Earliest Atomic Bomb

I was curious at what the Earliest possible date with a plausable POD could the Atomic Bomb be develeped, would it be possible before 1900?
 
Agentdark said:
I was curious at what the Earliest possible date with a plausable POD could the Atomic Bomb be develeped, would it be possible before 1900?
Sure. Nix some of the setbacks to technology from OTL.
 
Of course. You just need an early enough PoD. The Mithras TL I (mostly) created had an atomic war in 1802 (IIRC).
 
Right. Kill off the Mongols when they're still a proto-tribe (which in turn butterflies away the Seljuks, Ottomans, and some other vassals), and Samarkand, Constantinople, Kiev, Beijing, and Baghdad never get sacked. Now have some Italian rediscover the value of the Roman plumbing system, and watch as the Bubonic Plagues never happen. You'll have plutonium in 1600.
 
Surely this depends on the pod. If you assume some change say 20k BC that moves everything up 5-10k years they you could have something in the time period that in our timeline the Egyptians were building the pyramids.

However without a major advancement like that I doubt if you could speed things up much. First you must have something like the industrial revolution to both start developing non-biological resources and make science important, rather than just a plaything for a small element of very rich. You would need something like western society I think where new ideas were more readily accepted, rather than a theocratic or autocratic state. This would really require a multitude of medium sized states, both to encourage this and provide the political tension for constant development. [Any dominant state that becomes virtually all powerful will have a vested reason to discourage developments that might accept the established order]. At the same time states can't be too small else they will not have the resources to either persist politically, making things too unstable, or develop the bigger projects of the industrial age.

Once all this is in place you need the necessary steps, through discovery of the various rules of physics and chemistry to that of radiation, which largely destroyed the previous understanding. Then an understanding of the structure of the atom and of the related forces and finally the massive resources to develop nuclear power. [Along with again a good reason for such a massive investment].

Steve
 
stevep said:
This would really require a multitude of medium sized states, both to encourage this and provide the political tension for constant development. [Any dominant state that becomes virtually all powerful will have a vested reason to discourage developments that might accept the established order]. At the same time states can't be too small else they will not have the resources to either persist politically, making things too unstable, or develop the bigger projects of the industrial age.
I'll let Scott dispute the idea that large states can't be technologically innovative.

I'll tackle the idea that small states can't do it, since the Renaissance started in the Italian city states.
 
In my defense, I didn't see my POD as preserving large states, but rather as preserving cities of culture. My goal is to rush people into the agricultural revolution by preserving order in some of the more responsible governments, and make sure that when it happens, that there are prosperous, independent-minded cities for the population surplus to move into.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
Had Michael Faraday a classical education including mathematics he might very well have derived Maxwell's and even Einstein's equations in the 1840's. Given this knowledge, the impetus of the Civil war and their desperate situation we might see the Confederacy with one about 1864:p .

Really, it depends. My favorite is to see if it couldn't be pushed back to being based off of the theories we know were developed in Periclean Athens, giving one to Alexander. The problem there is that you still need about a hundred very basic inventions in the field of major industrial processes and then you have to give them mathematics that wasn't developed until the time of Newton.

Or maybe not, the Antikytheria mechnism seems to indicate a much greater knowledge of precision machining than we ever gave them credit for and the Archimedes Palimpsest hints that the calculus was not unknown to the Ancients so maybe....
 
Have some very influential, but not-too-bright monk miscalculate Jesus' birth by roughtly 50 years after what we consider it to be.



































Ha, ha, hah... I crack myself up.

I'll tackle the idea that small states can't do it, since the Renaissance started in the Italian city states.
Besides preserving ancient knowledge and theoretisizing, I thought they'd done poorly in applying it all, since each one of them lacked the resources large states like Britain and France had, hence they didn't continue playing a major role beyond the early Renaissance.
 

MrP

Banned
NapoleonXIV said:
Or maybe not, the Antikythera mechnism seems to indicate a much greater knowledge of precision machining than we ever gave them credit for and the Archimedes Palimpsest hints that the calculus was not unknown to the Ancients so maybe....

As Khib Yusa would say, "Ooh, shiny." :D wiki
 
Huns get slaughtered by the chinese in the second century.
4th century: Rome splits into various smaller nations, christianised barbarians in europe form proto-roman states.

5th century:Sassanid states threaten christian world, states lump toghether after intermittant border wars and fight back against Sassanids.
6th century: Innovations in warfare, early canons invented. Sassanids finally destroyed in final crusade. Divided romanified cities states in middle east, contact with Indian subcontinent. Revival of classic greek culture, greek/turkish states constitutional monarchy. Olympics restarted. Road building knowledge spreads to Scandanavia, India.

7th century: Silk Road from europe to india mostly real roman-style road. Compass discovered, Irish colonise Iceland and Greenland. Morroco trades with west africa via sea. Printing press arives from China too europe.

8th century: Eygptians/Indian nations taking trading posts across Indonesia, Australia, East Africa. North europe explores/half-heartedly trades with N.America. Selective breeding of animals takes off. Morrocans circumnavigate Africa, discover S.America trade with Mayans.

9th century: Mayan/Morrocans explore West coast of america, Morrocans chart S.America. European settlers across eastern N.America. Scientific method/ideology developed. Nazca balloons found, spread across Eurasia.

10th century: Train developed leads to industrial revolution which spreads from europe to asia. Brazil/N.America/S.Africa colonized. Indian nation defeats China, burning Beijing.

