Would the WWI Powers even use nuclear weapons against civilian (aka “strategic”) targets?
Would the WWI Powers even use nuclear weapons against civilian (aka “strategic”) targets?
You could ask the same thing of the military thinkers between 1950 and 1990, that was literally what the plans called for during all those years.Yes, because the top brass are going to sacrifice their troops and create a radioactive wasteland for... what, exactly?
Why nukes - fuel air bombs would be much easier to develop and deliver.
On having nuclear weapons in WWI beyond even the need for several breakthroughs in physics of the time and industrial process’ that are unlikely to take place you have another major stumbling block: chemical explosives.
Randy
By advancing chemical science from 1790 forward, there is no telling how much farther ahead we would be in the late 1800's. It means setting a POD more decades back, but it does not qualify as ASB. The discovery of oxygen is credited to Joseph Priestly (1774), but Antoine Lavoisier was just as important in the debunking of phlogiston theory. Given the speed with which scientists advanced quantum physics in the twenties, earlier discoveries in the nineteenth century will stimulate different minds forward. At issue, major advances in chemistry and electricity are likely to change the time line for conventional explosives, warfare and perhaps the politics that drove to the first world war.Try this POD. In the 1790's, Antoine Lavoisier decides to flee to England before he is executed. He continues his work, making many discoveries in electrochemistry that were attributed to Michael Faraday in OTL. Faraday, as a boy, develops his keen interest in science and eventually gets instruction from Lavoisier. So, Faraday gets a head start, moving 19th century science forward, faster, earlier. Faraday lives until 1867 and many elements of science are a good generation ahead.