CH: Nuclear Weapons by 1900

Addendum: Found the thread in question. I should used nuclear fission as a search term from the beginning. I used the site's search function, a function which I should not never behaves as badly for me as I read other people claim it behaves for them.

Thank you. I usually have good luck with the search function, but in this particular case I was using the wrong search terms.

That was interesting. Don Lardo's comments in particular have convinced me that even bumping up the discovery of radioactivity to 1848 (assuming for the sake of argument that calotype paper is a plausible stand-in for dry plates) probably wouldn't speed up the development of nuclear weapons enough to meet the 1900 deadline. I withdraw my scenario.

The same issues are likely to torpedo any other late-POD scenario, which leaves us with early PODs to accelerate the general pace of technological and industrial development (which I think was the main thing the OP was looking for).

I don't have a specific POD in mind, but my first thoughts are that some key factors could be:

  1. Speeding up the establishment of infrastructure for sharing information. Things like earlier movable type (has been discussed in other threads, and is very difficult to move earlier by more than a decade or two), cheaper paper (how?), etc.
  2. Increasing population earlier: many economists believe that innovation is proportional to population. The key things here are improving agricultural productivity and bringing more land under cultivation.
  3. Earlier industrial revolution (a complex topic in itself -- the exact prereqs of industrialization are a major open research area in economics, generally thought to include accumulation of capital stock and infrastructure, building enough of an agricultural surplus to support a large non-agricultural population, having the technology and techniques to build tools and design repeatable manufacturing processes, developing a culture that highly values diligence and conscientiousness, and a certain level of institutional maturity).
  4. Earlier development of the processes of science (experimental method, statistical analysis, peer review, etc). This gives more time to lay theoretical groundwork, and it accelerates the development of the technological prerequisites for items 1-3.
Off the top of my head, my best idea fragment would be some kind of earlier re-opening of large-scale Mediterranean trade, to generate more idea-sharing over a larger area and to introduce Arab and Byzantine preservation and extension of classical knowledge to Europe sooner.
 
With population, from what I understand, industrialization is fueled by expensive labor and cheap capital. Obviously, this oversimplifies things at times I'm sure.

Other than that, earlier urbanization, which itself would be driven by agricultural technology destroying the traditional rural lifestyle, causing many to move to urban areas.
 
if a creative minded Chinese or Mongolian of slight mass with an overpowdered
rocket launcher were to survive and in fact enjoy the resultant mishap.....
 

Flubber

Banned
Thank you.


You're welcome. I'm glad you found the thread as interesting as I remembered it.

I usually have good luck with the search function...

So do I, which is why I am always puzzled by other members' alleged problems with the search function.

... but in this particular case I was using the wrong search terms.

I was using poor search term at first too. Limiting my search to Before 1900, I tried "John Fredrick Parker" at first because it was his thread and then a few variations on "cathode ray tube". I finally used the no-brainer search term "nuclear fission" and pulled the thread up immediately. So much for over-thinking the problem! ;)

Off the top of my head, my best idea fragment would be some kind of earlier re-opening of large-scale Mediterranean trade, to generate more idea-sharing over a larger area and to introduce Arab and Byzantine preservation and extension of classical knowledge to Europe sooner.

And that would change so many other things that the term "Before 1900" may have no meaning at all.

Advances like the one the OP asked about are fundamental ones, they're part of the "weave" of a civilization. This isn't a case of sticking a bigger gun on a certain tank or putting a different engine in a certain fighter. Bringing forward a fundamental advance means bringing forward everything else. Everything changes because the basics have changed.
 

katchen

Banned
I suppose the best way for this to happen would be for the Southern Sung to continue their progress toward industrialization unmolested by Mongol conquest. Perhaps a TL in which the Chin or maybe better yet the Hsi Hsia conquer the Mongols, setting in motion the Buddhization of Mongolia and Siberia several hundred years early. Maybe Temujin becomes a lama and a yogi this TL.
 
And that's what I'm looking for really. How much has to change to get this to occur, and what does that change about human society in the process.
 

Flubber

Banned
And that's what I'm looking for really. How much has to change to get this to occur, and what does that change about human society in the process.


Let me repeat this because you obviously missed it the first time:

Advances like the one the OP asked about are fundamental ones, they're part of the "weave" of a civilization. This isn't a case of sticking a bigger gun on a certain tank or putting a different engine in a certain fighter. Bringing forward a fundamental advance means bringing forward everything else. Everything changes because the basics have changed.

Because so many, many, many different technologies, theories, techniques, and other fundamental issues are involved in theorizing, developing, and producing nuclear weapons, any advance in that ability essentially advances everything else.

This isn't a case of giving Napoleon Minie ball rifles or the Romans semaphore telegraphs. Both of those advances were already within the technological limits of Napoleon's and the Romans' time. This is a case of bringing forward the vast majority of human knowledge, science, and technology.

You're talking about producing nuclear weapons in 1900 instead of 1945 and want to know what will have changed? Ask yourself this: How many different things changed between 1900 and 1945? Can you even begin to number them?

That's how much change has to occur and that how much human civilization will have to be changed.
 
