Cultural effects of a nuked Berlin

Also is there use of neutron bomb, like name say it produce massive burst of neutrons what kill all live in it's range, but with little damage.
A depopulate but intact Berlin...

That is one of the most long-living misconceptions about nuclear weapons.. a neutron bomb is just an semi-effective nuclear bomb that does not use ALL the neutron flux for the explosion but rather only a part. So you have a neutron flux corresponding to say 100 kT explosion but the explosion itself has 5-10 kT power. Which is still damn destructive.
What the neutron bomb does is activate the iron nuclei in the blast-proof structures near the blast point itself - as an answer to the WarPac tank tactics; the WP tanks were designed to withstand a tactical nuclear explosion less than a kilometer away, and tank crews were trained to attack immediately after an explosion, in loose order, so a nuclear weapon would only take out a few tanks at once. The neutron radiation would turn iron-56 into highly radioactive iron-57, forcing the crews to abandon the tanks or die of secondary radiation exposure. Obviously the same would happen to a city - it is not "intact", it is still somewhat destroyed by the initial explosion, and a several hundred meters wide ring around the destruction zone is full of lethally radioactive steel girders, cars and all the everyday things made of iron.
 
with ww2 small Little Boy or Fat Man 10~20kilo tons of TnT, no problem they will rebuild the city,
call international Architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe or Oskar Niemeyer to make master plan for new Berlin.
with huge monument for deaths for first use of Atomic bomb.

With Cold war nuclear weapon of 1960s & 1970s, its hell different problem
there are Large Caliber max 9000 kilo tons of TnT and design to be very dirty in radioactive waste.
in this case Berlin would for over 30~60 years a no-man land with deathly radiation.

With 1980s nukes again the "game" change down to small caliber max 1000 kilo tons of TnT, but used massive.
it would change Berlin into "ground zero landscape" were several nukes hit the city.
here they could rebuild the city, but the rest of world would look the same. see best TL of 2010: Protect and Survive
Also is there use of neutron bomb, like name say it produce massive burst of neutrons what kill all live in it's range, but with little damage.
A depopulate but intact Berlin...

The OP, as I understand it, was talking about Berlin being hit as a result of an extended WW2:

Iwas going for a pod where the nazis positions in the eastern front hold a bit longer and wins the battle of the bulge, thus causing it to be nuked around 1946/7

If Berlin was hit during a nuclear WW3, I think the cultural effects of the wider conflict would significantly outweigh the impact of one specific city being destroyed.
 
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While it is conceivable that the Germans might build a museum and memorial to the atomic bombing, it would be unlikely to encompass much more than having a small park built around some appropriate building or identifiable structure near ground zero; Berlin was a massive city and the main urban centre of western Prussia, it is just too large and too important to abandon any sizable part of it.

Besides which, Berlin had already suffered so much damage from sustained RAF night bombing and USAAF daylight raids that it would have been very difficult to determine just what had actually been damaged by the atomic bomb; something that would almost certainly have ruled it out of the list of targets to be selected for atomic bombing. In Hiroshima the area of overwhelming destruction was within a radius of 2000 metres of the epicentre, and that was in a city where almost all civilian houses, and most commercial buildings were built out of wood and other lightweight materials; Berlin was a brick, tile and concrete city that had already withstood an extraordinary amount of bombing.

Ordinarily I would consider that, but Berlin would be a special case because of the multiple (opposing) power occupying the city. A war that lasted much longer than OTL, even enough to bring one of hte atom bombs to bear, would only fuel the emotional napalm of Soviet hatred for all things Nazi. I doubt that the Soviets would support rebuiliding the city if they were made to suffer more, and if the war lasts into '46 or somehow '47 then it will just be all the worse. You could get a case where the US, France, and UK rebuild their sectors and the rest of the city remains a dead ruin for years to come. Still, it would make a great major site for a permanent HQ for the UK or international peace sumit center when radiation got low enough, kind of a "we are here to remind us why we are here" motif.

