No Einstein, WWIII the ultimate result?

Dorozhand

Banned
So, I was musing yesterday about what it would have taken for a conventional WWIII to have happened between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. As I thought about possible POD's, probing further and further back into history, I suddenly found one that caught my attention.

What if Einstein had never become a scientist, the theories of relativity and E=mc2 were never forulated, physics continued (at least for a longer while) along Newtonian lines, Nuclear technology was never developed or concieved, and nuclear weapons never created.

Everything would be about the same until WWII, when, in the absence of even a theory regarding nuclear energy, weapon scientists concentrate instead on perfecting conventional weapons. The most significant fruit of this occuring in 1945, when the US invades Japan rather than nuking it as IOTL.

I then imagined a Japan under US influence, and a united Korea under Soviet influence (the USSR manages to grab the whole thing while the US is busy invading Japan into 1946).

This intensifies cold war tensions in the east. However, no third world war occurs immediately, because even without nukes a clash of titans would result in global catastrophe. However, in the 1960's, some kind of diplomatic crisis grips the world, occuring in either Europe, Asia, or Cuba, which precipitates a war between NATO and the WP.

I thought it was kind of interesting. Should I throw Cthulhu in there for good measure?
 
So, I was musing yesterday about what it would have taken for a conventional WWIII to have happened between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. As I thought about possible POD's, probing further and further back into history, I suddenly found one that caught my attention.

What if Einstein had never become a scientist, the theories of relativity and E=mc2 were never forulated, physics continued (at least for a longer while) along Newtonian lines, Nuclear technology was never developed or concieved, and nuclear weapons never created.

Everything would be about the same until WWII, when, in the absence of even a theory regarding nuclear energy, weapon scientists concentrate instead on perfecting conventional weapons. The most significant fruit of this occuring in 1945, when the US invades Japan rather than nuking it as IOTL.

I then imagined a Japan under US influence, and a united Korea under Soviet influence (the USSR manages to grab the whole thing while the US is busy invading Japan into 1946).

This intensifies cold war tensions in the east. However, no third world war occurs immediately, because even without nukes a clash of titans would result in global catastrophe. However, in the 1960's, some kind of diplomatic crisis grips the world, occuring in either Europe, Asia, or Cuba, which precipitates a war between NATO and the WP.

I thought it was kind of interesting. Should I throw Cthulhu in there for good measure?


I think that atomic weapons would be delayed by, at most, a decade. No scientific theory is utterly dependent on one man to come up with it. Einstein's OTL work will be done at some point. The evidence for his theories is still there--all it takes is someone to draw a line between them.

Let's say, however, that atomic technology is delayed a decade at least. WWII would end with the United States starving Japan to death, and possibly invading the remnants in 1947. The US Navy and USAAF would blockade, shell, and firebomb the living hell out of the Home Islands for months, killing, by the end, perhaps 1/3 to 2/3 of all Japanese. An invasion would only take place if, at the end, the semi-feudal Japan refuses to give in, or if the Soviets move to invade.

Without the atomic bomb, the US might actually have a stronger position in Europe. It would have to rely on more conventional means of diplomacy than just invoking the atomic bomb, and the Soviets won't be able to call that bluff ITTL--the US will have to actually put real force behind their demands.
 
I think that atomic weapons would be delayed by, at most, a decade. No scientific theory is utterly dependent on one man to come up with it. Einstein's OTL work will be done at some point. The evidence for his theories is still there--all it takes is someone to draw a line between them.

Let's say, however, that atomic technology is delayed a decade at least. WWII would end with the United States starving Japan to death, and possibly invading the remnants in 1947. The US Navy and USAAF would blockade, shell, and firebomb the living hell out of the Home Islands for months, killing, by the end, perhaps 1/3 to 2/3 of all Japanese. An invasion would only take place if, at the end, the semi-feudal Japan refuses to give in, or if the Soviets move to invade.

Without the atomic bomb, the US might actually have a stronger position in Europe. It would have to rely on more conventional means of diplomacy than just invoking the atomic bomb, and the Soviets won't be able to call that bluff ITTL--the US will have to actually put real force behind their demands.
no they wouldn't starve them, the allies agreed to conquer japan one year after Germany so downfall is going to happen
 
I will note that Einstein was not the only one involved in the field of nuclear physics, or even relativity. But 'no nukes' is interesting and not entirely implausible.

