DBWI: The US was the first country to have nuclear weapons

[Onedotman]

At the eve of the Second World War in 1945, the Soviet Union detonated its first ever nuclear weapons, the Malchik and the Tolstyak, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. This resulted in the unconditional surrender of Japan and marked the official ending of the war. But what if, it had been the US that got their hands on the A-bomb before the USSR did? How would this affect the Cold War and post-WW2 international relations in general?

 

[kham_coc]

Well Stalin used those to claim all of Germany, think they were supposed to share it so the Iron Wall would probably have gone through Germany instead of the Franco-German border. The US also would probably also not have done their post war project with the UK and with France if speed wasn't such of an essence. Outside of Europe one butterfly i can think of is Vietnam, France didn't really like being told by the USSR (and then privately by the US) to leave and not come back. That could have turned into a proxy war otherwise. Wait, we would probably see an independent Austria, as opposed to the silly insistence by the west of titling the DDR, DADR , and occasionally post communism DAR instead of GDR.

 

[Dr Dee]

It's been argued that the Soviets stealing a march on the US in the field of nuclear technology led to the Americans panicking and seriously accelerating their rocket development programme. While the Soviets got the bomb first, the Americans had Operation Paperclip. And as we all know, this meant that Chuck Yeager made it into space before any Soviet cosmonaut. Later on, when the American nuclear arsenal caught up with the Soviets, they also had the delivery systems that the Soviets lacked. Perhaps the Soviet first in nuclear weapons was also something of a Pyrrhic victory, considering the vast expense of Project Leningrad.

 

[Mister Abbadon]

The American Moonshot is butterflied for sure. Why worry about Space and Rockets when you have The Bomb?

I don't know if a Soviet Union without the Bomb could make it to the Moon before a US that did but the Soviet Union probably gets further into and does more research into space travel.

 

[Colonel Zoidberg]

Bear in mind that the war with Japan was America’s baby until the Soviets stuck their noses in it after Germany capitulated. So you might get lucky and butterfly the four decades of insanity that was the People’s Republic of Japan, or at least confine it to the likes of Hokkaido and avoid forcing the Emperor to move to Kyoto. You might see Tokyo rebuild all the way instead of just to the south, what with North Japan being crazy and militaristic but having little use for North Tokyo.

 

[Vahktang]

The Russian Nuclear Rocket experiments would not have been done.
They did not have the lift capacity of the U.S. rockets, but they did have the atomic power.
So they lifted all that junk into orbit ‘first man made object in outer space’ that did not even give off radio signals, let alone any on board scientific information from it, at least for the first one.
The near miss to landing on land, not the ocean, convinced them to stop it, as well as figuring out that a manned launch would not yield survivors with the program they did have.
Also, the Americans made it up there with a person first, so they took their atomic toys home and tried the other stuff, the continued canal building, for example, that they are still paying for in health concerns after 50+ years.