redlightning
Banned
What if the Soviet Union even after the Americans and British develop nuclear weapons, never replicate the technology for themselves?
WI: Soviets Never Acquire Nuclear Weapons
- Thread starter redlightning
- Start date
Why in God's name would they do that? Unless the USSR falls completely apart after WWII they are going to build nukes.
I cannot envision a world in which America developed the Bomb, but the Soviets were just never able. I can see a world without Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, and so the Soviets have a much longer wait in their development of atomic weaponry, but that's it.
Do you mean they are unable to or that they decide not to? Because the first is practically impossible considering the numbers of leading physicists that came out of the Soviet schools and universities and the second would be so out of character considering what the USSR was going/had just gone through in WWII that you'd have to be dealing with practically a completely different system of government to our timeline's one.
The Soviets had much more important spies than the Rosenbergs (notably Klaus Fuchs). Anyway, David Holloway, *Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956* (Yale University Press 1994), while acknowledging the major role played by espionage, adds (p. 366):
"The best estimates suggest, however, that the Soviet Union could have built a bomb by 1951 or 1952 even without intelligence about the American bomb. There already existed in the Soviet Union strong schools of physics and radiochemistry, as well as competent engineers. Soviet nuclear research in 1939-41 had gone a long way toward establishing the conditions for an explosive chain reaction. It was because Soviet nuclear scientists were so advanced that they were able to make good use of the information they received from Britain and the United States about the atomic bomb." https://books.google.com/books?id=ICO6aUnQ2KcC&pg=PA366&lpg=PA366
The only way i see it happening is that Stalin dies right after the war and instead of having a relatively smooth transition as under Khrushchev it quickly falls apart into civil war.
Maybe the wait is long enough a different set of political decisions are made by Stalin or his sucessors. Those decisions lead to collapse or some other radical change in the USSR & eventually a atomic weapons program is dropped.
Alternately the Capitolist nations collapse & the USSR has no need to develop them.
How? The US was untouched and invulnerable to attack in the 1940's. It was swimming in cash and so enormously unlikely to fall.
The ONLY way to keep the Soviets from getting a bomb after the US has one is to destroy the Soviets first. The most plausible would be an 'Operation Unthinkable'-esque continuation of WWII. Given that that's the MOST likely, you can see how things go downhill from there. The Nazis defeating the USSR may be the second most plausible, and we KNOW how unlikely that is.
Never is a strong word. You probably can significantly delay the development with purges on physicists and spy infiltration failure. Still that would mean much more incompetent Soviet leadership likely to fail not only to develop the bomb, but to keep power.
Delta Force
Banned
It's easy for a sovereign state to acquire the materials needed for a nuclear reactor and thus a nuclear weapon. Perhaps they could have difficulty making the weapons work, but the problem isn't impossible to solve. Gun type weapons are simple enough that the United States never saw the need to conduct a test of the design, but they are also expensive, inefficient, and vulnerable to safety incidents.
There's no plausible way to prevent the USSR ever getting nukes, that much is clear. But, purely as a thought experiment, what would they do if for some reason they couldn't and knew it? Here's the US with an impressive new weapon which the USSR can't replicate, but the Soviets are not going to just shrug and accept second-rate status. They'll try to achieve parity in some form, but what? Biological or chemical weapons? Orbital kinetic-energy systems? Cavalry riding genetically engineered bears?
If the latter, then we'd just activate Calbear, and all would be well.