I don't think you need Lovecraftian horrors - the horror of the setting can come from the sheer devastation of three major wars... and from the inevitable use of biological and chemical weapons, both of which saw major development even with nukes (and would see even more development as alternative deterrents). This strikes me as a setting where human pettiness and stubbornness is to blame for tragedy; adding in Cthulhu strikes me as somewhat distracting from that point.
To be fair, Charles Stross showed that you can mix Lovecraft and the Cold War but keep human failings (rather than humanity's insignificance in the face of an uncaring, ancient universe) as the main source of horror.
 
no they wouldn't starve them, the allies agreed to conquer japan one year after Germany so downfall is going to happen

If that is indeed the case, then it'll be both starvation and invasion. My reckoning is that the Home Islands will be mostly depopulated by 1947, if the Japanese leadership decides to actually fight to the very death. If they grow a brain and surrender, the casualties might be only 3.3 million men (3 million Japanese, 0.3 million Allies) and perhaps another 3 million civilians.
 
If that is indeed the case, then it'll be both starvation and invasion. My reckoning is that the Home Islands will be mostly depopulated by 1947, if the Japanese leadership decides to actually fight to the very death. If they grow a brain and surrender, the casualties might be only 3.3 million men (3 million Japanese, 0.3 million Allies) and perhaps another 3 million civilians.
casualties estimates for japan were 4-8 million
casualties for allies were 400,000
 

WeisSaul

Banned
casualties estimates for japan were 4-8 million
casualties for allies were 400,000

The Japanese were, in my honest opinion, a nation of brainwashed ubermilitarized, crazy motherf***ers. On Saipan and Rota mothers were cutting their children's throats and jumping off cliffs because of the pro-suicide culture that developed and the terrible lies Fed to everyone about the American barbarians that were coming to rape, torture, and pillage. Sounds like they took China's description of Japan and mad-lobbed a little.

Japan was training high school students in military procedures, Marshall arts, and crazy suicidal doctrines. If the allied forces landed on the mainland, wives would have cone at them with kitchen knives, farmers with pitchforks, students with blades, and the whole goddamned military and populace would have gone into a bloodcrazed frenzy fighting off the foreign barbarians who they (the citizenry) were afraid being raped and pillaged by.

Those numbers you posted were too low in my opinion. When a whole society of over 70,000,000 million people is armed and ready to fight to the death, hell does not even begin to define such a place when the allies hit the beaches.
 
The Japanese were, in my honest opinion, a nation of brainwashed ubermilitarized, crazy motherf***ers. On Saipan and Rota mothers were cutting their children's throats and jumping off cliffs because of the pro-suicide culture that developed and the terrible lies Fed to everyone about the American barbarians that were coming to rape, torture, and pillage. Sounds like they took China's description of Japan and mad-lobbed a little.

Japan was training high school students in military procedures, Marshall arts, and crazy suicidal doctrines. If the allied forces landed on the mainland, wives would have cone at them with kitchen knives, farmers with pitchforks, students with blades, and the whole goddamned military and populace would have gone into a bloodcrazed frenzy fighting off the foreign barbarians who they (the citizenry) were afraid being raped and pillaged by.

Those numbers you posted were too low in my opinion. When a whole society of over 70,000,000 million people is armed and ready to fight to the death, hell does not even begin to define such a place when the allies hit the beaches.
This. They would have starved before they would wurrender. The only way to force the surrender would have been through Operation Olympic.
 
The Japanese were, in my honest opinion, a nation of brainwashed ubermilitarized, crazy motherf***ers. On Saipan and Rota mothers were cutting their children's throats and jumping off cliffs because of the pro-suicide culture that developed and the terrible lies Fed to everyone about the American barbarians that were coming to rape, torture, and pillage. Sounds like they took China's description of Japan and mad-lobbed a little.

Japan was training high school students in military procedures, Marshall arts, and crazy suicidal doctrines. If the allied forces landed on the mainland, wives would have cone at them with kitchen knives, farmers with pitchforks, students with blades, and the whole goddamned military and populace would have gone into a bloodcrazed frenzy fighting off the foreign barbarians who they (the citizenry) were afraid being raped and pillaged by.

Those numbers you posted were too low in my opinion. When a whole society of over 70,000,000 million people is armed and ready to fight to the death, hell does not even begin to define such a place when the allies hit the beaches.
those were "official members of the military" not civilians or unrecognized combatants IE child soliders
 
I may not be entirely correct, but his mass to energy formula actually proved beyond doubt that bomb could be made. The concept of the atom bomb existed in SF from 19th century much in the same way as FTL engines exist now. Einsten's theory actually gave it theoretical framework necessary to postulate succesful bomb.
 
