A More Plausible "Big One"

6) - Authorial fiat.

Basically this, and he just hit the ground running with it.

A) - Stuart had only a very cursory and limited knowledge of non weapon related history, not even wikipedia level of knowledge. If the story was posted here he will be full of comment about the mistake and implausibility in less than 5 seconds, but in 10 Calbear will ban him due to his aversion to admit to have done any mistake and being very vocal about it. Probably this is one of the reason why he had a low opinion of this forum.

I think there's lots of former posters who dislike that they're opinions were disagreed with and so had to lash out in a way that ended up with them criticizing this site for enforcing civility.

B) - Can't keep separate his political idea from the story...but there is also the big suspect that's in reality he is just panpering the audience.

Yeah the story waxes anvilicious at times when he tries to grind his ideas home despite a lack of realism.

C) - his writing style is very boring.

This I would disagree with. It's a very gearhead style probably suited more to Calbear's AANW style narrative (I mean I couldn't for the life of me name who any of Slade's non-historical characters are) which charts things from an operational/technical perspective. His battle scenes can be exciting when you look at them from the meta of weapons going off (in true David Weber fashion) but can bog down in the minutia as we see "X weapon system used Y technical specification to produce Z result against A type of enemy gun emplacement firing B type of ammunition at C range against F style terrain" which can become boring. It can be done effectively, and by admittance I've read some of his work where it is. It's hard to do right though.

- No Chipang (Japan while conquering China become sinizated in a couple of years...yes i suspect that Slade had not read a single book about that period), please; at max a resurgent Imperial China that take control of the Japanese Island and create her own Sphere of Co-prosperity

Definitely. This needed to be excised. It would be far more interesting for a struggling Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere to slug on into the 60s-70s then have the geopolitical consequences of that pan out.

- No randomid caliphate, better a nasserite-like Arab Union

That was simply the most ridiculous thing ever put to paper outside a Tom Kratman book.

- If the war ended some years after OTL and after the attack there has been a multi-years effort to destroy any German remnants in Russia/east Europe...thing are pretty much changed from the ethnic pow.

Eh that's why the Big One is flawed even in conception. High probability of operational failure from simple logistics and maintenance issues, followed by a vulnerability to improved German AA and interceptors would mean it would be less than effective. Not to mention the German field armies then simply entrench in Eastern Europe and you haven't even solved the problem of occupied Europe as the surviving Nazis rape the occupied territories to rebuild, and now you don't have a coherent plan to finish them off...

- Yes i undestand Slade that for keep America in his eternal 50's the rest of the world need to be nerfed and no credible menace must rise...but is ridicolous and more try to keep it in this manner and more credibility go down the flush.

Nothing to add to this.
 
Not to mention the German field armies then simply entrench in Eastern Europe and you haven't even solved the problem of occupied Europe as the surviving Nazis rape the occupied territories to rebuild, and now you don't have a coherent plan to finish them off...
That is an issue addressed in later novels IIRC.
Though after so many years of National Socialist wartime occupation do you think that Eastern Europe had not been ravened to the marrow?
 
To illustrate the character and qualifications of the man, stuart slade, who wrote the big one: In later books he decides that all the countries in the middle east join up to form a single state known as the caliphate. A norweigan guy on the forums points out some historical issues with this and in response Stuart has finland basically be occupied by russia in his books to get back at him.
 

PlasmaTorch

Banned
[1] Agreed it would be an extremely stupid idea, but then TBO has only tenuous connections to reality.

[2] The B-36 problems have been dissected in detail here and at on other fora; it's utterly impossible.

Yes. The very premise of TBO is invalidated from the outset.

There was actually a guy over on SB who did a good job of addressing the B-36 problem.

[3] Actually if the Manhattan Project continued at wartime production levels [one MK3 per ten days] and incorporated the planned upgrades and new facilities scheduled for late '45 and into 1946 [up to one MK3/4 bomb per 5-6 days] two hundred nuclear weapons would be quite possible. Difficult and resource intensive (especially if the HEU is wasted on the MK1 designs) but possible.

