Nuclearf weapons postponed for 2 generations

I have heard it claimed that until some refugee physists made new calculations it had been thought that one would need a device weighing perhaps 30 tons to creat a nuclear explosion. Such was obviously not usable in military terms

If that had been believed there might have been no Manhatten project.

I am fairly clear that Japan would have been defeated and probably without a full scale invasion.

(I think that Japan might have surrendered conditonally - just keeping emporer- to avoid the risk of Soviet Occupation).

How likely is a war with the the Soviet Union in the absence of nuclear weapons?

How likely is the use of chemical or bio weapons in such a war?
 
Except that would not delay them for long, eventually the calculations would be made and sooner rather than later, you would be lucky to get a decade

War with USSR, probability is high, both bio and chem weapons are likely, but not certain
 
Except that would not delay them for long, eventually the calculations would be made and sooner rather than later, you would be lucky to get a decade

War with USSR, probability is high, both bio and chem weapons are likely, but not certain

MAthematically, we're been able to do better than the shuttle for 40 years. We haven't due to congress being very reluctant to develop new hardware, which inevitably means an end to purchases of the old hardware, and thousands of jobless americans. Such technologcal conservatism can and has (on many ocasions) stood in the way of mathematically sensible engineering progress.

It could easily have happened with the bomb in America, which didn't pick up the bomb as quickly as it coudl have. Britain woudl have gone ahead, but it's generally agreed that they wouldn't have finished until the war was already over, at which point the inbound labour government woudl no doubt have cancelled it like everything else. Without America or Britain to copy, and with German scientists (likely) clueless, the Russians might not have had the gumption to do their own research. There is after all a reason for the WesternInventionSki meme.
 
MAthematically, we're been able to do better than the shuttle for 40 years. We haven't due to congress being very reluctant to develop new hardware, which inevitably means an end to purchases of the old hardware, and thousands of jobless americans. Such technologcal conservatism can and has (on many ocasions) stood in the way of mathematically sensible engineering progress.
I'm skeptical this is a good analogy. Maybe I'm projecting too much from a present MAD-influenced viewpoint, but a working atomic bomb has obvious practical (military) value that a better space shuttle doesn't really seem to.

I'm skeptical it's likely for research into atomic weapons to be neglected like this unless one postulates a different, probably much more peaceful geopolitical situation.
 
IMO the best way is to kill off Arthur Jeffrey Dempster and F. W. Aston in the Spanish Flu, this will set back the development of the mass spectrometer by some years, and may result in U-235 not being discovered for some years after that (it was Dempster who discovered it OTL, in 1935).
 
In absence of nuclear weapons? Much, much more likely. We could see the Berlin crisis escalating into ww3, as Stalin won't have to worry about an extremely powerful weapon which he didn't have.
 
OTOH, that may not occur, since the US will be a more potent force in other respects, after all, no discovery of uranium means no Manhattan Project to soak up funds.
 
Britain woudl have gone ahead, but it's generally agreed that they wouldn't have finished until the war was already over, at which point the inbound labour government woudl no doubt have cancelled it like everything else.

The 1945 - 51 Labour government with Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary were very keen on developing the bomb actually and did so even though the USA went back on the initial Tube Alloys proposal and the UK had to start again. The labour politicians of that era had all served in the coalition government during the war and had a strong defence ethos.
 
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