Nuclear Weapons in Alternate History
Nuclear Weapons more than anything are the bete noir of alternate history. For once one power has them, that power is now a super-power beyond the rest, and if all powers get them then that makes direct war between them impossible unless they wish to risk, and take, annihilation.
The development of the Atomic Bomb can be realistically retarded in an alternate history, since it was an enormous effort, at immense expense requiruing the sort of organisation from the top that only war can bring. But the USA was not alone in having such a project – Britain, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Imperial Japan all had projects to some degree or other.
The science was out there, in journals and papers published internationally. Everyone knew it was theoretically possible, but the questions remained – was theory correct, and what was the best route to prove it, if it was?
Popular history would say that the Nazis were wrong in their approach, that Heissenberg for all his undoubted intelligence in other areas of quantum mechanics, got it wrong. But there are two answers to this – one is that perhaps Heissenberg deliberately got it wrong, not wanting to give a regime such as the Nazis a weapon of such immense magnitude as the atomic bomb, the other is that Hessenberg was not so much wrong as approaching it from a very roundabout way that would have worked eventually, but was not as direct as that hit upon by the American team.
Give the latter possibility, it suggests that an alternate timeline where the USA does not have the political will to invest in the Manhattan Project could see an eventual German success, down the line, some time in the 1950s once Heissenberg and his team have ironed out the rough spots and glued together enough ideas to make the leap.
By then of course it would not just be Nazi Germany working on the bomb, alone. The USA would have some sort of organisation, maybe on the cheap, maybe competing labs working on it, whilst Britain, the Soviets and the Japanese would all also be working on it – maybe, in an alternate history, the French as well.
And spying would play a huge role. Historically, the Soviet project benefitted from a couple of high placed traitors in the British/American programme, allowing Stalin to force his own team to complete a prototype and detonate it to prove Soviet capability. Without the traitors they would have got there later, perhaps too late if some in the American political establishment had had their way.
One could certainly see that if the Nazis are on the verge of a breakthrough, the first to detonate an atomic bomb, then spies, traitors, agents within their ranks would be passing on information to both the Russians, and the British and Americans. It would not be a super-weapon that Nazi Germany would be permitted to own the unique rights to for long.
Of course, if your alternate history removes the Nazis from the equation then the impetus to prove and develop the atomic bomb that historically the 1930s provided could be missing. It could remain the realm of fantasists into the 1960s, but one would doubt that with the science out there, and the equations increasingly and constantly proved, that nobody gets round to trying to build a real life device.
Even a Central Powers victory in the Great War would not prevent the science from being out there, it builds upon what has gone before, and it gradually builds up to the conclusion that harnessing the power of splitting the atom would create a weapon of enormous power. There will never be a time when such an idea does not appeal to some government, somewhere
Eventually someone is going to feel that they have the money to spare, the political power to command it attempted, and that mixture of right and belief in themselves that provides for the impetus of any secret weapons programme. It will come, and delaying it later than the 1960s in any timeline where the science is out there seems highly unrealistic.
Of course, you could be writing a timeline where the science is not out there – but it is difficult to prevent it from getting there. It is not Einstein alone, nor him and Heissenberg, it is a body of scientists brought up on the nineteenth century arguments and discoveries who work as a peer group in journals and papers across the world. Sure, you could prevent this if your timeline is drastically different to what really happened, but even something such as an absolute Napoleonic victory will not derail the science that comes naturally over time.