Are you sure about that? The hanford reactors started having problems with the wigner effect sometime in 1946. The b reactor went first (because it was the first to come online), then d and f reactors went too. Didn't they have to be torn down and rebuilt to get up to full capacity again? I wonder how many kilos of plutonium they'd be able to churn out before that happened.

Also, wouldn't the americans need to keep at least one reactor online in order to have a continous supply of polonium available for use in the initiators? In my mind, the biggest problem with using a bunch of mark 3 bombs is maintaining enough polonium for them all. That stuff decays pretty quickly, and it takes alot of time to transmute properly, so that seems like a potential bottleneck.

In OTL, the americans also had problems making enough weapons assemblys to keep up with the supply of fissile material... Anyway, do you have any info on what the planned upgrades for the hanford reactors were?

[4] Historically the production rate for MK1 bombs under wartime conditions was roughly three per year ('Little Boy', a second included in the Downfall planning for mid-November '45, a third in mid-Spring 1946) though the rate could have increased. Therefore having six to eight gun-barrel weapons available is, IMO, quite plausible.
One of the few plausible bits of Slade's work...

Personally, I don't think it was a smart route for stewart to go. If the americans knew they would need a stockpile of over 200 atomic bombs, then why in gods name didn't they use the uranium in an implosion bomb? Even an annular bore design would be better. Its incomprehensible to me that they would waste it on the mark 1 design. That amount of fissile material could have been used to make 25 or so implosion bombs!
 
I think there's lots of former posters who dislike that they're opinions were disagreed with and so had to lash out in a way that ended up with them criticizing this site for enforcing civility.

A) - Stuart had only a very cursory and limited knowledge of non weapon related history, not even wikipedia level of knowledge. If the story was posted here he will be full of comment about the mistake and implausibility in less than 5 seconds, but in 10 Calbear will ban him due to his aversion to admit to have done any mistake and being very vocal about it. Probably this is one of the reason why he had a low opinion of this forum.

If the novel's completely batshit official message board was any indication, Stuart would catch a banhammer for some sort of bigotry within a few weeks. Like just take a big prize wheel with every non-straight-male-WASP ethnicity on it and spin that sumbitch.

I always saw The Big One as this fleshed out rationalization of the "NUKE EM ALL" eliminationist impulse that's been lurking in the Id of the Far-Right since the dawn of the nuclear age. Its a cool grimdark fantasy, but the one thing I've never been able to grasp is how Germany could ever piss off America that badly.
 
If the novel's completely batshit official message board was any indication, Stuart would catch a banhammer for some sort of bigotry within a few weeks. Like just take a big prize wheel with every non-straight-male-WASP ethnicity on it and spin that sumbitch.

I always saw The Big One as this fleshed out rationalization of the "NUKE EM ALL" eliminationist impulse that's been lurking in the Id of the Far-Right since the dawn of the nuclear age. Its a cool grimdark fantasy, but the one thing I've never been able to grasp is how Germany could ever piss off America that badly.
That’s actually pretty easy - at the time nobody really understood the real nature of nuclear weapons - if the first use in battle is 200 or so at a time on Germany, they won’t understand until afterwards...
 
Yes. The very premise of TBO is invalidated from the outset.

There was actually a guy over on SB who did a good job of addressing the B-36 problem.
I remember that. Slade's fanboys were unhappy.

Are you sure about that? The hanford reactors started having problems with the wigner effect sometime in 1946. The b reactor went first (because it was the first to come online), then d and f reactors went too. Didn't they have to be torn down and rebuilt to get up to full capacity again? I wonder how many kilos of plutonium they'd be able to churn out before that happened.
The problems of the Wignar effect tend to be overstated. The main reason for the reactor downtime was the huge cutbacks in the project after the war ended.
The B reactor was reduced to stand-by status and one of the others was shutdown to prolong it's useful life.

