Pre-WWI UK: Nuclear options

A couple of scenarios I'm thinking of, and wondering what the resident Britons' opinions are.

1) Ditchers prevail in the Parliament Act division, 500+ Liberal peers join them in the Lords. Is it possible in that scenario that Home Rule gets sped up? With an overwhelming Liberal Lords majority and ruthless use of both cloture and time allocation the HRA can surely be passed fairly quickly.

2) In that scenario, there's going to be Ulster trouble. Will Asquith flood Ireland with regular troops to disarm the Volunteers, as he seemingly summoned the courage to do by 1914 IOTL? If he does, how bad does it get?
 
I got all excited, expecting a discussion about nuclear technology being advanced by 40 years or so. Tsk, shame.
 
Asquith's threat to create 500 peers wasn't a bluff (he'd gotten the King's agreement) but the Lords could refuse to seat them, as they did with Scottish peers with English/British titles in the 18th century. Which would lead to a stalemate and constitutional clusterfuck - short of a revolution the Lords have nothing to lose and the Liberals can't back down because they've already created the peers. I suspect in this instance the price for the Lords backing down would be some kind of reform (as numerous Conservative and Liberal peers had urged in the previous two decades) of the Upper Chamber and possibly a dilution of the Parliament Act.

With regards to Ireland, I can't see Asquith having the gall to disarm the UVF given that the problems of doing so - a reluctant Army and sympathetic public on the mainland - still exist.
 
Nukes in 1914? Would've been interesting.

Well, the primary question there is which of the Powers have them. Presuming all the major Powers do, the question is whether at the beginning of the war whether Moscow considers Serbia to be worth the possibility of Nukes being used.

The true ugliness here is the possibility of Nukes being used in the Russian Civil War.
 
On the latter question, Ireland is going to be...rather worrying. The Curragh Mutiny (where 57 officers out of the 70 at the largest army base in Ireland proposed to resign their commissions rather than force Ulster to accept Home Rule) shows that at least among the army in Ireland there was not a lot of support in the military for forcing the north into a Home Rule Parliament administered from Dublin. And depending on when this Home Rule Bill goes through (and the number of butterflies from the changes in the Lords) the Ulster Volunteers could be armed with several thousand rifles and the Number 1. Scheme (whereby upon the declaration of Home Rule UVF troops would immediately seize strategic locations such as arms caches, hospitals and power plants using motor vehicles to move quickly to their positions). If the Home Rule Act doesn't have some sort of opt out for Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down at least then things will be messy.
 
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