A World of Tomorrow?

Retro-Futurism+City+1.jpg


In the post-war world, as we all know, there was a great wave of optimism across the Western World for the possible utopia to come: the UN, atomic power, space travel, television, robot dogs - that whole shebang.

I was wondering with a POD around 1945, how much of that dream, of the lost Atomic Age, could be achieved in comparison to OTL. This is quite a broad idea I understand but I was intrigued to see what people thought.

This also includes social aspects of the post-war utopia - with regards to civil rights, poverty etc.


 
I've been doing some thinking about something similar, and I think it depends on what you want to save, and how long you're willing to wait for your jetpack.

There are obvious reasons why some of the technology they dreamed of, like antigravity, isn't going to happen. But other pieces of it could be salvaged. I've been wondering if it might be possible to have Truman's efforts to put the atom bomb under exclusive UN control actually work... I've a lot of reading to do yet, but Truman, at least, seems to have been serious about it, and there were at least elements within the Soviet Union, like Beria and Malenkov, that might have been interested in coming to an accommodation. That said, even if both Beria and Truman were honestly aiming for real disarmament, the realpolitik pressures against it might have been overwhelming.

An alternative approach, with a more good-vs-evil feel, would be to have the Soviets pull out of the UN after the start of the Korean War, and have the UN evolve towards an Alliance of Democracies, a sort of super-NATO, with a standing UN army.

(Seriously, you cannot tell me that B-58 Hustlers painted eggshell blue with the UN logo on the tail are not cool... Because I will not listen if you try.)

Or maybe not. I'm just brainstorming here.
 
Hmm. I'll take these separately in hopes of feeding you some ideas.

The UN: what good does having a bunch of petty kleptocrats and dictators voting on things do? Perhaps if the UN was formed by the Western Allies in WWII but only expanded to include countries that embraced democracy in practice as well as in theory? The incentive to join the UN could come from some sort of Marshall Plan/Peace Corp program to develop the infrastructure and train people in medicine, engineering, etc. in member nations ONLY. Prospective members must allow full access to UN officials to monitor elections. The UN might quietly back pro-democracy revolutionary movements in especially bad regimes.

Atomic power: the major problem here is a PR one. If you can evade the Three Mile Island incident (pretty easy to do, actually) and have somebody sane in the environmental movement decide to pick on coal instead (which is actually much worse for the environment), just switching OTLs coal subsidies to nuclear power and turning off the anti-nuclear lobby before it ever forms would probably be enough to see the US have nearly the level of nuke primary electrical generation of France. Atomic planes, trains, and cars probably still aren't practical (even with additional R&D effort being spent and thus improved miniaturization from OTL), but atomic spacecraft most certainly ARE. This would greatly boost the development of space.

Television: um, we've got it. We've even got video phones (not to mention web cams), and the internet! I don't think anyone ever predicted a higher level of media saturation and communication bandwidth then we have today.

Robot dogs: again, they exist. Turns out they aren't very cuddly. Perhaps some version of bird flu crosses species to dogs and the hysteria makes actual flesh-and-blood dogs frowned upon? Kinda like how some people in Egypt killed all the pigs for no reason during the Swine Flu peak?

Most of my other thoughts on heading for "utopia" aren't politically correct.
 

Geon

Donor
Atomic Age Utopia

For the atomic age utopia which was hoped for after World War II I would say the following has to happen.

First, I agree with Gridley, the UN needs to be reworked, maybe even scrapped and put back together in a form that actually favors the democracies and not just the interests of penny ante dictators. After all, wasn't the UN formed to stop such dictators from seizing power and threatening humanity in the first place? (i.e. remember what we were fighting for in World War II)

Secondly, you need to find some way to either prevent the Cold War or end it early. If there is no Cold War you can certainly concentrate more on peacetime applications of various technologies, including atomic technologies.

Third, with no Cold War and a stable world police force (see first point above) the U.S. would be able to dismantle its nuclear weapons providing there was a verifiable and workable system in place to prevent the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons elsewhere in the world. The U.S. could then lead the way in developing safe usable nuclear technology.

