Nuclear Weapons prior 20th century

NIK PARMEN

Banned
How is this possible? your views

Nuclear Blast.jpg
 
you're basically talking about increasing the rate of development of new technologies, not necessarily by a lot but to some degree
 

Philip

Donor
You really need to specify a time frame for the POD.

If the POD occurs around 3000BC, then having nuclear weapons develop about 50 years early seems completely reasonable. If the POD occurs in 1848 (to pick a popular 19th Century POD), then it seems nearly impossible to have them develop before 1901.
 
You need WWII-era tech to do it. We've discussed this ad nauseum in the post-1900 forum.

The chemistry, the physics, the economy all have to be at 1930s+ level, so if you have A bombs by 1900 then you have cars by 1850, basically.

You have to speed up the entire tech-tree to get there.

So you're essentially saying, WI tech happened 50 (100 etc) years early.


Without totally huge changes to history, you can move the Abomb forward from '45 to '44. Maybe 43. That's just about it. If you want to posit a surviving Alexander the Great TL that lands on the moon in 1500, then you could have an A bomb ~1500. If dinosaurs weren't wiped out in 65 million BC, you could have an a bomb in 64 million bc....

The question as posed is so vague as to be almost meaningless, I'm afraid.
 
I think several technological braekthrough could be moved few decades earlier to speed up technology advance. Make someone invent nd introduce working steam machine around 1700 to speed up industrial revolution. Then have other genius introduce railroads faster. I think that Henry Ford and Edison-like people introducing ideas of mass production and industrial research lab earlier that in OTL are also plausible which should speed up further industrial and scientific progress. Also avoid few dead end's in theoretical physics to introduce atomic theory earlier and have someone formulate theory of relativity before 1870.
 
Nuclear bombs are a no-no. But dirty bombs that kill off a populace with flakes of radium all over the place is possible. Then again, our ancestors were morons and used the stuff for toothpaste and so forth, so the nastiness of it would have to be known.
 
The problem isn't just the physics it the entire raft of basic technologies which have to work to build the bomb. Things like ultra corrosion resistant steels for the gasseous diffusion plant, electronic and explosive componentry to get the simultaneous lens explosions, the metalurgy to refine and enrich urnaium to 90%+ purity and the machining capability to build the physicis package correctly. You're not going to be able whip up a nuke in a 17th century Dutch shipyard no matter how good the theoretical physics is.
 
Top