No nuclear weapons - but for how long?

[Gwendolyn Ingolfsson]

Hi again!

Just got done reading "World Wars III" by Paul Di Filippo, a great little short story at http://www.webdelsol.com/4Walls8Windows/Paul_Di_Filippo/dif3.htm. The gist of it: Time traveller from a nuclear war-ravaged 1980s goes back to the early 20th Century and starting with Albert Einstein kills every nuclear physicist/rocket scientist he can get his hands on. No nukes, no ICBM's but oopsie! Conventional WWIII by the 70's. Anyway, my little question is this: ASB aspects aside, what is the longest reasonable time the development of nuclear weapons can be delayed? 20, 30 years? I'd say the world would have The Bomb by the mid-60s on the outside even with no Einstein. What say you?

 

[tom]

I agree. Radiation is too noticable, someone's gonna look into it. He would have to either kill scores of thousands, or go back to before the Industrial Revolution, to delay nukes to the late 1970's.

 

[aktarian]

Depending on your POd timeframe. The further back you go, the longer delay could be. But IMO once structure of atom was discovered and at least realised that means to split it exist you will get nuclear power eventually. Though if this is purely civilian is another matter. You can delay it (lack of funding, no big war to boost research, exploring wrong directions, couple of big and messy mistakes...) but eventually you'll get it. Not in 1945 though.

 

[Grimm Reaper]

What if it backfires and the development comes early? Not likely, I admit, as the US in WWII had to invent whole specialties and fields of industry to make it happen but...

What if it comes in, say, 1955, at the height of the Cold War and one of the two superpowers suddenly has the latest ultimate weapon?

And how does the US handle WWII differently without such a weapon? Is the US(or UK) more concerned with the post-war period, possibly grabbing off the Balkans or more of Germany? Is Japan hit even harder and then subject to partition?

 

[Gwendolyn Ingolfsson]

What if it backfires and the development comes early? Not likely, I admit, as the US in WWII had to invent whole specialties and fields of industry to make it happen but...

What if it comes in, say, 1955, at the height of the Cold War and one of the two superpowers suddenly has the latest ultimate weapon?

And how does the US handle WWII differently without such a weapon? Is the US(or UK) more concerned with the post-war period, possibly grabbing off the Balkans or more of Germany? Is Japan hit even harder and then subject to partition?

Hmmm. Well, if it comes during the Cold War then one side or the other is going to be much more tempted to use it than in OTL. After all, they won't have the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before them to give them pause. They'll build a few dozen or a few hundred and unleash an atomic Pearl Harbor. Nasty.

As for Japan in a non-nuclear WWII, just read Alfred Coppel's "The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan" or David Westheimer's "Death Is Lighter Than a Feather." Both great AH books based on the actual Allied invasion plans and on Ketsu-go, the Japanese defense ideas. Hair-raising to say the least.

 

[Grimm Reaper]

I suspect it might come out of the bag before one side had hundreds but you can never tell.

And you don't need these books to realize what an invasion of Japan might have involved. Just the collapse of the Japanese transport net along with the production of food would have killed millions over the next few months, even if the US agreed to a ceasefire while negotiations went on. Things were that bad.

Perhaps someone here remembers a book, the Trinity something-or-the-other? The premise was that a woman, probably a Kerry supporter today, but also an expert on the development of nuclear weapons, is sent back in time to try to stop the use of such weapons. In her attempts she accidentally gets the attention of a Nazi agent, and the Nazis hasten a project of their own, using radioactive materials rather than a nuclear device. The books ends with some interesting results.

1) Most of the top people on the Manhattan Project are dead.
2) Much of Manhattan was killed by a u-boat firing rockets with the radioactive material.
3) The source of the material was then destroyed, as it was built using slave labor at Dachau! In this unique scenario the Jews in this camp actually had a chance to do real harm to the Third Reich. Shame about Munich and much of Bavaria but...
4) FDR lost the election, with who knows what effects? Personally I suspect the erasure of Truman from history could prove disastrous for the Democratic Party.
5) The US used a nuke on Germany in February 1945, THREE on Japan, hit Moscow during the Berlin Crisis of 1948, then the North Korean capital and two Chinese cities in 1951 will issuing warnings to a Ho Chi Minh fellow...
6) The USSR is far behind in the nuclear race, as so many of the scientists who aided them were either killed or removed once it became clear that there was a traitor in the Manhattan Project's missed. No General Groves to protect essential scientists either.
7) No hydrogen bomb as of 1951.
8) Having no idea what the attack on Manhattan meant or how many such weapons Hitler had, our heroine was forced to ADVANCE the atomic bomb.