Fourth, one result of these technologies would be a nuclear powered rocket engine which could open the way much earlier to the Moon, Mars, and the rest of the Solar System.

Fifth, the development of safe nuclear technologies (emphasis on the word--safe) means less dependence on fossil fuels for power generation.

Sixth, a sensible environmental movement led by conservationists, which starts following World War II, is started which emphasizes preservation of natural areas, but works hand in hand with rather then against industrial needs and development. Perhaps a joint council on environmental and economic affairs headed by leaders of industry and conservation leaders could be devloped.

This won't give you Buck Rogers' or the Jetsons, but it will give you a start toward the world pictured in the first posting.

Geon
 
TBH the picture looks like a US city in 1975 OTL if you take away the wacky hanging monorail thingie on the left. :p

But as a big fan of retrofuturism I get the point of the OP and like the idea...it's like we're shooting for plausible Atompunk! I think Geon has a lot of it solved. Simply eliminating the "Duck and Cover" years from the world conciousness would IMO do a lot to change attitudes on nuclear power.

Nuclear Cars and Planes nonwithstanding, there's certainly potential for Nuclear Cruise Ships at least. The Sovs even kicked around the idea for a Nuclear Zepplin (here that? It's the sound of A Perfect AH Cliche Storm forming!) though that probably wouldn't be too practical...you'd need to make an actual lead zep!

Mix in a bit of Electropunk and you have electric trains supplied by a nuclear grid with electric cars as a cheap competitor for gas autos in the urban environment...might spur battery tech sooner too.
 
I don't think this is as hard to achieve as most think, but it does require some changes, particularly with the UN.

The UN is formed in 1946 as IOTL, but pressure from America and Britain leads to it being a group of democracies only, and that full UN membership requires the countries involved to be nations with a certain set of requirements - democratic elections, freedom of speech and assembly, et cetera. Most of the Western world post-WWII has these, but the Soviet Union does not and Stalin objects to the idea, which leads the UN to be founded without the USSR and its allies. By the early 1950s, the countries of the UN are almost entirely allies of the United States, United Kingdom or both. Japan and West Germany join in 1953 and 1955, respectively. South Africa is kicked out for its racist apartheid policies in 1961, but returns after apartheid crumbles into history in the late 1970s, gaining its membership back in 1980.

The United Kingdom works with the United States and the "white dominions" to help adjust its colonies into democracy. India is not partitioned, and joins the UN as a unitary state in 1947, followed by its colonies through the 1950s and 1960s. France does the same, though France's efforts to have its colonies transfer into democracy is not successful in a number of cases.

The exploits of black servicemen in America in WWII lead to a sense among many veterans that racism is counterproductive and doing more harm than good, and most cities with large black communities see large number of black police officers join their forces in the 1940s and 1950s. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, black students start arriving in "white" American schools in numbers. In places like Detroit, New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and much of the Rust Belt, this goes fairly smoothly, owing in large part to the fact that many American blacks gained the respect of their peers in WWII. The development of the automobile leads to the building of the Interstate Highway System, which begins in 1956, though then-President Eisenhower endeavors to have America have the finest transportation system in the world in every regard, and the funding of the time also goes towards railways, air travel and everything else.

A February 1957 investigative journalism article in Life Magazine exposes plans by General Motors and other companies to buy up streetcar systems and dismantle them in favor of buses - which earns GM and its partners in the scheme a congressional investigation and over a billion dollars in fines, and leads to public outcries to save many of the systems that GM was seeking to buy and dismantle. This bad publicity and money problems end GM's attempts to destroy streetcar and light rail transit systems - in fact, GM does the exact opposite, and by the middle of the 1960s is providing funding for expansions of mass transit systems, hoping to sell additional rail cars and equipment.

