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Could they have done it? How long would it have taken? Alternate History Miscellaneous Challenges
Could you do better than the Japanese leadership? POD is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. A lot of the comments don't make sense unless you've following the dialogue. Here are some of my general-interest ones. |
A
German A-bomb? How might that have happened? It
wouldn't have been easy I suppose that Hitler or
German militarists might have seized on A-bombs as a way of getting
around their military inferiority in the early 1930s. That would have
required pushing the theories that led to a bomb forward a few years.
If the equivalent of Szilard’s patent was filed in say 1930 instead of
1934 I could see the German military saying, “Hey, something that
Versailles didn’t forbid. Let’s check it out.” So they do a covert
program. Assuming the Nazis take power on schedule, that would create
an interesting situation: physicists, many of them Jewish, working on a
top-secret weapon that already has some momentum.
Now Hitler could just blindly disband the program based on the number of Jews involved and push the Jewish scientists into exile. That would give Britain and the US a nice boost on their A-bomb program. More likely, he would try to marginalize the Jewish physicists while continuing the program, but not allow them to immigrate. That would probably delay the US program because a lot of these guys were brilliant. Assuming they continued the program, at some point, the Germans would have to make some tough choices. They didn’t have the resources to build the conventional forces they did historically while still building an A-bomb. They could have kept the conventional buildup at a more sustainable level while putting resources into the a-bomb research and development. Doing that would mean accepting inferiority in conventional weapons into the 1940s. I doubt Hitler would have the patience to do that. It would also mean delaying moves into the Rhineland, Austria, etc, and those moves gave the Nazis vitally needed resources. Another issue: security. Given the nature of the Nazi regime, Jewish scientists who had worked on the program would want desperately to get info on the program out to the west. If they succeeded, they would probably spark a race to the Atomic bomb. If the Germans cut off all outside access to them, or killed them, that would probably set off alarm bells in the west too. Here’s another option: enough of the conservative Germans near the top of the pre-Nazi governments are aware of the project and the possible impact of the Nazis coming to power on it that they decide not to allow the Nazis into the government. Guys like Papen who thought the Nazis would be useful and controllable idiots might back off, or knowledge of the program might cause Hindenburg to avoid appointing Hitler chancellor. Some economic stuff I’ve been reading lately seems to indicate that the German economy was starting to recover pre-Nazi takeover, so it’s possible we might end up with a traditional German militarist regime pursuing slower rearmament and A-bombs. That would make the mid-1940s interesting. I’m not sure Europe would survive an in-house A-bomb race. Really nasty ideas, and not real likely given Germany's shortages of raw material and manpower.
Posted on March 26, 2010.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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