Tibet like North Korea

As for Tibet developing nuclear technology? Please, this isn't "Blake and Mortimer". If you want a Tibetwank, complete with aggressive totalitarian regime, a secret nuclear program and world conquest, read The Secret of the Swordfish.

Heh they would need some serious money and technological upgrade (and the overall brain trust) in order to have a nuke and the thing not only do they need nuke they need missiles to deliver them.

Oh Blake and Mortimer, the memory..(ok I mostly watched the cartoon) what's amusing is that my local library never had the Secret of the swordfish so I kept wondering what the hell was that about

IIRC Blake and Mortimer was pretty much all about everyone being technologicly superior to the heroes (Japan has human like robot while France stuck in the 50's) but anyway
 

Hendryk

Banned
Oh Blake and Mortimer, the memory..(ok I mostly watched the cartoon) what's amusing is that my local library never had the Secret of the swordfish so I kept wondering what the hell was that about
With an unspecified POD in the immediate post-WW2 years, a strongman named Basam Damdu takes over Tibet and renames it the Yellow Empire. In the course of the following three years, presumably thanks to massive deposits of handwavium in the Himalayas, he turns it into an industrial and military powerhouse, with secret underground factories churning out various advanced weapons, including ICBMs. Then he declares war on every single other country in the world, invades them all overnight (and I mean literally overnight, and that includes the USSR and the US), and puts the entire planet under military occupation.

Fortunately the British manage to salvage a secret base near the Strait of Ormuz, and they save the world thanks to an experimental superweapon of their own, the Swordfish, which is a kind of hypersonic multipurpose fighter-bomber.

I found it immensely entertaining when I was 10, but let's face it, in terms of AH it fails dismally. Not to mention that almost everything in it was later retconned, and for the rest of the series everyone seemed to have forgotten that there was a WW3. It's normally the kind of thing that people would be expected to remember.
 
Yes and von Braun experimented on KZ prisoners to see how radical enviorement the human body could take. Such a man of peace.
Even worse than Tibet, I found out von Braun later on worked for this place called The United States of America! Since former Nazis worked for them, they must be evil and guilty by association!
 
Is it possible that von Sternberg could have fleed to Tibet and take it over? As much of a bastard as he was, he was the closest thing around a North Korea style leader.
 
Much of North Korea's policy and propaganda is built around the North/South Korean divide. What sort of enemy would Tibet have? Only thing I can think of is China, but I doubt the leaders of Tibet would be so stupid as to be as antagonistic towards China as NK is towards SK.
 
If you'd really want to go over the top, then you could make some nationalist secret agents of theocratic isolationist Tibet steal some small low-yield nuclear weapons. Not big bombs, just smaller missiles with depleted uranium or something. They can be quite easily abused for various dirty deeds, even with no real nuclear-processing technology and infrastructure.

But Tibet becoming an ATL analogue North Korea is too far-fetched, given its geography, resources, manpower and overall history and political situation.

Is it possible that von Sternberg could have fleed to Tibet and take it over? As much of a bastard as he was, he was the closest thing around a North Korea style leader.

That isn't completely out of the question. But he'd need to stop being dilussional for a while, gain at least a lick of common sence and leave Mongolia with his rag-tag army much sooner than in OTL (in order to escape from the inevitable arrest by either the Reds or other Whites, once they roll into Urga).
 
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archaeogeek

Banned
Much of North Korea's policy and propaganda is built around the North/South Korean divide. What sort of enemy would Tibet have? Only thing I can think of is China, but I doubt the leaders of Tibet would be so stupid as to be as antagonistic towards China as NK is towards SK.

"Free Tibet" and "Chinese occupied Northern Tibet"? Most of Tibetans actually live in the province of Qinghai afaik
 

Typo

Banned
Even worse than Tibet, I found out von Braun later on worked for this place called The United States of America! Since former Nazis worked for them, they must be evil and guilty by association!
To be fair if you are trying to make a point that the US was good during the period when worked with those Nazis it's kinda not valid
 
No, I don't think theocratic Tibet would be like North Korea-it wouldn't have the resources if nothing else. I think it would look a lot like OTL Bhutan-a very isolated country that is rather authoritarian, had no elections until a couple years ago, severly limits its citizen's contact with the outside world, ethnically cleansed one-sixth of its population, and yet is still regarded as some kind of otherwordly Shangra-La by people who really ought to know better.
 
I didn't realize Bhutan had any sort of fan club....

Not on the scale of Tibet, no, but you can still find praise for Bhutan in some quarters, mostly centering around their king's eschewing of economic growth in favor of "Gross National Happiness" (and whats that supposed to mean anyway? How do you measure a whole country's "happiness"?) Its a very isolated country, most people live in abject poverty, the government banned TV and the Web until 1999, and yet plenty of people have decided that this represents not controlling authoritarianism, but "sustainable development" and the limiting of materialism and consumerism. (Never mind all those expelled Nepalese the article I linked to above talks about-I suppose their "Gross National Happiness" doesn't really count)

In some ways its understandable-Bhutan is Buddhist, and most people have a very positive image of Buddhism, and the country works very hard to project itself as some kind of Shangra-La, free of all the materialism and consumerism that ailes other countries. But really, I've heard one environmentalist* praise the Bhutanese model in a speech, and when you're deciding on material for that sort of thing, there's no excuse for not digging a little deeper.

*Specifically, it was Vandana Shiva.
 
No, I don't think theocratic Tibet would be like North Korea-it wouldn't have the resources if nothing else. I think it would look a lot like OTL Bhutan-a very isolated country that is rather authoritarian, had no elections until a couple years ago, severly limits its citizen's contact with the outside world, ethnically cleansed one-sixth of its population, and yet is still regarded as some kind of otherwordly Shangra-La by people who really ought to know better.

To be fair, the government had to institute elections virtually against the people's will (certainly without them wanting it), which looks like it could be a very similar situation with Tibet. Bhutan and Tibet would probably be closely allied.
 
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