Radioactivity and nuclear energy on Wiki said:
While E = mc2 is useful for understanding the amount of energy potentially released in a fission reaction, it was not strictly necessary to develop the weapon, once the fission process was known, and its energy measured at 200 MeV (which was directly possible, using a quantitative Geiger counter, at that time). As the physicist and Manhattan Project participant Robert Serber put it: "Somehow the popular notion took hold long ago that Einstein's theory of relativity, in particular his famous equation E = mc2, plays some essential role in the theory of fission. Albert Einstein had a part in alerting the United States government to the possibility of building an atomic bomb, but his theory of relativity is not required in discussing fission. The theory of fission is what physicists call a non-relativistic theory, meaning that relativistic effects are too small to affect the dynamics of the fission process significantly."[60] However the association between E = mc2 and nuclear energy has since stuck, and because of this association, and its simple expression of the ideas of Albert Einstein himself, it has become "the world's most famous equation".[61]
While Serber's view of the strict lack of need to use mass–energy equivalence in designing the atomic bomb is correct, it does not take into account the pivotal role which this relationship played in making the fundamental leap to the initial hypothesis that large atoms were energetically allowed to split into approximately equal parts (before this energy was in fact measured). In late 1938, while on the winter walk on which they solved the meaning of Hahn's experimental results and introduced the idea that would be called atomic fission, Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch made direct use of Einstein's equation to help them understand the quantitative energetics of the reaction which overcame the "surface tension-like" forces holding the nucleus together, and allowed the fission fragments to separate to a configuration from which their charges could force them into an energetic "fission". To do this, they made use of "packing fraction", or nuclear binding energy values for elements, which Meitner had memorized. These, together with use of E = mc2 allowed them to realize on the spot that the basic fission process was energetically possible

This is what I found on Wiki. I guess that it could be developed empirically, of course. Some 20 irradiated nuclear physicists later. :eek:
 
Einstein was pretty much irrelevant to the development of nuclear physics. The only real part he played in developing the bomb was to help convince American politicians that they should fund the development

The important phycists with regards to nuclear physics were Rutherford, Bohr, Heisenberg et al
 
Well, this means he can't build all those superweapons that allowed the Allies to defeat the Soviet Union in Red Alert. ;)
 
The actual theory behind nuclear weapons is quite straightforward, the difficulty is the engineering needed to makeit happen. If Einstein doesn't come up with it someone else while, maybe more incrementally but it will happen.
 

Perkeo

Banned
How critical was Einsteinian physics in actually developing the bomb?

As a physicist, albeit not a nuclear physicist, I dare to say that Einsteinian physics isn't critical AT ALL. The applications for Einsteinian physics are spectroscopy, astronomy and many high accuracy measurements like the GPS, but relativity doesn't show up in nuclear physics until a far more advanced stage than the Manhattan project.

The formula E=mc² applies just as much to conventional explosives as to nuclear bombs, and the speed even of the so called "fast neutrons" is less than one percent of the speed of light, so I suppose Newtonian mechanics are perfectly accurate in reactor physics.

He opened some POLITICAL doors that were crucial to the Manhattan project, no more and no less.

I may not be entirely correct, but his mass to energy formula actually proved beyond doubt that bomb could be made. The concept of the atom bomb existed in SF from 19th century much in the same way as FTL engines exist now. Einsten's theory actually gave it theoretical framework necessary to postulate succesful bomb.

The discovery of radioactivity triggered those SF concepts, and the discovery of nuclear fission that gave it theoretical framework necessary to postulate succes. Einstein wasn't involved in either.

You may delay the bomb a lot by either removing Henri Bequerell (who discovered radioactivity in 1896) or the Curie clan (who made some key discoveries and pioneered experimental methodology), but Albert Einstein is simply is the wrong guy for our POD.

EDIT: Unless of course, we refer to the POLITICAL contribution of Einstein. With the removal of the Manhattan project and the OTL lack of success of the German Uranprojekt, nuclear reactors and/or bombs will be considered infeasable for quite a while longer than IOTL. Note that we have no more than a decade from the theoretical idea to the actual application. That is unprecedented in history.
 
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The actual theory behind nuclear weapons is quite straightforward, the difficulty is the engineering needed to makeit happen. If Einstein doesn't come up with it someone else while, maybe more incrementally but it will happen.

Other people did, as said, Einstein had stuff all to do with the development of nuclear weapons or even the theories that suggested them. Einstein simply gave Roosevelt a kick up the backside regarding funding of the manhattan project
 
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