11th century: China deposes Emperor becomes communist. Catch up Industrial revolution.

12th century: India-China rivalry leads to cold war. Chinese develop nukes.
Indian cities nuked after border war.

13th century: Italy develops computer, information revolution; ICBMs result in China-Europe cold war.
 
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An invention of a printing press,in the 9th century. An earlier Renaissance, by the 1300s you should have nukes.
 
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CalBear

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The POD need to include advanced metallurgy, precision machining, explosive design, aeronautical engineering, and several geniuses. An atomic bomb needs all of these, especially the geniuses. Discovery of Radioactivity, Off Periodic-Table non-naturally occuring elements, both the General & Special Theory of Relativity, and several other major Physics discoveries are needed just to understand that the weapon COULD exist.

You will need several serious, 737 sized, butterflies to nudge nukes backward in the TL.
 
The Cult of Einstein

CalBear said:
The POD need to include advanced metallurgy, precision machining, explosive design, aeronautical engineering, and several geniuses. An atomic bomb needs all of these, especially the geniuses. Discovery of Radioactivity, Off Periodic-Table non-naturally occuring elements, both the General & Special Theory of Relativity, and several other major Physics discoveries are needed just to understand that the weapon COULD exist.

You will need several serious, 737 sized, butterflies to nudge nukes backward in the TL.

I took an AFIT graduate level course on nuclear weapon physics back in USAF days.

General Relativity has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

Special Relativity contrary to a widely held opinion is not necessary to develop fission weapons (it is necessary for fusion). You can derive the diffusion equation which is the real key equation in the shebang without special relativity using classical mechanics and exerpimental observation. Coulomb repulsion explains more than half the yield. For a while the engineers wonder where the rest is coming from but in the meantime they're leveling cities.
 

CalBear

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Tom_B said:
I took an AFIT graduate level course on nuclear weapon physics back in USAF days.

General Relativity has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

Special Relativity contrary to a widely held opinion is not necessary to develop fission weapons (it is necessary for fusion). You can derive the diffusion equation which is the real key equation in the shebang without special relativity using classical mechanics and exerpimental observation. Coulomb repulsion explains more than half the yield. For a while the engineers wonder where the rest is coming from but in the meantime they're leveling cities.

Regarding Special Relativity, I will gladly bow to your expertice, as my knowledge is not post-grad and is based on general physics, not weapon specific applications.

Regarding the remainder of my statements on needing geniuses, I will stand pat. To make a weapon from enriched Uranium or, to an even larger degree, Plutonium, you need to understand how these elements are different, how, specifically, you can create them, separate them from the mother U-235, handle the enriched products without killing everyone in the area, start a controlled nuclear chain reaction, and understand how you make a nuclear pile (again without killing yourself and/or poisoning the region around the lab for a quarter of a million years), all of which requires a minimum of 4 distinct Nobel Prize winning "leaps forward" in physics (IOTL it took several additional steps). These do not include the discovery of radioactivity in the first place, yet another Nobel Prize moment nor the conceptual leap from "radiation exists" to "you know, we could really get a hell of bang out of this stuff". Start piling up those geniuses.

I also will restate that numerous other independent breakthroughs, unrelated to physics, are necessary for the creation of any nuclear weapon.

It's not impossible, but we are still talking honkin' big Monarchs.
 
" I'll let Scott dispute the idea that large states can't be technologically innovative.

I'll tackle the idea that small states can't do it, since the Renaissance started in the Italian city states."
DN

Possibly I didn't express myself clearly enough. I didn't say large states can't be technological innovating. More that if you have one overwhelming state i.e. an imperial Rome or China then it would tend to be conservative and also the lack of competition. Such large states are more viable technologically now because they can compete with each other whereas before modern technology they have only fairly superficial contact - other than occasional trade of ideas and some diseases, which could be dramatic.

Small states could be innovative. As you say the Renaissance started there. I never said otherwise and the competition in their struggle for survival was important for their development. However I think they were too small to have the resources to develop an atomic project, especially not an earlier one than OTL. [Can you imagine say Venice or Florence having the resources for a Manhattan project, let alone developing a delivery system - other than by smuggling it into a rival city state for test purposes?] Also they ended up being swamped politically and militarily by the larger national states that developed.

Steve
 
DominusNovus said:
I'll let Scott dispute the idea that large states can't be technologically innovative.

The criterium isn't "large" but "with no concurrent around". During Song dynasty, China was split, and they made many inventions. Under the Mings China was united, but didn't invent that much (AFAIK). Could be coincidence, but it would make so much sense...
 
Just to throw in the obligatory chemist comment, we will have also seen by this point a couple of very nasty wars with chemical agents. If we are assuming an increase in general science knowledge, it will be much easier (theoretically and practically) to prepare large amounts of blister agents and high explosives...but I guess that is a little off topic.:p
 

Perkeo

Banned
It is clearly impossible to have a nuclear bomb without science and technology that wasn't available until very shortly before the Manhattan Project. And certainly an economy smaller than 1940's USA was hardly able to fund it. So IMHO there is no way the bomb could have come significantly earlier. Instead a MUCH later Trinity Test would be far from ASB.

Of course there are many ways to accelerate the development of science, technology and economy. But what's the point? If there's 1940's sci & tech, 1940 economy, then it is the 1940's, no matter what date you put on it.
 
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