping charges. There are tablets from the Neo-Assyrians describing tunnel sapping, so the practice was probably known to earlier societies, especially since walls date to prehistory. Sapping charges completely change the siege landscape.

  15. WI: Gunpowder invented in Sumer 3000 BC

    Did they even have any tube objects for making disposable fireworks and rockets besides maybe pottery? No papermaking, no bamboo plants, the gunpowder weapons they could create might be just cannons, nothing else.

  16. Miscellaneous >1900 (Alternate) History Thread

    Frivolous: Are there any big seaside, riverside or lakeside cities globally that are good candidates for Chicago-style vertical uplifting in the 20th century in some AH? I'm thinking that besides the various cities of the Netherlands, something like that could maybe happen in Houston, Manila...

  17. What's the earliest that daguerrotype, ambrotype or tintype photography could be invented?

    These processes rely on a few chemical products that are beyond most conceptions of pre-industrial technology but, if, say, an experimenting alchemist discovered one of these by chance in Renaissance Italy, Ming China, Constantinople or Abbasid Baghdad could the technology continue as an artisan...

  18. AHC: wank the Maya

    Sailing. Which of the Caribbean coast and the Pacific coast is generally better for the Maya in this scenario?

  19. PC/WI: an advanced civilization in Papua New Guinea

    You should probably fix the thread title

  20. In a hypothetical wind power-wank TL is WW2 any different?

    A quick search for details on the history of wind farms finds that the basic theory was popularised by the Danish scientist Poul la Cour from about 1898 to 1905, small wind farms of around 100 KW per turbine were sporadically introduced in the 1930s and a 1.25 MW turbine comparable in efficiency...
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