Also, wouldn't the americans need to keep at least one reactor online in order to have a continous supply of polonium available for use in the initiators? In my mind, the biggest problem with using a bunch of mark 3 bombs is maintaining enough polonium for them all. That stuff decays pretty quickly, and it takes alot of time to transmute properly, so that seems like a potential bottleneck.
Yes the X-10 reactor was used to produce Po-210 for the initiators. It produced about 3TBq per cycle and was producing 3.7TBq/month in JUN1945 and 19TBq by December that year. A MK3 used about 1.1TBq for the initiator so it's not a great bottleneck.

In OTL, the americans also had problems making enough weapons assemblys to keep up with the supply of fissile material... Anyway, do you have any info on what the planned upgrades for the hanford reactors were?
I'll have to dig that out, I don't have my research materials to hand. IIRR it was a programme of sequenced addition of extra reactors and reprocessing/extraction facilities

Personally, I don't think it was a smart route for stewart to go. If the americans knew they would need a stockpile of over 200 atomic bombs, then why in gods name didn't they use the uranium in an implosion bomb? Even an annular bore design would be better. Its incomprehensible to me that they would waste it on the mark 1 design. That amount of fissile material could have been used to make 25 or so implosion bombs!
Well not 25, but certainly five or six HEU pits or thirteen composite pits (with around 25kg of Pu239) so the cores of one MK1 and four MK3 bombs could produce more than twice as many composite cores.
The reason for Slade to continue with the MK1 bombs is I believe confusion over the use of gun-barrel weapons in the early earth penetrating nuclear weapons like the MK8. While the MK1 could be used in an impact fused role (with some modifications) it wasn't designed to penetrate obstacles.
 
If the novel's completely batshit official message board was any indication, Stuart would catch a banhammer for some sort of bigotry within a few weeks. Like just take a big prize wheel with every non-straight-male-WASP ethnicity on it and spin that sumbitch.

Ehy if you think that Obama is the most radical and controversial modern president, you are very biased or you live in another quantum reality.

And yet the B-36s did fly.

The problem, at least for me, it's not that the B-36 fly, it's that the entire operation go better than many training exercise, a total cumberstomping triumph, no navigational or human error, no mechanical problem, no bomb malfunction...all goes as plan, German impotency included. All that with a lot less experience in strategic bombing than OTL.

The American Revolution lasted 8 years and was not a very cheery string of victories, sometimes wars last a long time because they are important to win. Despite their initial lack of success the Germans will eventually develop their own nuclear weapons and ICBMs.

Sorry but comparing that hell in earth that was the Eastern front to the American Revolution, is like compare a little league team with the New York Giants; we are talking about a brutal meatgrinder with loss easily surpassing the 1 million and not including the wounded, plus we are talking of a situation that's not that clear cut regarding the pubblic will to fight Germany as it has come through a big diplomatic incident unlike a sneak attack like Pearl Harbour.
In poor words, during and expecially after the war the USA will get the full WWI European experience, not that clear cut and relatively easy experience of OTL...and i assure you that's something of unforgetable; not considering that Stuart always failed to explain to me one thing: Who pays for all that toys, both during the war and expecially after as there is no Marshall Plan (ehy you don't want that nasty european get on their feet soon) and Russia and the rest of europe are in worse shape than OTL. Basically you can forgot the idyllic eternal 50's...and welcome turbulent 70's a couple of decades early

Diplomacy and trade worked. Japan gets its Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere. Later books explore what happens to them. I have not read those books yet so I don't know what happens to them.

The problem is that agreement can be summed up on: please create a rival power to the other side of the ocean with the express purpose to be our rival, and please close the chinese market that are extremely important for us and keep them open has been one of our foreign politics objective for decades...all that so we can concentrate over a distant possible enemy that half our population doesn't even bother to be interested.
After that Stuart treatment, clearly show that not only he had not even bothered to read a wikipedia article about the second sino-japanese war but clearly doesn't even know WW2 Japan...and Chipang it's just the usual enemy of america in the TBOverse aka uncapable to pose a real threat or even make them fight seriously a little due to authorial fiat
 

Archibald

Banned
The problem, at least for me, it's not that the B-36 fly, it's that the entire operation go better than many training exercise, a total cumberstomping triumph, no navigational or human error, no mechanical problem, no bomb malfunction...all goes as plan, German impotency included. All that with a lot less experience in strategic bombing than OTL.

