Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Gunpowder Weapons

Is there a non-ASB alt history where the world comes together and agree not to weaponise gunpowder (or other explosives)?

It'd mean no guns, cannons, or bombs, but allow peaceful progress of research that followed from gunpowder's discovery.
 

CalBear

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Since the formula for making gunpowder does not require numerous individuals with post doctorate physics, electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineering skills, a HUGE industrial footprint, and can literally be achieved to materials you can find lying on the ground, I would predict spectacular failure.
 
Is there a non-ASB alt history where the world comes together and agree not to weaponise gunpowder (or other explosives)?

It'd mean no guns, cannons, or bombs, but allow peaceful progress of research that followed from gunpowder's discovery.

There's three problems with this.

1) The first nation to cheat gets to win massively at their next war.

2) Gunpowder is actually relatively simple to make, and there's no need for advanced chemistry - you could write a timeline about its discovery by some alchemist a thousand years earlier, and it'd be plausible. This means it's really hard to delay long enough for centralizes states, capable of actually making such an agreement, to form.

3) It doesn't actually stop guns, cannons, or bombs - napalm-like substances like Greek Fire have a long history, they could be pressurized to shoot across distances, and a big barrel of the stuff launched from a catapult is basically an incendiary bomb.
 
Another problem is that you need a reason to ban them, everycountry must feel that they gain something by agreeing. With nuke, gas ans bioweapons, its easy: these weapons have the capacity to wipe out large part of populations, so you fear them. But this fear isn't present with gunpowder. The first cannons were pitiful, barely causing more damage than a trebuchet, hand grenades were as much effectives as incendiary projectiles and the first arquebuse was slower and had less range then crossbow. It was the perfectionning of these weapons that allowed them to be feared on the battlefield and perfectionning take time. And more time you take with these around, harder it is to ban them or stop their use.
 
The Pope tried to ban crossbows, right? I don't see why he couldn't attempt the same with guns (not that it would work).
 
The only vaguely plausible model I can see is a carefully controlled monopoly on gunpowder as in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. And it won't last, making black powder is quite simple.
 
Part of the problem is that the first civilisations to discover gunpowder were on the continent of Eurasia. This meant that they either had someone to the west of them who had someone to the west of them whom they had to worry about as having gunpowder weapons or they had someone to the east of them who has someone to the east of them whom they had to worry about having gunpowder weapons.

This was even before taking into account the ever increasingly sophisticated state of sea travel.

The only folk who were able to tame guns for a few centuries were the Japanese and even they eventually found folk with better guns knocking on their doors.

Besides the NPT on nuclear weapons is only a few decades old and already it looks a mite leaky.
 
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