China was a fairly new addition to the constant struggle between fascism and communism. The new Peoples’ Republic of China was led by none other than the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, who turned out to be a similarly ruthless dictator as his patron Stalin. The latter had an interest in a strong China as a counterbalance against both influence from the Anglo sphere powers and the Nazi regime which was supporting the Republic of China on Taiwan under Chiang Kai-Shek again as their Japanese ally had been thoroughly cut down to size by the Americans.
Like in the Soviet Union, China became a highly centralized state and the economy became a planned economy on the Stalinist model although China didn’t have to do it alone like the USSR had to in the 1930s. Stalin had built up his country with almost entirely internal means, creating an autarky. Mao wanted to do the same. He had a large distrust for experts as he thought them to be intellectuals (who he distrusted a lot) with liberal and fascist sympathies. He could hardly say this about Soviet experts sent by Stalin and he reluctantly let them in although this arguably saved China from some of his more zany schemes. Among them were building small furnaces on the collective farms which would be fed pig iron lumps and which would produce steel and make China the greatest steel producer in Mao’s vision. Soviet technical experts persuaded him that this was a very bad idea. This was the beginning of the First Seven Year Plan which would see a great influx of Soviet men, materiel and resources. Mao learned from Stalin’s favourite methods and started using anti-communist prisoners for his projects as slaves. Soon railroads and roads connected the major cities along with modern communications. Vast industrial complexes similar to those around Magnitogorsk and Moscow were built around cities like Harbin and produced modern machinery such as tractors, but also tanks. It turned out that China had the world’s largest coal reserves and massive mining projects were created out of scratch, with many deaths as a result due to lack of decent safety measures. In 1949, a team of Soviet geologists discovered the Daqing oilfield in Manchuria. In seven years, the production of coal, steel and pig iron doubled or even tripled. According to Chinese figures, the heavy industry sector had achieved 112% of its preset aims. This most likely wasn’t true, but production increases were enormous, new production processes were invented and China was modernized overall to the level of the USSR. China’s east coast where most major cities were, was electrified. The army also benefitted from this.
The Peoples’ Liberation Army, or PLA for short, saw an influx of equipment that was sold for bottom prices by Stalin. The new IS series tanks and also the highly successful T-34 entered service and soon Chinese made copies came off the assembly lines. The IS by now had met its opponent in newer German models, but still ranked among the best tank designs. Its 122 mm gun was powerful and its armour nearly impenetrable for the standard 50 and 75 mm anti-tank guns of the day. The new T-54 was even more powerful with 203 mm armour plating of high quality steel and a 100 mm gun which, although smaller in calibre than the IS 122 mm gun, had a higher armour penetrating capability. Something similar was happening in Korea albeit at a smaller scale than in China and the USSR. This was a build-up for war, a war that wouldn’t come, not during Stalin’s lifetime anyway.
Besides the atomic bomb project, Hitler ordered Plan Z to be restarted with several modifications. The new Plan Z was formulated in 1945 and now planned for the following ships to be built by 1962: six H-class battleships, twelve aircraft carriers, three battlecruisers, eleven heavy cruisers, sixty-six light cruisers, one hundred destroyers and five hundred U-boats of the new, modern Type XXI long ranged type which outclassed all other existing diesel-electric submarines without exceptions. This new model had a new engine that allowed it to remain submerged permanently due to a special chemical reaction that created the necessary oxygen for the diesel engines. This design was also among the more silent submarine designs in the world and was hardly audible to the existing anti-submarine technology and often wasn’t heard by patrolling destroyers until too late which frequently led to a war fever among crews as they feared that if the Germans wanted to attack, the torpedo had already been launched. This was one of Hitler’s many grand schemes besides his reconstruction of Berlin into his world capital of Germania and his new enthusiasm to achieve nuclear power for the Reich after learning of the successful American Trinity test. The new H-class battleship with a weight of 62.500 tons and a main battery of eight 406 mm (16 inch guns) was a daunting opponent, even more so when the designers upgraded the armour with the new Lion-class and Iowa-classes as new opponents. Learning from past mistakes, the fire control and communication centres of the ship were moved below where the 295 mm armour belt protected them. The aircraft carriers were of a completely new design and were renamed the Hermann Goering-class after his final demise in 1949 of a cerebral haemorrhage. They were based on the highly successful Essex-class. This would give Germany a big navy although still outnumbered by the USN in everything except U-boats in which German designers held the lead.