Let me repeat this because you obviously missed it the first time:

Advances like the one the OP asked about are fundamental ones, they're part of the "weave" of a civilization. This isn't a case of sticking a bigger gun on a certain tank or putting a different engine in a certain fighter. Bringing forward a fundamental advance means bringing forward everything else. Everything changes because the basics have changed.

Because so many, many, many different technologies, theories, techniques, and other fundamental issues are involved in theorizing, developing, and producing nuclear weapons, any advance in that ability essentially advances everything else.

This isn't a case of giving Napoleon Minie ball rifles or the Romans semaphore telegraphs. Both of those advances were already within the technological limits of Napoleon's and the Romans' time. This is a case of bringing forward the vast majority of human knowledge, science, and technology.

You're talking about producing nuclear weapons in 1900 instead of 1945 and want to know what will have changed? Ask yourself this: How many different things changed between 1900 and 1945? Can you even begin to number them?

That's how much change has to occur and that how much human civilization will have to be changed.

My question then is how to set off such a monumental change in human society to begin with?
 
What essay are you talking about? Can I see it please?

I found a link on the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120215...history.com/gateway/essays/OrionProblems.html

My read of it is not that Orion's necessarily a completely invalid concept, but rather that it's badly overhyped and has some pretty serious issues drawbacks that were (at least at the time the essay was written) very often overlooked. At best, it's a huge engineering challenge to develop a workable launcher from the concept, and once you've got it running, it's going to give dozens of people cancer and wreck a continent's work of consumer electronics whenever you launch it. And it doesn't do much to make all the complementary technologies you need for effective space exploration and colonization easier.
 
Now it's my turn to thank you for a link! Thank you! :D

My pleasure.

And that's what I'm looking for really. How much has to change to get this to occur, and what does that change about human society in the process.

Maybe it would be more informative to split this into two questions:

1. How much could we speed up the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles with a relatively late (19th century?) POD?

and

2. How could we speed up the entire pace of human development by 50 years or more?

We've discussed both a bit already on the thread. I think the answer to #1 is that we could probably speed it up by maybe a decade or two if we're willing to accept a certain level of unlikely events, but not by the 45+ years you were looking for. There are accidents and coincidenences and times stalled out waiting for the aforementioned in any story of long-term scientific or tech, and with a bit of luck, we can shorten the waiting periods a bit by having the accidents happen sooner and by having people sooner realize that it's worth investing major effort in actively looking to fill in missing pieces. That's what I tried to do with my original proposal, but Flubber's convinced me that there were more missing pieces than I'd thought.

For #2, it's a very wide ranging topic, and I've already given you my preliminary thoughts. There's so many possibilities, and so much room for butterflies for each possibility, that it's hard to delve into it without picking a small set of possibilities to focus on. If you'd like to narrow down the focus on a specific POD, I'd be happy to help speculate on its consequences. You might have better luck starting a new thread once you pick a POD, since it seems to be mainly just us and Flubber following this thread, and a new thread is more likely to pick up people who have specific knowledge or interest of the area around your chosen POD.
 
I doubt a 19'th century POD would deliver a nuclear weapon any sooner, and depending on the circumstances of the POD nuclear weapons development could even be delayed considerably beyond the Trinity test in 1945.

Keep in mind that the U.S was one of the few countries, if not the only country who had the capital necessary to build a Atomic Bomb during wartime Uranium was a scarce resource, though it should also be noted that the allies and defected German scientists did contribute a fair bit of research and Uranium to the overall project.
 
We really need an aeolipile sticky in Before 1900. This is the second time in as many days that some well-meaning poster has trotted out this pipe dream.

I'm not sure why in an AH forum something as simple as saying, take existing technology and combine it with other existing technology in a revolutionary way, is a pipe dream ... it is the stuff of AH.

Now, I get that it gets close to the deus ex machina that then borders on ASB .... but it does raise interesting questions. In another time and place your response could equally be applied if someone said, let the chinese figure out the potential of gun powder by somehow combining it with an arrow hurling device in the fifth century and xxx .... should this concept be banned?
 
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Flubber

Banned
I'm not sure why in an AH forum something as simple as saying, take existing technology and combine it with other existing technology in a revolutionary way, is a pipe dream ...


You're not sure why because you don't yet know enough about either the aeolipile or steam engines. The aeolipile is not a "gateway" or "precursor" to steam engines and there have been dozens of threads explaining just that over the last few years.

... it is the stuff of AH.

It's the stuff of ASB AH. This board deals in plausibility, the ASB board deals with ASB.
 
Keep Rome from squashing the Hellenistic states. Have people like Archimedes encouraged, rather than murdered. That alone could move civilization forward by 200 years or so.

You MIGHT even be able to get an industrial revolution started a thousand years early. Nukes by 945?
 
Delivery of a weapon could be done by submarine. Not necessarily suicide crew either, Basically you Bomb is in a sponson under the keel, once the weapons officers make the final assembly operations, they could use punch tape programming and separate the Bomb onto the harbor floor.

See also Jerry Pournelle's "King David's Spaceship" for an extended discussion of a determined Victorian-level technology.
 
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