Over the 1960s, the exodus of middle class families from inner-city regions is met with newcomers coming to clean up their neighborhoods, which means the massive decay of American inner cities that happened in the 1950 through the 1970s largely stops about 1965. The blueprint for the future grew out of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago in the middle of the 1960s, as newcomers of all races began staking claims in the neighborhoods, fixing up buildings and vocally fighting the gangs and racial tensions, which leads to numerous incidents of violence in 1965 and 1966, but the newcomers refuse to be intimidated, and the gangs are eventually driven out and broken up. This tenant activism was soon added to by tenants making changes to the area and fixing up the buildings themselves, whether the authorities liked it or not. By the 1970s, similar stories were happening across the United States in housing projects and communities. Cabrini-Green itself becomes a symbol of misguided urban planning ideals being transformed by the people who live there - and the activist spirit of fixing up the problems in your own communities swells across the United States. By the early 1980s, Cabrini-Green is the center of a growing young person and immigrant community in Chicago's Near North Side.

Jane Jacobs' stopping of the Spadina Expressway in Toronto in 1971 becomes a major rallying point for communities across the United States, and the activist spirit of the time leads to many such situations. General Motors, which had instigated much of these plans, starts jumping in to try and make them evolve to suit new realities, with GM-sponsored projects proposing everything from burying expressways and building parkland or rail corridors above them to building elevated rail lines and stations for them above the freeway corridors. Local banks and businesses specialize in building improvements for local communities, with a popular comment being "If its good enough for people to live there, its good enough to justify makiing people want to live there."

The first American civilian nuclear power station is inaugurated at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1958, and over the 1960s and 1970s nuclear power plants spring up all over the place. An anti-nuclear movement still gets some plants stopped, namely ones in poor locations. March 28, 1979, is just another day at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gets a reputation for being harsh on those who violate public trust. Improvements in design and engineering standards mean that nuclear power stations built in the early 1970s and later are considerably better than earlier facilities. By the time Shippingport closes in 1981, 176 nuclear reactors are operating in the United States, with an addition 52 under construction, despite the anti-nuclear lobby and its considerable influence. The ire of the environmentalists had, by then, turned to other areas, though the anti-nuclear movement still protests regularly. The most infamous mistake of the nuclear movement was the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, which never operated commercially, and after years of tests was closed for good in 1990. Such failures, however, did not stop the industry from continuing to expand its operations. By 2010, 265 nuclear reactors operate in the United States, producing very nearly 50% of the United States' electricity.
 
Alot of interesting ideas flying around.

I like the idea of the UN breaking with the Eastern Bloc over Korea - frankly how obvious support for the 'rogue state' didn't lead to a major move in this direction, particularly at a time when 4 of the 5 Security Council members were anti-Moscow, is strange to me.

On the Cold War - have Stalin succeeded by someone different, a moderate like Malenkov or Kosygin. If we can avoid the pig-headed foriegn policy of Kruschev, we'll avoid at least one almost-nuclear war and hopefully see the Cold War become more of a geopolitical rivalry.

On the Space Race - If we have a Soviet Union more interested in soft power, I think a crucial move for better space technology is have the hammer & sickle get to the Moon first. It would be a major motivator for NASA to push for a Mars landing (which in such a TL, I imagine would be the real space landmark in American eyes) - we might see von Braun's nuke-rocket idea overtake the shuttle.

Nuclear rockets might also have the knock-on of major investment into atomic power in terms of cost, efficency and safety - which would push for greater use of it domestically (by which I mean grids, not toasters)

Another push for major atomic power I believe, would be a more cohesive Arab nationalism, leading to a greater, earlier threat of the oil embargo of the 1970s. Perhaps the United Arab Republic extends as planned to Iraq - putting the monarchies of Jordan, Saud and Kuwait under threat. The US/UN might end up in a similar (cold) situation to 1991 but I imagine it would also bring the idea of domestic atomic power back into the limelight.
 
I don't think this is as hard to achieve as most think, but it does require some changes, particularly with the UN.

I like it. Things go a little too perfectly, maybe, especially on racial issues and the US pursuing a foreign policy based on morality rather than realpolitik, but I, for one, am okay with that.