Nazi prestige, however, culminated in Germania, Hitler’s megalomaniac project to remake Berlin. Soon engineers found, however, that the soil of Berlin was unfit, but Hitler insisted and therefore immensely deep foundations had to be laid. A new Olympic stadium was built which could fit a crowd of 400.000 people along with the Volkshalle, a two hundred metre high dome in which Hitler could address 180.000 people simultaneously. It had a bronze eagle on top which, instead of the traditional swastika, held an earth ball which signified Nazi dominance over the world. The stairs were flanked by the statues of the two titans Atlas and Tellus who carried the heavens and the earth respectively. Inside, twenty-four metre tall Doric columns made out of marble supported the ceiling and behind Hitler’s stand where he addressed crowds, a twenty-four metre golden eagle stood. This building was the most magnanimous and the epitome of Nazi megalomania and of the world capital Germania, the centre of Nazism and it was envisioned as a shrine to future Nazis with a symbolic meaning that would be similar to the meaning the St. Peter Basilica had to Roman Catholics. It was truly ambitious. The other buildings weren’t unimpressive though. A one hundred metre tall triumphal arch spanned the road on the east-west axis where most government buildings were. There was also the equally impressive north-south axis. The façade of Hitler’s palace was 700 metres long. Munich and Nuremberg would be recreated in a similar way with Speer’s marble and granite giants with Munich, for example, having a Roman temple style monument to those who had died in the 1923 coup attempt and a large skyscraper with a marble eagle perched on top. Very soon, Germany had the largest concentration of neo-classicist and baroque architecture in Europe, if not the world, with only Italy coming close as Mussolini was attempting to recreate ancient Rome in fascist style.
The Cold War had already sparked an arms race and the space race also began in earnest when the Germans successfully brought man’s first artificial satellite in orbit in 1950. The ballistic missile program had taken off in the 1930s as these weapons were not restricted by the Treaty of Versailles. Great leaps had been made since this field had become popular in the 1920s when rockets could barely achieve an altitude of 100 metres. The A4 missile (A for Aggregate series) had already achieved semi-orbit in 1944 and had a range of 320 kilometres and was able to carry a one tonne warhead which could be a conventional warhead but also a chemical or biological one filled with nerve agents of which the Nazi regime had the largest stockpile or anthrax (nuclear payloads were still far too large). These rockets were fuelled with a liquid propellant of ethanol and liquid oxygen which could propel it to speeds of thousands of miles per hour at an altitude of 88 kilometres where no weapon on Earth could shoot it down. The impact of this weapon was inevitable once it had been launched although its guidance system of gyroscopes and gyroscopic accelerometers was grossly inaccurate and unsuitable for military targets and certainly not hardened facilities. This rocket was to be used as a terror weapon only and was also a test bed for future designs of Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists who were the leaders in their field as of the 1940s. The program had eventually led to the A9/A10 was a two stage rocket which stood 41 metres tall and weighed in at over 100 tonnes and was able to reach New York, Washington, Sverdlovsk and Beijing with a projected range of over 10.000 kilometres. It, along with the A11 that would follow, had the potential to bring a satellite payload into orbit which happened in 1950 as planned. This new super weapon could hit the eastern seaboard of the US and Washington therefore started its own program although it would take them years to catch up as Germany launched the first manned flight into space in 1953 and landed a man on the moon in 1959. The space race was definitely on.
