AH Challenge, results of a shorter WWII:

Suppose that when Hitler invades the USSR in this ATL he invades a USSR that is actually prepared for and expecting his invasion. And that the USSR and its allies crush Hitler in a shorter WWII. Before turning around and doing the same to Japan. What happens in a scenario where the war in Europe is shorter and less devastating while the war in the Pacific is still going on?

If the USSR wins the war with less damage on its own soil and fewer casualties, what kind of butterfly does that have for the postwar world? If the war ends with the UK's economy less devastated, what are the results of this in terms of postwar fallout? Adding to this the results of a much shorter Holocaust, what happens if millions of Jews and other victims who IOTL died in the mass slaughters perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are alive after the war?

If the USA plays less of a battlefield role and the war is shorter, how much does that impact US recovery from the Great Depression and the Civil Rights movement? Would a war that ended before anyone came close to creating nukes give nuclear weapons a less ominous sense which means greater likelihood of a global cinder?

What happens to computer technology and rocketry in this world? Or to de-colonization if the USSR and the UK and the USA end up smashing Germany in a four-year war instead of a six-year one?
 
A lot is going to depend on the post-war dispositions of Germany and Japan in this scenario. (And with the UK and US two years less exhausted and two years less spent in alliance with them, an immediate round two against Russia is a lot less unthinkable if Stalin demands too much.)

I'm deeply pessimistic about the nuclear future here; I expect that the things will get used at least once in any imaginable timeline and we were amazingly lucky to discover them during the very tail end of an unrestricted global conflict.

Computing should be much the same; the heavy lifting there was fairly early in the war. Rocketry is going to depend on who ends up with the better pick of strategic Germans.
 

Sir Chaos

Banned
I agree about the nuke thing. My guess is they´d get used fairly early in the next war, by which time the US probably has quite an arsenal of them - maybe 30 or 40 or so.
 
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