WI: 20th century is peacetime in Europe the whole century

I think that it's hard to get into too many specifics without knowing the exact POD, but war/ international rivalries do spark invention. Without an active war, or at least the threat of an active war, there's less interest in spending a whole lot of money into military development and the military is a big kickstarter for technologies that eventually make their way into mainstream society. For example, without the threats of WWII there just wouldn't have been as strong a need to devise radar and commercial airline accidents would be a lot heavier without radar guidance.
 
Radar guidance, or radio guidance? Even without Radar, I can imagine an increasingly intricate system of ground-based (and perhaps aircraft-based) transmitters to give aircraft as much assistance as possible. I suppose it depends on how directional you can make your beacons.
 
War/international rivalry does have a significant effect but it is not on technical innovation itself as much as upon widespread deployment. As Mr. William Gibson put it "The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed".
The first discoveries of "radar"(where radio engineers noticed that aeroplanes in flight could disrupt radio signals) were in the early 1920s and Britain had already developed RDF pre-war. The jet engine was already being trialled pre-war (Heinkel and Caproni were very interested as well as Messerschmidt, the Hortens and Frank Whittle) and the Germans had already developed nerve gases fairly accidentally out of pesticides research. Some specific areas of military technology like tanks and the bazooka are very closely linked to war, it is true, but they and derived technologies, if any, have had limited impact on civil society. And even if no wars broke out in Europe there would still have been international rivalries.
Personally I think it unlikely that Europe could have gone through the 20th century with no wars at all. In a best case scenario, I think we would be looking at a situation where there were no big wars but probably a few small ones which the rest of Europe managed not to get entangled in other than pressurising settlements and peace talks. An AH/Italy spat over Albania, a Bulgar/Greek border conflict, a post-KuK Hungary and Romania fighting over Transylvania or a Catalan or Basque war of independence, for instance. Possibly also some multinational military action such as an armed intervention to carve up the remaining Ottoman Empire or a forcible settlement of Sino- Japanese wars. Plus a couple of South American wars where new military technology could be trialled on a small scale.
 
The only way there's no Great European War in the 20th century is if some huge plague collapses the great empires before WW1 and a new post-plague order in Europe arises.
 
If anyone really thinks technological development is helped by war, then by that logic it would be the right thing to do for the human race as a whole to start World War 3 right now. Europe has pretty much rebounded from the first and second rounds. Not to mention Japan and China. Plenty of new stuff to blow up.

I honestly can't fathom the idea that organised death and destruction helps science and technology in any way. How does destroying ancient ruins help archaeology? How does bombing hospitals help medicine? How does blowing up schools make for more discoveries?
It's a miracle that the stressed out scientists and engineers manage to use their dwindling resources to create anything.

The only good war as far as development is concerned was the cold war. Brush fires limited to countries with few scientists (still wasteful), and massive governement spending in technology. Combined with an active free market that was also R&D'ing.
 
I honestly can't fathom the idea that organised death and destruction helps science and technology in any way. How does destroying ancient ruins help archaeology? How does bombing hospitals help medicine? How does blowing up schools make for more discoveries?
It's a miracle that the stressed out scientists and engineers manage to use their dwindling resources to create anything.

I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that the developments triggered or accelerated by war can be seen and read about, while the developments which could have been made if the resources which went into war were put to different use have to be imagined. Or maybe, not the developments themselves, but the circumstances of their development.
 
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