For both the USSR and the Reich it was time to ascend to superpower status as well. In 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. The test was called RDS-1 which was an acronym of First Lightning or, allegedly, Russia Does it Herself which would have been ironic as the Soviets, like the Germans, received a lot of information from espionage in the US and not through their own research. The test was a success nonetheless as the design was almost a full copy of the Trinity design or implosion design as it is officially known. With a yield of 20 kilotons, it was equally powerful. The Nazis, however, made it very clear that they had other weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. Hitler had no qualms of letting anthrax and nerve gas rain down on Soviet cities such as Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and even as far away as Sverdlovsk and Omsk with his rockets and new Ju 390 long range bombers which had a range of 10.000 kilometres and could strike at any Soviet city, even as far away as Vladivostok. Stalin knew that Hitler, being in the mental state that he was in during the late 1940s, would probably live up to this threat and postponed his plans for revenge even further until it was too late and the task of avenging the loss in the Great Patriotic War fell in the hands of his successor. He had built up too long for his vengeance war and had made a lot of propaganda and now the Soviet Union’s chance was gone, perhaps forever. Hitler tested his own nuclear weapon in 1950 and it achieved an incredible yield of 22 kilotons. This test was perhaps the most gruesome of all as Hitler ordered it to be tested on a concentration camp with Slav prisoners to see what effects of a nuclear blast and the radiation would have on the human body cheaply. Several thousands of inmates would die directly from the blast while many thousands more would die of radiation disease and severe burns while German doctors, among them Josef Mengele or Doctor Death, who would conduct a great many gruesome experiments on his irradiated victims. Hitler himself saw the test and was astonished, claiming euphorically that he had the power of God at his fingertips now and that no one would dare to challenge the Reich ever again. This was perhaps one of the only moments that Hitler became emotional about anything else than his monomaniac obsession with racial purity.
America, however, tested an even more powerful weapon in 1952 with their Ivy Mike test. The 62-ton "Mike" device was essentially a building that resembled a factory rather than a weapon. It has been reported that Russian engineers referred to Mike as a "thermonuclear installation". At its center, a very large cylindrical thermos flask or cryostat, held the cryogenic deuterium-tritium fusion fuel. A regular fission bomb (the "primary") at one end was used to create the conditions needed to initiate the fusion reaction. The device was designed by Richard Garwin, a student of Enrico Fermi, on the suggestion of Edward Teller. It had been decided that nothing other than a full-scale test would validate the idea of the Teller-Ulam design, and Garwin was instructed to use very conservative estimates when designing the test, and that it need not be deployable. The primary stage was a TX-5 boosted fission bomb in a separate space on top of the assembly (so it would not freeze, rendering it inoperable). The "secondary" fusion stage used liquid deuterium–tritium despite the difficulty of handling this material, because this fuel simplified the experiment, and made the results easier to analyze. Running down the center of the flask which held it was a cylindrical rod of plutonium (the "sparkplug") to ignite the fusion reaction. Surrounding this assembly was a five-ton (4.5 tonne) natural uranium "tamper". The exterior of the tamper was lined with sheets of lead and polyethylene foam, which formed a radiation channel to conduct X-rays from the primary to secondary. (The function of X-rays was to hydrodynamically compress the secondary, increasing the density and temperature of the deuterium–tritium to the levels needed to sustain the thermonuclear reaction, and compressing the sparkplug to supercritical ignition.) The outermost layer was a steel casing 10-12 inches (25-30 cm) thick. The entire assembly, nicknamed "Sausage", measured 80 inches (2.03 m) in diameter and 244 inches (6.19 m) in height and weighed about 54 tons.
With a yield of approximately 10.4 megatons, the test was an amazing success. Destruction was caused for miles around and the atoll of Elugelab which was the test site, was wiped off the earth. It was just a test to find out whether fusion worked and soon the scientists would begin working on a deployable version which would be tested in 1955. Hitler responded by ordering his scientists to build him one of these super bombs as well although the Nazis wouldn’t achieve fusion weapons until 1962. Another result was that Hitler decided to ‘give’ the bomb to Italy which had its own nuclear energy project. Hitler donated the Italian team a non-functional nuclear warhead which would have had a yield of around 25 kilotons which gave the Italians something to work with. In 1954, they successfully tested a 40 kiloton device in the Libyan desert, making Italy the country to have the strongest first test in history.
