If there is no nuclear bomb, how many world war would happen?

Since the only reason The Soviets and Americans dont invade eachother was fear of mutual destruction(even with nukes, it was pretty close), what would happen if we take nukes away? How many world war would we see?

My bet is on 4. Since it take 2 war to keep germany down.

For the POD? Well just assume most of atomic scientist died of some random fever. We just need to kill einstein,curie and heisenberg? Maybe some more guys. Not likely. But its not asb either.
 
Remember the Soviets were just as scared of the West as the West was scared of them. The trauma of WWII was completely done through conventional means. Even though the Soviets could steamroll Europe with numbers if they wanted to, keeping and pacifying it is another matter all together...
 
Remember the Soviets were just as scared of the West as the West was scared of them. The trauma of WWII was completely done through conventional means. Even though the Soviets could steamroll Europe with numbers if they wanted to, keeping and pacifying it is another matter all together...

"Empty stomachs make for angry hearts" Lenin

Stalin never forgot that particular chestnut. When one of his generals suggested steamrollering Western Europe (mind, at the time the general didn't know of Manhattan and Stalin did) Stalin angrily smashed his fist on the table and growled: "And who will feed them?":mad: I think Stalin very much had the image of the python trying to swallow the baby elephant on his mind...

Are they as effective as nukes?

No. Chemicals are not easy to deliver, and are basically a battlefield weapon. Attempting to turn it into a weapon of mass destruction against cities only insures that turnabout is fair play. Biologicals have a nasty tendency to bite the hands of the deliverer.

Oh yes. They could easily wipe out a city. And if you were stupid enough to pick the "right" disease, you could have a global pandemic a la The Stand pretty quickly.

As stated, you can just as easily create a superbug that kills your own population too. The genetics of the life cycle within bacteria and mechanics of virological reproduction dictate that any such artificially created pandemics will inevitably become a Frankenstein Monster that eventually kills its creator. Even if it kills a lot of innocent villagers first.
 
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Sir Chaos

Banned
As stated, you can just as easily create a superbug that kills your own population too. The genetics of the life cycle within bacteria and mechanics of virological reproduction dictate that any such artificially created pandemics will inevitably become a Frankenstein Monster that eventually kills its creator. Even if it kills a lot of innocent villagers first.

Mutually Assured Destruction.
 

CalBear

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Are they as effective as nukes?

Bioweapons can be a nightmare. End of world potential. Extremely cost effective system. Problem with them, until fairly recently, is that the more effective they are, the more danger they present to the user. This has become somewhat less of an issue with genetic engineeing.

Chemical weapons are more scary than truly effective as actual "weapons" A couple tons of CW weapons (including weapon casings) will kill/injure part of a major city. A couple tons of modern nuclear weapons will wipe out at least a couple cities (a B-61 gravity bomb weighs 700 pounds and has a yield of of to 340kT, a W88 missile warhead, yield 475kT weighs ~800 pounds).

To the OP question: A span of 10-30 years between wars is reasonable, depending on how alliances shake out. For example, after WW II NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have been ready to go at it hammer and tongs by 1955, only ten years after WW II, but they had been allied in the previous conflict and, at least in the case of the West, had been able to recover remarkably quickly while the Soviets had managed, rather miraculously, to rebuild military capability during a massively destructive war. After a major engagement in 1955 there would have been at least a decade, more likely two to rebuild and refill the various treasuries.

So a quick and dirty estimate would be 1955,-1958, 1973-76, 1996-2000 (very possibly with a different set of players, potentially the PRC vs. the West over what is left of the USSR or the Soviets and Chinese deciding the future of Eurasia) with two power block gearing up for the next war right around now.
 
The scenario's pretty ASB, though. The hard part of nuclear weapons is refining the fissionables, not building the bomb. Once you've discovered isotopes and radioactivity the rest will come. You'd have to have a POD that wipes out just about all of modern physics and the scientific method for those not to have been discovered eventually. At the very least, it's early enough (before Marie Curie) and devastating enough that the butterflies wipe out WWII entirely.
 
The scenario's pretty ASB, though. The hard part of nuclear weapons is refining the fissionables, not building the bomb. Once you've discovered isotopes and radioactivity the rest will come. You'd have to have a POD that wipes out just about all of modern physics and the scientific method for those not to have been discovered eventually. At the very least, it's early enough (before Marie Curie) and devastating enough that the butterflies wipe out WWII entirely.

I agree. Wiping out Einstein doesn't wipe out the concept of E=MC2 which is really the sparking point of realizing that a weapon is possible. Energy and mass are equavelent and convertible. Yes, Einstein came up with special relativity, general relativity, and quanta packets (light is a particle and a wave leading to quantum mechanics); and coming up with both a unified theory of gravity and then also giving birth to quantum mechanics is an amazing life-time accomplishment, but it doesn't mean that if he's butterflied away that those concepts aren't found at roughly the same time, perhaps one person coming up with relativity, another for quantum mechanics. If those discoveries come from a German (or other "Aryan" in the view of Nazis) non-Jew in this ATL then we could see further progress towards a nuclear weapon by the Nazis during WWII. Part of their problem was the throwing out of "Jewish science".
 
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