The way I was planning on doing it - and I'd like to emphasize this is just brainstorming - was having Molotov have a sit-down with the atomic physicists in 1943 and be convinced of the importance of the atomic weapons project. As a result, he pushes it hard, and ends up Stalin's golden boy in the late 40s. Butterflies give Stalin a heart attack in 1948, and the Korean War doesn't start in 1949. The USAF and USN budget battles aren't ended by the outbreak of the Korean War, and the USAF wins; conscription ends in 1950, and the USAF merrily pursues an 80-wing program while the Army and Navy downsize drastically.

In 1952, North Korean forces cross the border; unknown to the west, the invasion occurs without the approval of Molotov in Moscow. The Army doesn't have the forces to stop the invasion, and Truman orders a desperate gamble: SAC drops three atom-bombs off the North Korean coast as demonstration shots. Molotov, who didn't want this war in the first place, brings North Korea and China to heel and gets everyone on the proper side of the border, but the affair causes the communist states to leave the UN when the security council refuses to condemn the US's actions.

In the US, the strategy of relying purely on air power has been vindicated, and USAF's budget amounts to two-thirds of spending on defense by 1960. The Navy doesn't have the money to build Polaris, and the Air Force funds atomic-powered ALBM-carrier planes to fill the same spot on the strategic triad. The first atomic-powered airplane flies in 1965, the first civilian atomic-powered aircraft before 1970. These jets are enormous: the first-gen military vehicles mass over one million pounds, and by the 80s airplane masses have reached 5,000 tons. This is driven by the mass economics of atomic propulsion: the mass of an atomic power plant, counting the shielding, is roughly proportional to the square root of its total thrust, with a "sweet spot" in the 5-20 million pound range. The development of high-temperature, high-density atomic reactors for air travel has knock-on effects throughout the American economy, including in the use of nuclear space propulsion, and in high-temperature chemical reactions, such as steel smelting.

At the same time, the focus on the Air Force has left the US military with less ability to meddle in the third-world, and American activity in places like Vietnam remains limited to air support and material aid. There will be no Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, Molotov starts a new terror in the USSR, which extends to the satellite states and, with the aid of some sympathetic Chinese army officers, eventually to China, aiming to ensure he's never again put in the same position as in the Korean War. The Sino-Soviet split and deStalinization never happens, and the USSR remains a state run by terror, with mass purges occurring roughly once a decade. China follows the USSR's lead economically, and on paper the Warsaw Pact's economics look pretty good thanks to growth in China. Per capita GDP plateaus in Russia at the same time as it did in OTL, and it will ultimately plateau in China, as well; but the larger population base of the communist states keeps them a threat into the early 21st century. Molotov also pushes the space program a lot harder: he credits his role leading the Soviet atomic program in world war II with saving his life from Stalin, and has developed a bad case of superscience fever, pushing a lot of prestigious but economically questionable technology programs.

What do you think? It has a couple of obvious issues, like whether three more years of austerity for the Army would be enough to force Truman to use atomic demonstration blasts in Korea, whether the communists could or would back down if he did, whether even Molotov can integrate China into the Warsaw Pact, and whether atomic-powered airplanes make any sense even in an atompunk world. I'm in the middle of a lot of research to see if it can be made to work, so any comments by the more knowledgeable would be appreciated.

Incidentally, I'm a little surprised ANP (Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion) doesn't have the same sort of cult following as Orion or the X-20 Dynasoar; it's the same sort of terribly cool techno-wizardry. I've dug up a bunch of studies from the late 60s and early 70s that claim the plane could be made both safe and extremely cost-effective - like, competitive with trucks level of cost-effective (!) - but I'm not expert enough to tell if they're just talking out their budget-holes or not. Still, it's terribly cool. :cool:
 

Spengler

Banned
only one way to make this better is to have the united states assign the Orion project to nasa and for it to be fully funded.
 
Incidentally, I'm a little surprised ANP (Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion) doesn't have the same sort of cult following as Orion or the X-20 Dynasoar; it's the same sort of terribly cool techno-wizardry. I've dug up a bunch of studies from the late 60s and early 70s that claim the plane could be made both safe and extremely cost-effective - like, competitive with trucks level of cost-effective (!) - but I'm not expert enough to tell if they're just talking out their budget-holes or not. Still, it's terribly cool. :cool:

Take this from a nuke-fan in the aviation industry: they're on crack. Really, really bad crack.