This era would also see the deaths of three great dictators. Stalin died first on March 5th 1953 in his dacha near Sverdlovsk of a stroke, leaving his underlings to fight for power. The more reform minded candidates such as Khrushchev were removed quickly enough by the Stalinists who wanted to keep the USSR ‘disciplined’, highly militarized and ready for a war with the Nazis. The task of taking up the imperial robes fell to Vyacheslav Molotov who became the new secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union while Beria became premier and Bulganin took over his position as head of the Peoples’ Commissariat for Internal Affairs, better known as the widely feared NKVD. The second to die was Hitler who fell from power in 1955 at the age of 66 after cancer had eaten up his body just like it had his mother’s. Research was conducted on how to combat this disease, but for the Führer it came too late. By now, Hitler was senile and insane and others took care of day to day affairs as he was deemed incapable of decision making although he remained the official leader of Nazi Germany to keep up appearances. An uneasy truce had remained in place during his lifetime, but a fierce power struggle erupted among the Nazi leadership now that he was gone. Himmler perished first as he returned by plane from the Crimea where he had been on vacation in a dacha formerly belonging to a high ranking communist party member. His plane blew up in mid air and leader of the Gestapo, the ruthless Reinhard Heydrich who was his second in command, is still expected from this although the evidence is only circumstantial at best with a lot of it locked up in bunkers deep under Berlin with access for certain privileged people only (read: high party members). The Nazis called it sabotage by restive Ukrainian elements. With Himmler dead, Heydrich took over his SS and used it to purge the party. Hess and Bormann were killed and Goebbels was intimidated. He had little following and with Goering dead, the Luftwaffe was in hands of Udet who was apolitical. In 1955, Heydrich took up the mantle of Hitler and became the new Führer and with his SS, Gestapo and SD networks, he had more power and control than any other candidate could have ever dreamed of. The last to die was Mussolini who died in 1958 of a heart attack at the age of 75 after, ironically, having visited Hitler’s tomb in Linz. He was succeeded by the pro-German Alessandro Pavolini who was elected by the Grand Council of Fascists over Count Galleazo Ciano who was les popular. A new age could begin.
Like in the Soviet Union, China became a highly centralized state and the economy became a planned economy on the Stalinist model although China didn’t have to do it alone like the USSR had to in the 1930s. Stalin had built up his country with almost entirely internal means, creating an autarky. Mao wanted to do the same. He had a large distrust for experts as he thought them to be intellectuals (who he distrusted a lot) with liberal and fascist sympathies. He could hardly say this about Soviet experts sent by Stalin and he reluctantly let them in although this arguably saved China from some of his more zany schemes. Among them were building small furnaces on the collective farms which would be fed pig iron lumps and which would produce steel and make China the greatest steel producer in Mao’s vision. Soviet technical experts persuaded him that this was a very bad idea. This was the beginning of the First Seven Year Plan which would see a great influx of Soviet men, materiel and resources. Mao learned from Stalin’s favourite methods and started using anti-communist prisoners for his projects as slaves. Soon railroads and roads connected the major cities along with modern communications. Vast industrial complexes similar to those around Magnitogorsk and Moscow were built around cities like Harbin and produced modern machinery such as tractors, but also tanks. It turned out that China had the world’s largest coal reserves and massive mining projects were created out of scratch, with many deaths as a result due to lack of decent safety measures. In 1949, a team of Soviet geologists discovered the Daqing oilfield in Manchuria. In seven years, the production of coal, steel and pig iron doubled or even tripled. According to Chinese figures, the heavy industry sector had achieved 112% of its preset aims. This most likely wasn’t true, but production increases were enormous, new production processes were invented and China was modernized overall to the level of the USSR. China’s east coast where most major cities were, was electrified. The army also benefitted from this.
