The WMD Paradigm

How Butterfly-Resistant are WMDs?


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So, first off, I'd just like to say that I wasn't sure exactly where to put this (before and after 1900 converge), but I decided to put it here.

So, to the point: most TLs here, from the very best to the very worst, have nucleur weapons being developed at some point between 1920 and 1960. Now, I have to admit that I'm no scientist, so it would b great to here a real scientists' input. But, just how convergent is it to have nucleur weapons in your TL?
 
Not 100% sure what you're asking -

Are you asking whether the development of nuclear weapons was inevitable?

Or, are you asking whether nuclear weapons could have been developed much sooner - i.e., before 1900?
 
I would say that, given human nature, if you are positing a timeline with a technological society at all similar to our own, the development of some kind of WMDs is almost inevitable.
 
I would say that, given human nature, if you are positing a timeline with a technological society at all similar to our own, the development of some kind of WMDs is almost inevitable.

I totally agree with you-from a technlogical standpoint, the advances in science will eventually make some kind of superweapon. But I guess what I'm asking (and now I realize I'm not so sure myself) is a more scientific question: were "our" WMDs (uranium, plutonium, atom, hydrogen) inevitable, or were they just a chance shot, with a different POD throwing avenues of research totally off and resulting in a totally different kind of superweapon. This mainly came as a question out of the fact that every TL I have read, upon reaching the 1920-60 range, has a nucleur weapon pretty much the same as ours.
 
It's an interesting question - I suppose we tend to go with nuclear weapons because those are the sorts of WMDs our timeline has focused on. I suppose without nukes, we might have focused on biological weapons.

Beyond that, I don't know, I suppose it depends on whether you think that things like Tesla-esque death rays might actually have been developed.
 

Thande

Donor
I'm going to go against orthodoxy and say that I think the development of nuclear weapons is far from inevitable, and has a basic probability of less than 50%. Here's what you have to happen in order to get nuclear weapons:

1) Have radioactivity and other phenomena explained by a version of physics that leads to the realisation of the possiblity of nuclear fission. From first principles, with no direct evidence. Remember we had a theory that explained combustion satisfactorily for years until someone built a decent set of scales and proved it was illogical. Someone could easily build an atomic and quantum theory that fits the evidence but fails to predict nuclear fission. Even in OTL the scientific jury was still out up until the Trinity test to some extent.

2) Get enough money and resources to build a bomb. This is hard. Look at Iran today. A medium-sized, middleweight country with a decently sized population and a reasonable university system, and it's still taking them years and years. And that's after other people have done all the groundwork. I think OTL was a strange case of a perfect storm: America, a country both rich yet also in a depression, having a government that wanted big public works projects to create jobs (which is particularly ASB-sounding if you know American history) and a country that wasn't at war yet but knew it might be very soon. (The letter from Szilard signed by Einstein that led to the Manhattan Project was signed by Roosevelt a few days before Pearl Harbour - if he had left it any longer, it's likely it wouldn't have reached the president's desk for months or years with the chaos of WW2!)

3) The engineering expertise. I once had to write an essay on how the Manhattan Project was more an achievement of engineering than physics. The project consumed a ridiculous amount of the USA's resources, in wartime, and the only thing even slightly comparable was the Apollo programme. You need companies with the right areas of experience and you need a setup where those companies are independent enought to have branched out into such areas yet not so independent that the government can't order them to work on this project. You need a military that will take this project seriously and has its own corps of engineers to implement the scientists' dreams.

4) Avoid dead ends. The Nazi atom bomb project focused on trying to make a reactor and then make it go critical, having missed the idea of an impact bomb. This, in a country with all the scientific and engineering expertise of Germany, should illustrate why A-bombs are less likely than people think they are. The USA mostly avoided this because they had so much money, whenever there was an either/or choice of designs in the Manhattan Project and one of them might end in a dead end, they just did both. Again, I can't stress enough that the circumstances for this to happen seem rather unlikely to me. And a project like the Germans', in which they might stake everything on a wrong design...it could easily just be cancelled and then no-one else would touch the atom bomb idea, regarding it as being as half-baked as cold fusion in OTL.

5) Actually drop the thing. The US nearly didn't in OTL because there was a small but real concern that the fission might proliferate and ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on earth. Besides, the war was nearly over. But there were reports of the Soviets working on their own bomb (which, remember, they benefited significantly from the fact that they had their agents infiltrated into the Manhattan Project) and the Bomb was dropped largely as a national propaganda exercise. If it had been peacetime, well, would any politician sign up to a project that might deliver a wonder weapon but would have a 5% chance of destroying the world?


So...yeah. Basically I think the circumstances that led to the development of the Bomb in OTL were rather special. And let's not forget that there are lots of things which most people think are plausible and doable and have been planned for years and years but have never materialised because of lack of government funding: moonbase, anyone?
 
I would like to add that our society in OTL jumped at the possibility of the nuclear bomb as if the survival of the human race depended on it.

It is hard to imagine "the bomb" being developed in theory, in practize, tested, produced and used in anger any sooner than it actually happened.
 
I'd say that nuclear weapons are inevitable. Releasing the energy from the atom is very potent, and it seems that figuring out how to harness it is just as simple (complicated) as figuring out how to initiate a chain reaction and blow stuff up with it.

The question is, then, whether atomic weapons would be the WMD's of choice for some hypothetical cold war. We could see airships laden with nerve gas as the ultimate WMD, as they float, unassailable above the clouds, over the enemies cities and industry. Both sides know they cannot build a capacity to reliably intercept or interdict enemy airships or balloons, so we have mutually assured destruction, and any attempt to seriously build heavier-than-air flight is met with anti-ballistic missile style treaties.

So, WMD's? Inevitable, the logical progression of increasing capacity for destruction will have to end in weapons so destructive they are put in another category, reserved only for special occasions, meanwhile technologies capable of lesser destructive power for more cost will advance parallel to them, for 'everyday' wars and police actions.

Actually, that's not a bad definition for WMD's.

Nuclear weapons? Inevitable, the logical progression of increasing understanding of physics will have to end in the capacity to harness the atom.
 
Given the Loko valley, evidence of the possibility of nuclear fission is possible from the pre-history
you just need a thoughtful homo habilis
 
I think that if the PoD occurs sometime after the middle part of the 19th century, the science and technology allowing nuclear power (and weapons) is probably pretty much inevitable by the 20th or 21st centuries, barring some totally unexpected event or series of events. On the other hand, believe the OTL development and introduction of nuclear weapons in the 1940's was significantly accelerated by several very specific events associated with the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. I could easily envision alternate time lines of a technological 20th century in which no major powers see a reason to expend the money and effort to develop such revolutionary weapons, and nuclear weapons are significantly delayed - or occur only as a secondary product of a much slower evolutionary development of commercial nuclear power.
 
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