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ATLs have lots of examples of technologies that were proposed over the years that would have worked, at least for some definition of "work," but were never developed in our time line. Orion is certainly the most commonly mentioned example, by a substantial margin, but there's also zeppelins, nuclear thermal rockets, various spacecraft and high-speed aircraft projects, etc.

What about the other side of the coin? Are there technologies that exist today that might not have been developed, or at least delayed for fifty years? I don't mean just specific systems, like the F-22 fighter aircraft or the Apple iPod, but whole classes of technology.

For example, I think you could probably kill civilian nuclear power in the United States with a fairly minimal PoD. Give the United States Atomic Energy Commission the same attitude Stalin had towards nuclear safety, and then have something like the Kyshtym disaster happen in, let's say, 1954. Unlike the USSR, the US couldn't cover up something on that scale, no matter how deep in the desert it was. Since Three Mile Island, the US has issued no new licenses for nuclear reactors; if there had been a bona fide disaster on our soil, with hundreds of people killed from direct effects... While that certainly wouldn't kill the military program - we'd still need atom bombs - you could probably kill civil nuclear power, at least in the US, for a long, long time.
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