The Peoples’ Liberation Army, or PLA for short, saw an influx of equipment that was sold for bottom prices by Stalin. The new IS series tanks and also the highly successful T-34 entered service and soon Chinese made copies came off the assembly lines. The IS by now had met its opponent in newer German models, but still ranked among the best tank designs. Its 122 mm gun was powerful and its armour nearly impenetrable for the standard 50 and 75 mm anti-tank guns of the day. The new T-54 was even more powerful with 203 mm armour plating of high quality steel and a 100 mm gun which, although smaller in calibre than the IS 122 mm gun, had a higher armour penetrating capability. Something similar was happening in Korea albeit at a smaller scale than in China and the USSR. This was a build-up for war, a war that wouldn’t come, not during Stalin’s lifetime anyway.
Besides the atomic bomb project, Hitler ordered Plan Z to be restarted with several modifications. The new Plan Z was formulated in 1945 and now planned for the following ships to be built by 1962: six H-class battleships, twelve aircraft carriers, three battlecruisers, eleven heavy cruisers, sixty-six light cruisers, one hundred destroyers and five hundred U-boats of the new, modern Type XXI long ranged type which outclassed all other existing diesel-electric submarines without exceptions. This new model had a new engine that allowed it to remain submerged permanently due to a special chemical reaction that created the necessary oxygen for the diesel engines. This design was also among the more silent submarine designs in the world and was hardly audible to the existing anti-submarine technology and often wasn’t heard by patrolling destroyers until too late which frequently led to a war fever among crews as they feared that if the Germans wanted to attack, the torpedo had already been launched. This was one of Hitler’s many grand schemes besides his reconstruction of Berlin into his world capital of Germania and his new enthusiasm to achieve nuclear power for the Reich after learning of the successful American Trinity test. The new H-class battleship with a weight of 62.500 tons and a main battery of eight 406 mm (16 inch guns) was a daunting opponent, even more so when the designers upgraded the armour with the new Lion-class and Iowa-classes as new opponents. Learning from past mistakes, the fire control and communication centres of the ship were moved below where the 295 mm armour belt protected them. The aircraft carriers were of a completely new design and were renamed the Hermann Goering-class after his final demise in 1949 of a cerebral haemorrhage. They were based on the highly successful Essex-class. This would give Germany a big navy although still outnumbered by the USN in everything except U-boats in which German designers held the lead.
Nazi prestige, however, culminated in Germania, Hitler’s megalomaniac project to remake Berlin. Soon engineers found, however, that the soil of Berlin was unfit, but Hitler insisted and therefore immensely deep foundations had to be laid. A new Olympic stadium was built which could fit a crowd of 400.000 people along with the Volkshalle, a two hundred metre high dome in which Hitler could address 180.000 people simultaneously. It had a bronze eagle on top which, instead of the traditional swastika, held an earth ball which signified Nazi dominance over the world. The stairs were flanked by the statues of the two titans Atlas and Tellus who carried the heavens and the earth respectively. Inside, twenty-four metre tall Doric columns made out of marble supported the ceiling and behind Hitler’s stand where he addressed crowds, a twenty-four metre golden eagle stood. This building was the most magnanimous and the epitome of Nazi megalomania and of the world capital Germania, the centre of Nazism and it was envisioned as a shrine to future Nazis with a symbolic meaning that would be similar to the meaning the St. Peter Basilica had to Roman Catholics. It was truly ambitious. The other buildings weren’t unimpressive though. A one hundred metre tall triumphal arch spanned the road on the east-west axis where most government buildings were. There was also the equally impressive north-south axis. The façade of Hitler’s palace was 700 metres long. Munich and Nuremberg would be recreated in a similar way with Speer’s marble and granite giants with Munich, for example, having a Roman temple style monument to those who had died in the 1923 coup attempt and a large skyscraper with a marble eagle perched on top. Very soon, Germany had the largest concentration of neo-classicist and baroque architecture in Europe, if not the world, with only Italy coming close as Mussolini was attempting to recreate ancient Rome in fascist style.
The Cold War had already sparked an arms race and the space race also began in earnest when the Germans successfully brought man’s first artificial satellite in orbit in 1950. The ballistic missile program had taken off in the 1930s as these weapons were not restricted by the Treaty of Versailles. Great leaps had been made since this field had become popular in the 1920s when rockets could barely achieve an altitude of 100 metres. The A4 missile (A for Aggregate series) had already achieved semi-orbit in 1944 and had a range of 320 kilometres and was able to carry a one tonne warhead which could be a conventional warhead but also a chemical or biological one filled with nerve agents of which the Nazi regime had the largest stockpile or anthrax (nuclear payloads were still far too large). These rockets were fuelled with a liquid propellant of ethanol and liquid oxygen which could propel it to speeds of thousands of miles per hour at an altitude of 88 kilometres where no weapon on Earth could shoot it down. The impact of this weapon was inevitable once it had been launched although its guidance system of gyroscopes and gyroscopic accelerometers was grossly inaccurate and unsuitable for military targets and certainly not hardened facilities. This rocket was to be used as a terror weapon only and was also a test bed for future designs of Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists who were the leaders in their field as of the 1940s. The program had eventually led to the A9/A10 was a two stage rocket which stood 41 metres tall and weighed in at over 100 tonnes and was able to reach New York, Washington, Sverdlovsk and Beijing with a projected range of over 10.000 kilometres. It, along with the A11 that would follow, had the potential to bring a satellite payload into orbit which happened in 1950 as planned. This new super weapon could hit the eastern seaboard of the US and Washington therefore started its own program although it would take them years to catch up as Germany launched the first manned flight into space in 1953 and landed a man on the moon in 1959. The space race was definitely on.
For both the USSR and the Reich it was time to ascend to superpower status as well. In 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. The test was called RDS-1 which was an acronym of First Lightning or, allegedly, Russia Does it Herself which would have been ironic as the Soviets, like the Germans, received a lot of information from espionage in the US and not through their own research. The test was a success nonetheless as the design was almost a full copy of the Trinity design or implosion design as it is officially known. With a yield of 20 kilotons, it was equally powerful. The Nazis, however, made it very clear that they had other weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. Hitler had no qualms of letting anthrax and nerve gas rain down on Soviet cities such as Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and even as far away as Sverdlovsk and Omsk with his rockets and new Ju 390 long range bombers which had a range of 10.000 kilometres and could strike at any Soviet city, even as far away as Vladivostok. Stalin knew that Hitler, being in the mental state that he was in during the late 1940s, would probably live up to this threat and postponed his plans for revenge even further until it was too late and the task of avenging the loss in the Great Patriotic War fell in the hands of his successor. He had built up too long for his vengeance war and had made a lot of propaganda and now the Soviet Union’s chance was gone, perhaps forever. Hitler tested his own nuclear weapon in 1950 and it achieved an incredible yield of 22 kilotons. This test was perhaps the most gruesome of all as Hitler ordered it to be tested on a concentration camp with Slav prisoners to see what effects of a nuclear blast and the radiation would have on the human body cheaply. Several thousands of inmates would die directly from the blast while many thousands more would die of radiation disease and severe burns while German doctors, among them Josef Mengele or Doctor Death, who would conduct a great many gruesome experiments on his irradiated victims. Hitler himself saw the test and was astonished, claiming euphorically that he had the power of God at his fingertips now and that no one would dare to challenge the Reich ever again. This was perhaps one of the only moments that Hitler became emotional about anything else than his monomaniac obsession with racial purity.