Another siliness is that the Air Force build a humongeous air base in Newfoundland, and they use a bunch of B-36 tankers, coming from the Azores. This is completely overkill.
 
Another siliness is that the Air Force build a humongeous air base in Newfoundland, and they use a bunch of B-36 tankers, coming from the Azores. This is completely overkill.

How about the Francophobia that's already apparent in the first book, and only worsens from there? Or the Finnophobia, for that matter? I distinctly recall the author saying - in his Word of God mode - that Finland in-universe basically inherits Germany's war guilt from WWII, or something like that. How is that even supposed to make sense?
 

Archibald

Banned
I never bothered to read the book, only what google books allowed me to read for free. France was screwed since june 1940, slade POd is probably after that date, so he probably didn't gave a fuck.
 
Well, among other things, on the day that the nuclear destruction of Germany occurs, Slade had the Americans bomb Paris (with conventional ordinance), including deliberately blowing up the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe. Remember, this was the era of "freedom fries" and other such things.
 
How about the Francophobia that's already apparent in the first book, and only worsens from there? Or the Finnophobia, for that matter? I distinctly recall the author saying - in his Word of God mode - that Finland in-universe basically inherits Germany's war guilt from WWII, or something like that. How is that even supposed to make sense?

Ask Norseman, he will answer that question more correctly, but the basic is that Norseman criticized the plausibility of the TBOverse and Slade 'retaliated' by basically giving Finland a much worse fate than the previous book...because he though the fella was Finnish, yes sir welcome to kindergarden
 

PlasmaTorch

Banned
I remember that. Slade's fanboys were unhappy.

I actually read some more of that thread today, and it amazes me just how many layers of FAIL there are in 'the big one.' One of the commentors said that there were 2600 aircraft involved in that single raid, many of them B-36s! It looks as if my previous summary (that the americans didn't need 1000 bombers to pull off TBO) was giving stewart slade more credit than he deserves!

To put this into perspective, there were 2600 aircraft involved in this cluster#$%^ of a raid, and only a handful of B-36s get damaged or destroyed! NONE of them are forced to turn around with engine problems either, which is even more unbelievable. Its hard enough to accept that the B-36s got into service any sooner than OTL, because the whitney R-4360 engines they used were state of the art and on the very edge of what was technologically possible in the 1940s.

Thus, you can't really rush their development forward in any appreciable way. Stewart makes the same mistake as those high school kids who are always asking 'what if the Jumo 004 engine was ready a year earlier?' TBOs situation is actually worse than that, because the whitney R-4360 engines are an evolution of the wright R-3350 engines used on the B-29. And since stewart decided to cut back the B-29 project in order to save money... Whence cometh the B-36s engines? :confounded:

Its hard for me to believe that a guy who was employed in the defense industry could be this blissfully ignorant and hopelessly optimistic about the development of a weapons system, even one that he has a soft spot for... Actually, you know what, I CAN believe it. Just take a look at the colossal screw up that is the F-35 fighter, or the zumwalt destroyers!

Simply stated, theres no way for stewart to get these engines any sooner than OTL, and his proposed solution actually makes things worse, because the experience gained with the B-29 project went directly into the B-36 program soon after. Whats even more unfeasible is how SAC achieves (by mid 1947) a level of operational readiness that didn't happen OTL until at least 1950 or so. When 'the big one' takes place, the B-36 would still have low mechanical reliability that relegates them to the role of hanger queens.
 
Last edited:

PlasmaTorch

Banned
The problems of the Wignar effect tend to be overstated. The main reason for the reactor downtime was the huge cutbacks in the project after the war ended.
The B reactor was reduced to stand-by status and one of the others was shutdown to prolong it's useful life.

I recall RanulfC stating that the reason the hanford reactors were ramped down was due to damage from neutron embrittlement (I.E, the wigner effect). The program cutbacks were merely a consequence of this. The americans just couldn't keep churning out bombs at that rate.