If Berlin is nuked in the context of a World War III and there is enough of civilization left to express lament for such things in the lifetimes of the survivors, the significance of one city will be drowned out in the missing millions or billions of other faces worldwide. No offense to Berlin but if half the human race is missing then you might get a Guernica-style motif in a few generations with Berlin as a flashpoint or background piece, depending on how and why the war occured.
 
altamiro said:
I doubt, if the bomb were made ready earlier, that a) it would have been used on Berlin - someone with authority has got to be left to surrender
Agreed. Cologne? Bonn?
Cook said:
Berlin had already suffered so much damage from sustained RAF night bombing and USAAF daylight raids that it would have been very difficult to determine just what had actually been damaged by the atomic bomb
That alone would keep it off the target list; the planners wanted to know what the Bomb could achieve.
altamiro said:
Japan WAS nuked and most of their power supply is nuclear - so I doubt it would be so different in Germany.
Japan also imports all her fuel, & has an unpleasant past experience with shortages & bad decisions...:eek::rolleyes:

There is one thing I see likely: it discourages Stalin from being a cowboy. The Allies have proven willing to nuke Europeans...:eek:
Cyrus Alquist said:
America would have to either drop only 1 on each nation, or leave Japan unnuked.
Any situation delaying the end so much Germany gets Bombed, Japan will have to wait anyhow--& will probably surrender without it.:rolleyes:
M79 said:
It might play into the art world during the 1960s and create a plot for various B-horror movies well into the 21st century. Maybe it is left completely alone, never rebuilt but serving as a vigilant reminder of the price of atomic war and creating a tourist "city". It might also serve as a site for various peace conferences based on the tragedies seen there in the past
I can see a sector remaining "unreorganized" (to borrow a word:p), symbolically, but not all of it. Not when it's a major city needing accommodation & industry.

I do think you'd see a lot more European films dealing with nuclear war themes. Probably a few more British & American ones, too, without the romance of the post-apocalyptic garbage. I wonder if, TTL, The Iron Dream doesn't be come a hit--& a major motion picture?:cool::cool: (And does Norman write it sooner?)
Mike Stearns said:
So instead of visiting Auschwitz, people go and visit the rubble of Berlin? I could see that.
Not instead.:eek:
 
If their capital is bombed? I don't think Japan is a particularly good analogy for what might happen in Germany, nuking the capital would surely be far more traumatic for a nation's pysche. It would probably make Germany a more reactionary and anti-American country

Why? A lot of Germans hated that city.

Fuck, even the Nazis hated Berlin.
 
One thing: Little Boy and Fat Man were America's entire nuke supply when they were dropped. So America would have to either drop only 1 on each nation, or leave Japan unnuked.
The entire assembled supply of weapons. The third could have been deployed before the end of the month and more were in production. If it came to it that, no one would have gone "unnuked."
 
Yeah it would probably be rebuilt. It would probably be entirely in the Soviet sector, if it wasn't seen as worth the effort by the West. And after the Cold War gets going, it would be the most logical place, politically, for the capital of East Germany.
 
Agreed. Cologne? Bonn?

Nuremberg has been suggested as symbolic to Nazi movement.

That alone would keep it off the target list; the planners wanted to know what the Bomb could achieve.

That is the case for ALL cities of any importance in Germany; Dresden was the last largely undestroyed city until Feb 1945. After that, the biggest undestroyed city would be Heidelberg with about 100.000 inhabitants and without the least industrial or transportational significance.

There is one thing I see likely: it discourages Stalin from being a cowboy. The Allies have proven willing to nuke Europeans...:eek:

This is this weird "inverted racist" argumentation that I often hear from Americans - that nuking Europeans vs. non-Europeans would make a difference in making the decision... it is certainly not a thought that ever passed through Stalin's head at the time. For him there were enemies and, well, not necessar friends but non-enemies; skin color of someone simply didn't figure in the consideration unless it was a way to fuck with the former or acquire the latter.
 
altamiro said:
This is this weird "inverted racist" argumentation that I often hear from Americans - that nuking Europeans vs. non-Europeans would make a difference in making the decision...
I doubted it would for him. It might be for the WAllies, tho.
 

Cook

Banned
That alone would keep it off the target list; the planners wanted to know what the Bomb could achieve.
Why did you quote me, trimming my statement, simply to repeat exactly what I’d said in the section immediately following what you quoted?
:mad:

Besides which, Berlin had already suffered so much damage from sustained RAF night bombing and USAAF daylight raids that it would have been very difficult to determine just what had actually been damaged by the atomic bomb; something that would almost certainly have ruled it out of the list of targets to be selected for atomic bombing.
 
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