Atomic rockets? Love the idea. Let's light this teakettle! OK, we need a better tag line, but most rocket scientists will kill for just a few km/s of delta-V.

Atomic trains? Why bother? Use nuke plants to generate electricity and electrify most of your lines instead. Much easier.

Atomic aircraft? No. Just not practical. Power/weight is the last word (OK, phrase) for aviation, also the first and most of the ones in the middle. Nuke plants are very fuel efficient but their power/weight ratio is awful.
 
Take this from a nuke-fan in the aviation industry: they're on crack. Really, really bad crack.

Atomic rockets? Love the idea. Let's light this teakettle! OK, we need a better tag line, but most rocket scientists will kill for just a few km/s of delta-V.

Atomic trains? Why bother? Use nuke plants to generate electricity and electrify most of your lines instead. Much easier.

Atomic aircraft? No. Just not practical. Power/weight is the last word (OK, phrase) for aviation, also the first and most of the ones in the middle. Nuke plants are very fuel efficient but their power/weight ratio is awful.

I kind of suspected so. But, just to play devil's advocate, the plan was to build airplanes with a mass of 5 to 20 million pounds, or about 4 to 16 times the size of the biggest airplane ever built in real life. The argument runs, mass of the power unit is dominated by mass of the shielding, which scales proportionally to the surface area of the reactor, which scales as the square root of the reactor volume, which is directly proportional to reactor power. So, for a big enough plane, the mass savings from not carrying fuel are enough to cancel out the mass of the reactor system.

Some specific numbers: this comes from the "Subsonic Nuclear Aircraft Study," NASA, 1968. The study mostly glosses over the turbojets and actual airframe, focusing on safety issues, reactor design, and heat exchangers. They posit a 1-million-pound takeoff weight, using a 250 MW reactor with a mass, counting shielding but not heat exchangers or engines, of 284,000 lbs. Heat exchanger and engine are another 100,000 lbs. Coolant is either liquid metal or high-pressure helium. An aside mentions an anticipated efficiency of 30% in converting reactor heat to propulsion, although it's not clear if this is a figure arrived at through calculation, or just a number they made up; they also never discuss how much thrust that translates into. Payload fraction is 0.2, average speed is Mach 0.8. I believe the system is intended as a demonstrator, given that their cost figures suggest the system is uncompetitive below a 5-million-lbs. takeoff weight.

Anyway, yeah, it's probably bullshit. But it's so cool! :eek:
 
I like it. Things go a little too perfectly, maybe, especially on racial issues and the US pursuing a foreign policy based on morality rather than realpolitik, but I, for one, am okay with that.

I'm not sure I'd call it that. I only mentioned the decolonialization aspect. I would still expect them to be fighting in Korea. Butterfly Vietnam, though. The money pissed away fighting in Vietnam goes to something more useful in this world.
 
It is possible if the Berlin Blockade escalates into war and the US crushes the USSR. This is possible since the USSR didn't test its first bomb until 1949 and the blockade occurred in 1948.
 
I kind of suspected so. But, just to play devil's advocate, the plan was to build airplanes with a mass of 5 to 20 million pounds, or about 4 to 16 times the size of the biggest airplane ever built in real life.

Anyway, yeah, it's probably bullshit. But it's so cool! :eek:

And that's part of the problem. The 747-8 (the biggest Boeing airplane) has a takeoff weight of less than a million pounds. How long a runway does a 5 million pound airplane need? What kind of wing-loading will it have? Ground pressure? The A380 caused (is still causing, actually) major problems with a MTOW of just 1,300,000 pounds - not many airports can handle it. Airplanes are also not infinitely linearly scalable.

The heaviest aircraft ever, IIRC, is the AN-225 at only a hair more MTOW than the A380.

For comparison, a Saturn V weighed over 6,000,000 pounds. THAT's where your nuke plant pays for itself.
 
Top