alternatehistory.com

(Inspired by Emperor Palpatine's thread)

Seventy years ago on this date(7:00 pm EST), the first successful American test of an atom bomb occurred on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific, then currently owned by the U.S; a month later, on the afternoon of September 11, the Americans used two atomic bombs against the Turkish cities of Gaziantep and Bursa, in an attempt to get the Sultan and his quasi-fascist government to surrender(China had already surrendered by the end of May, 1945); he did so on 18 September, but only after being literally taken hostage by the Ottoman Army to do so. And with that, WWII would end, and the Ottoman Empire would dissolve by April, 1946.

But what if that initial test hadn't succeeded? After all, it is true, General Eisenhower had voiced his concerns that, given the novelty of this technology, any failure might backfire on us; and if the test had failed, many argued that we wouldn't have had a choice but to attempt to fully invade & forcefully pacify Turkey, which might have taken a decade or more to succeed. Would this have indeed been the case? Or might there have been other avenues that could have been taken?

OOC: Here's the background here(warning: a fair amount of text here! apologies in advance.)-the POD is sometime very early in the 20th Century; the Central Powers actually won the Great War(an isolationist liberal Republican kept us out of military action, though we did offer aid after the war), but their victory was of a Pyrrhic one; firstly, the Ottomans had already lost Palestine(in 1912), and would also lose Lebanon, and to a particularly brutal revolt at that, and Britain had refused to withdraw after setting up their puppet states in both Palestine and parts of Arabia(which happened earlier in the Great War, before the Entente had begun to lose), and France quickly made Lebanon a protectorate. This, and the fact that the Ottomans were in no real shape to continue the war after April 1918, had caused a significant build up of anger amongst not just nationalists, but a huge swath of the Turkish public in general; a rumor began to circulate that the Young Turks(whose ultra-nationalist wing never became dominant, as opposed to OTL; that particular faction[which had played a huge role in OTL's Armenian Genocide, btw!] later split off altogether ITTL), and liberal elements in general, had been responsible for a "stab in the back", as it were, and rightist elements would begin to agitate against the reformists, throughout the '20s; Mehmed VI would die in Jan. 1929, and his son Mehmed VII would succeed him-one of his first acts was to grant Iraq it's independence in March of 1929, hoping that this would ease ethnic tensions.

Meanwhile, the Germans had themselves suffered greatly, and were in no position to directly intervene when Russia fell to the revolutionaries in 1918; they did, however, assist the Tsarists in setting up a puppet state, ruled from Crimea(the rest of the Ukraine had gone socialist, but was mostly not re-absorbed by Russia, except for the eastern border areas), and also controlling everything in Central Asia that wasn't Kazakstan, and the Caucasus.

Austria-Hungary would trundle on until 1926, when it, too, fell apart piece by piece, due to internal stresses-the Croatians were particularly eager to see the Austrians go.

Unfortunately, when the thirties came about, the two remaining Centralist powers, Germany and Turkey, were stuck in dire straits: when the U.S. economy crashed in 1929, both of these nations were hit particularly hard. In 1933, Mehmet VII, already unpopular with the reactionaries, would be toppled, and Sezhade Abdurrahim, Abdul Hamid II's son from his tenth marriage, was put in place instead, for his willingness to abide by the agenda of the ultra-nationalist coup plotters.

The Germans would themselves delve into reactionary militarism, and in Jan. 1937, the reformist government of Walther Rathenau was forced out of power under highly questionable circumstances, and replaced with a government more amenable to the reactionary elements.

(We will go into detail about China later, but I can say that they themselves came under a charismatic dictator, who wasn't Mao Zedong.)

And by the end of that decade, the stage for another war was set.....

(Again, I apologize for the info dump.)
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