Yes the X-10 reactor was used to produce Po-210 for the initiators. It produced about 3TBq per cycle and was producing 3.7TBq/month in JUN1945 and 19TBq by December that year. A MK3 used about 1.1TBq for the initiator so it's not a great bottleneck.

This article from wikipedia claims that bismuth-209 had to be irradiated for 100 days to produce polonium-210. I wonder how it could be churning out batchs of polonium every month... Did the X-10 reactor have multiple chambers or something, where different batchs could be irradiated in different intervals? I'm also curious about how they managed to increase the X-10s production rate!

As for the number of polonium initiators, I was actually talking about the quantity required to pull off 'the big one.' A stockpile consisting of two hundred mark 1 bombs would require 220 TBq of polonium, by your estimates. Its clearly impossible for the americans to supply enough neutron initiators for that many bombs, especially when the B and D reactors at hanford are out of action.

I'll have to dig that out, I don't have my research materials to hand. IIRR it was a programme of sequenced addition of extra reactors and reprocessing/extraction facilities.

Let me be the first one to know when you find out, because it sounds very interesting.

Well not 25, but certainly five or six HEU pits or thirteen composite pits (with around 25kg of Pu239) so the cores of one MK1 and four MK3 bombs could produce more than twice as many composite cores.

I'm confused. :confused: You said that they could have up to eight mark 1 bombs ready by the middle of 1947. Those bombs used 64 kg of uranium enriched to 80%. Eight such bombs would yield a supply of 512 kg of uranium.

Lets ignore the issue of composite pits for now... An implosion design could presumably work with just 20 kg of uranium. Therefore, you could make 25 implosion bombs in place of the 8 gun type bombs. Thats what I was trying to say.

The reason for Slade to continue with the MK1 bombs is I believe confusion over the use of gun-barrel weapons in the early earth penetrating nuclear weapons like the MK8. While the MK1 could be used in an impact fused role (with some modifications) it wasn't designed to penetrate obstacles.

Right. I'm assuming he had those gun type bombs to go after underground bunkers or something. That plan wouldn't work though, as you say.
 
I’ve only read “The Big One” so I don’t know if this was covered in any other books but are some points I want to bring up:

-Why would The the USAAF/USAF not develop a long range fighter to take on the Luftwaffe? Basically the US sends out a few B-29 raids, gets it’s ass kicked and just gives up? Slade mentions the P-47 and P-80but no P-51 Mustang? OTL both P-47s and P-51s killed German jet fighters. The US and it’s Russian Allies don’t think about getting air superiority over Eastern Europe? The Nazis don’t have long range bombers so that means the Russians could crank out MiG-15s with ease. In TBO there is no Pacific War. The US by itself could darken the sky with Mustangs and beat the Luftwaffe through attrition just like OTL.

- The British didn’t take the blue prints for the Spitfire with them to Canada? No one from DeHavilland escaped? Canadians can’t build Spitfires and Mosquitoes? No Hawker Sea Fury?

-The US Navy is parked off the coast of France bombing the Nazis but not Occupied England and Ireland?

-The Luftwaffe doesn’t have aircraft in the British Isles? You would think they would figure out how to attack an aircraft carrier.

-No Royal Navy aircraft carriers?
-A combined US/UK naval force could basically blockade the British Isles the way we did to Japan in OTL WWII.

- Why not just retake Britain? Slade says the German Navy is kaput. There is a resistance movement going on in Britain being supplied by the Americans (how are they doing that?) Instead of going into Russia, retake the UK, build some airfields, start a guerilla war in Vichy France and then nuke Germany.
 
Last edited:

Archibald

Banned
Well, among other things, on the day that the nuclear destruction of Germany occurs, Slade had the Americans bomb Paris (with conventional ordinance), including deliberately blowing up the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe. Remember, this was the era of "freedom fries" and other such things.

(restrain from cursing in english and French languages) Connard.
 
Well, among other things, on the day that the nuclear destruction of Germany occurs, Slade had the Americans bomb Paris (with conventional ordinance), including deliberately blowing up the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe. Remember, this was the era of "freedom fries" and other such things.

Oh this brings back memories. I got banned from his forum for my criticism of this particular turn of events.
 
Top