America, however, tested an even more powerful weapon in 1952 with their Ivy Mike test. The 62-ton "Mike" device was essentially a building that resembled a factory rather than a weapon. It has been reported that Russian engineers referred to Mike as a "thermonuclear installation". At its center, a very large cylindrical thermos flask or cryostat, held the cryogenic deuterium-tritium fusion fuel. A regular fission bomb (the "primary") at one end was used to create the conditions needed to initiate the fusion reaction. The device was designed by Richard Garwin, a student of Enrico Fermi, on the suggestion of Edward Teller. It had been decided that nothing other than a full-scale test would validate the idea of the Teller-Ulam design, and Garwin was instructed to use very conservative estimates when designing the test, and that it need not be deployable. The primary stage was a TX-5 boosted fission bomb in a separate space on top of the assembly (so it would not freeze, rendering it inoperable). The "secondary" fusion stage used liquid deuterium–tritium despite the difficulty of handling this material, because this fuel simplified the experiment, and made the results easier to analyze. Running down the center of the flask which held it was a cylindrical rod of plutonium (the "sparkplug") to ignite the fusion reaction. Surrounding this assembly was a five-ton (4.5 tonne) natural uranium "tamper". The exterior of the tamper was lined with sheets of lead and polyethylene foam, which formed a radiation channel to conduct X-rays from the primary to secondary. (The function of X-rays was to hydrodynamically compress the secondary, increasing the density and temperature of the deuterium–tritium to the levels needed to sustain the thermonuclear reaction, and compressing the sparkplug to supercritical ignition.) The outermost layer was a steel casing 10-12 inches (25-30 cm) thick. The entire assembly, nicknamed "Sausage", measured 80 inches (2.03 m) in diameter and 244 inches (6.19 m) in height and weighed about 54 tons.
With a yield of approximately 10.4 megatons, the test was an amazing success. Destruction was caused for miles around and the atoll of Elugelab which was the test site, was wiped off the earth. It was just a test to find out whether fusion worked and soon the scientists would begin working on a deployable version which would be tested in 1955. Hitler responded by ordering his scientists to build him one of these super bombs as well although the Nazis wouldn’t achieve fusion weapons until 1962. Another result was that Hitler decided to ‘give’ the bomb to Italy which had its own nuclear energy project. Hitler donated the Italian team a non-functional nuclear warhead which would have had a yield of around 25 kilotons which gave the Italians something to work with. In 1954, they successfully tested a 40 kiloton device in the Libyan desert, making Italy the country to have the strongest first test in history.
This era would also see the deaths of three great dictators. Stalin died first on March 5th 1953 in his dacha near Sverdlovsk of a stroke, leaving his underlings to fight for power. The more reform minded candidates such as Khrushchev were removed quickly enough by the Stalinists who wanted to keep the USSR ‘disciplined’, highly militarized and ready for a war with the Nazis. The task of taking up the imperial robes fell to Vyacheslav Molotov who became the new secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union while Beria became premier and Bulganin took over his position as head of the Peoples’ Commissariat for Internal Affairs, better known as the widely feared NKVD. The second to die was Hitler who fell from power in 1955 at the age of 66 after cancer had eaten up his body just like it had his mother’s. Research was conducted on how to combat this disease, but for the Führer it came too late. By now, Hitler was senile and insane and others took care of day to day affairs as he was deemed incapable of decision making although he remained the official leader of Nazi Germany to keep up appearances. An uneasy truce had remained in place during his lifetime, but a fierce power struggle erupted among the Nazi leadership now that he was gone. Himmler perished first as he returned by plane from the Crimea where he had been on vacation in a dacha formerly belonging to a high ranking communist party member. His plane blew up in mid air and leader of the Gestapo, the ruthless Reinhard Heydrich who was his second in command, is still expected from this although the evidence is only circumstantial at best with a lot of it locked up in bunkers deep under Berlin with access for certain privileged people only (read: high party members). The Nazis called it sabotage by restive Ukrainian elements. With Himmler dead, Heydrich took over his SS and used it to purge the party. Hess and Bormann were killed and Goebbels was intimidated. He had little following and with Goering dead, the Luftwaffe was in hands of Udet who was apolitical. In 1955, Heydrich took up the mantle of Hitler and became the new Führer and with his SS, Gestapo and SD networks, he had more power and control than any other candidate could have ever dreamed of. The last to die was Mussolini who died in 1958 of a heart attack at the age of 75 after, ironically, having visited Hitler’s tomb in Linz. He was succeeded by the pro-German Alessandro Pavolini who was elected by the Grand Council of Fascists over Count Galleazo Ciano who was les popular. A new age could begin.