Not sure I agree with that; the US and (especially) the UK played significant roles in early nuclear research as well (Rutherford, Dirac and Chadwick, to name a few Commonwealth researchers; the US has fewer, but e.g. Lawrence is hardly a small fish).with the majority of nuclear research going on in Germany and France, if anyone discovers a nuke early it will be one of those 2.
in order to get all this discovered you need to change the entire british nuclear research and widen it considerably, and thus major butterflies.
also more uk research in this field will lead to more researchin other countries
Not sure I agree with that; the US and (especially) the UK played significant roles in early nuclear research as well (Rutherford, Dirac and Chadwick, to name a few Commonwealth researchers; the US has fewer, but e.g. Lawrence is hardly a small fish).
Germany under Weimar would presumably have significant restrictions on weapons research, and is hardly in the best economic position to do so for most of that time. France maybe, but the French have other problems during this period.
Of course for any state doing this, the question becomes "what are they giving up to afford it?"
Since it'd be top-secret research and development, the butterflies elsewhere in the world shouldn't be so big. I somehow forgot that the British did have the whole "empire" thing going on, so if a succesful test is carried out in Australia, it's nearly impossible for anyone else to know.
i agree that there important researchers in the anglosphere, but remember this is pre-war very unlikely the uk would cooperate with the US on this.
my point however is that there are a lot of discoveries & inventions that need to be done early, and results like this come from a lot of tedious research, not from luck or brilliance alone. the uk would need a whole trainload of extra physics geniuses, since the one around would have their hands full from existing research.
weapons research????
before you can think of a bomb you need a whole bunch of discoveries & inventions to lay the groundwork for fission to be discovered. this is general physics research, not specific weapons research.
adding to what i already wrote, where do the genial scientists come from that discovered this to start with, and top secret stuff wasn't that in vogue yet.
all this research would be done in the 20searly 30s, not good years financially. where is the money coming from?
before they get any of this research money you needs basic research that shows the viability of such a weapon (remember they are all fighting for budget, so need some proof, this is peace time after all), this research will be the standard academic research in other words..in the open. once the MoD is convinced it is feasible, other countries will have made the same conclusions.
Theoretically possible, if you discover U-235 in the 20s (difficult, but not impossible by any measure of means). Also, the bomb need not be the original aim, it could as easily be a by-product of the aim to build a nuclear reactor as the other way around.
It could be as early as the late 1920's and it could be as late as the late 1930's. The USA built a crash program in 2.5 years. After the basic physics are worked out, a 5-8 year weapons development program is about the right amount of time. While people talk about the cost of the A-bomb project, it was largely due to it being a crash program. We built cities just to be level a few years later. I think the plutonium cycle is more likely than the uranium cycle. So we get to the question of when the major weaponization program is authorized. In 1938 we have the fission discovery IOTL. So I don't see any possible way much past the late 1940's, but this low probability event. In 1933 or so, Plutonium is discovered in published paper but not followed up. Without the chaos of WW1, you would have follow up studies that confirm. IMO, 1935 is the last possible realistic date to begin the "Berlin Project", and it would be the Germans who lead. So 1942-1945 is latest time frame with other great powers to follow over the next decade. Too much of the basic research would be public and published for one power only to launch the program.
Now lets take the lost time of WW1 which setback many technologies more than a decade. Germany was the leader in physics, and hard hit. IMO, the most likely time to discover plutonium is the early to mid 1920's, call it 1922 to 1926, so we get a bomb in the early 1930's. It is important to remember that the basic byproducts of fission were worth 10,000's of times more valuable than gold. It was projected that the radium mines would be worth more than all the gold mines in the world. Radium was mined out of uranium ore. The initial funding will be based on obtaining medical isotopes combined with people trying to get rich quick. No way to stop this one. We nerfed the bomb development as much as possible IOTL.
Now if everything lines up just right, you could get plutonium discovered in 1919 or so. But this again is not terribly likely. The only missing precurser technology in 1913 is the spectrometer. It was found in 1918 IOTL. And it also depends on how rapidly it is funded for the weaponization. You could see a Manhattan type funding ITTL, but it is unlikely to be that high. The British, USA, and Germany could certainly afford to fund at this level, it is just unlikely.
Well there's always Ida Noddack, she correctly criticised Fermi's conclusions in 1934 and apparently suggested what would become nuclear fission as a potential alternative answer. She was ignored however as she didn't offer any proof to back up her ideas and previously she and her husband had claimed to have discovered a new element only to turn out to be mistaken which probably dented her international scientific credibility somewhat. Have her, or someone that reads her paper and gets curious, do some experimentation and thinking on the subject and you could maybe move the discovery of fission up say three or four years. That's still going to be an exceedingly tight, if not almost impossible, deadline if you keep WWII breaking out in 1939.Our timeline fission was discovered in 1938 by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn.