What happens to the Indian independence movement in this scenario? Would Bose even have died if he was freer to travel?
More the former than the latter, depending on your definition of “us” (I’m reading it as “from the Manhattan Project”)
What happens to the Indian independence movement in this scenario? Would Bose even have died if he was freer to travel?
More the former than the latter, depending on your definition of “us” (I’m reading it as “from the Manhattan Project”)
Except that there’s quite a bit of evidence that the USSR didn’t actually use any of the information he provided (this is discussed in the link you provided). Once everyone knew that atomic bombs were possible, it was just a matter of time before every major power that had decent physicists would figure it out.
My humble opinion:
If Japan was able to secure a colonial empire in East Asia, it might have been quiet for a decade or so. But I feel a war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. Powerful people in the Japanese government saw the Soviets as an ideological enemy they didn’t want to exist in their proximity. Once the Japanese military recovered from its conquests in East Asia, it would seek a new war against the Soviet Union.
If Japan was able to conquer both East Asia and Siberia, then they might have been satisfied and seen themselves as a “have” power which sought no further changes in the status quo.
That’s a good spot to segue into something else.
In our world after WW2 there was a period of time between 1945-1951 for everyone to absorb what happened (with not only The Holocaust and Japanese genocides, but the advent of nukes, jets and missiles).
Now of course, genocides still happen and the world either is aghast or shrugs based on political and racist indifference, but in this alt timeline…not only is the grinding of the war longer, but it looks like, jets, missiles and possibly nukes will be developed by several countries with no lull and accompanying moral ponderance on their use.
The US might have gone ahead and developed an atomic bomb. We were in a better position than the rest of the world in terms of the materials, experiences, and know-how. We would have the same motivation to get it done first, just because we weren’t at war doesn’t mean we would trust any other country to have that technology ahead of us.
How much of that know how was German scientists (and other Europeans) who left Europe because they were Jewish, or Jewish-adjacent? If the US was neutral, would they have been allowed to emigrate there? Maybe the US would have turned them away, out of concern for antagonizing Germany.
So these people would have ended up somewhere else, like the UK or USSR.
And if the USSR had developed the bomb first, and were facing a grind in Europe, it’s a lock that they would have used it at least once. Maybe not twice after they saw the effects, but for sure once.
“Fuchs’s greatest contribution to the Soviets may have been disclosing how uranium could be processed for use in a bomb. Fuchs gave Gold technical information in January 1945 that was acquired only after two years of experimentation at a cost of $400 million. Fuchs also disclosed the amount of uranium or plutonium the Americans planned to use in each atomic bomb”
He didn’t outright give them bomb plans, no, especially not for fusion bombs. But saving them 2 years and $400 million? That’s quite a chunk.
But even there, there’s controversy over what effect it had. It’s all mostly speculation. That link also says this:
Because the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenti Beria, used foreign intelligence as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default, it is unknown whether Fuchs’s fission information had a substantial effect. Considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium that it could procure, it is difficult for scholars to judge accurately how much time was saved.
How long it would take the USSR to develop a bomb without any input from the US at all is pretty much speculation. We’ll never know for sure.
It’s generally agreed the physics aren’t mind-bendingly difficult.
One of the most difficult things, by contrast, would have been the industrial and technical capacity, i.e. more on the engineering side of things. Even now, one of the signs we look for are importation/production of equipment for the centrifuges. Getting the infrastructure set up for atomic weapons development is an expensive and challenging proposition, especially for a nation at war and/or at risk of invasion.
So, it becomes more a question of motivation - would an isolationist US not at war approve appropriate levels of funding to be first to a weapon that they weren’t yet convinced would be a game changer and possibly one they wouldn’t really need? That’s an iffier proposition.
ETA: also, I’d hazard a guess that the German Jews who fled in the 20s/30s who were also top level scientists would have been allowed in. That’s how we got Einstein. Also, the head of the US program was Oppenheimer, who was already an American.
But at the same time, it’s pretty well-established that the German scientists of the time went down the wrong pathway for developing a bomb. So, somewhere, someone made the right choice in one program, and the wrong one in the other. Who those people were, and where they ended up, made quite a bit of difference.
There were factions in America that proposed embargoing all sales of military supplies. One group felt that military intervention might follow logistic support (this was the part of the view that arms dealers had caused World War I). Some groups felt we shouldn’t pick sides in the war (people who opposed British imperialism or Soviet communism for example). Some people were dedicated pacifists who opposed military sales on principle. And some people felt American military products should be used exclusively to build up America’s own military rather than sent off to help other countries.
Some people, as you noted, saw a divide between selling military supplies and selling non-military supplies. But that divide was hard to fix in place. What was a military product? Selling things like tanks and guns were obviously military. But what about oil or metal? What about grain? These were products that weren’t directly sent to battlefields but enabled other countries to fight wars.
There were already a large diaspora in the US, I’m sure that would have made it a tough sell to exclude others. Especially educated, world-class scientists.
In any case, a lot of those scientists were already emigrating to the US before the war - look at Einstein, Bethe, Szilard, von Neumann, Franck, Teller… all came to America before the war.
Many of them came here before the war started, Einstein chose to stay in the US while visiting in 1933. I doubt the US would turn them away under a position of neutrality, neutral countries usually provide a haven for people escaping war. I’m not saying a boatload of desperate Jews couldn’t be turned away based on a refugee quota, but in this situation individual scientists shouldn’t face a problem.
Well, it’s really a question of when exactly does the timeline start to diverge? A US that decides to just let Japan do whatever it wants so long as the US is not directly attacked means that the US was being far more isolationist, far sooner than 1939.
And there’s also the issue - if the US is staying out of it, do these scientists stay in the US, or do they move to one of the countries that is actually fighting the Germans? Because it was the fight against the Germans that really motivated a lot of those people. It’s not a simple issue.
The US might not even develop a program, since they’re trying to stay out of it. And even if the US does start work, will they allocate the resources they need to accomplish it in the same ~4 year time span? Almost certainly not. And even if they have a well-funded program, will these scientists work on it? Why help the US develop the bomb if the US has made it clear that they have no intention of using it to stop Germany? Better to make a bomb for the UK or USSR, who will use it, not just sit on the sidelines, even if it takes longer.
So Britain is out of the war in this scenario, 100% definitely, they lose to Germany without US support. Even if Germany are still not able to launch an invasion (which would be a real possibility), the battle of the Atlantic (and the amount of supplies coming from overseas without US logistical support, regardless of the U boat casualties) mean Britain is forced to surrender very early in the war.
At that point you have the whole of the Nazi war machine focused on the Soviet union, and for me the most likely outcome there is the Nazis win. I mean the war in the Soviet union was a very close run thing in 1941 and 1942, it would not take much to tip the balance to the Nazis, and being in sole control of Europe with no Western Allies to worry about that is big advantage.
In Asia Japan wins definitely 100%. Even if USSR survives and is able to steamroller Manchuria, they are not the going to be able to run an island hopping campaign across the Pacific and invade Japan (and why would they want to? particularly as they would in that scenario have just become unopposed rulers of all of Europe).
Definitely no nukes in the first half the 20th century either. The Manhattan project isn’t happening and without it none of the other nuclear projects happen.
Yes, and despite post war Soviet claims they didn’t need the allies, Stalin himself said the USSR needed American aid to survive.
Totaling $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in today’s currency, the Lend-Lease Act of the United States supplied needed goods to the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 in support of what Stalin described to Roosevelt as the “enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy — bloodthirsty Hitlerism.”
** 400,000 jeeps & trucks*
** 14,000 airplanes*
** 8,000 tractors*
** 13,000 tanks*
** 1.5 million blankets*
** 15 million pairs of army boots*
** 107,000 tons of cotton*
** 2.7 million tons of petrol products*
** 4.5 million tons of food*
Yeah, the USSR was building a lot of tanks on their own, but all that aid allowed them to.
The War in the Atlantic was being won by the U-Boats, even Churchill admitted as much. GB needed US aid, which went beyond those 50 old destroyers (which were just fine for Convoy escort). All of the RNs lovely Battleships would be useless.
By 1941, the United States was taking an increasing part in the war, despite its nominal neutrality. In April 1941 President Roosevelt extended the Pan-American Security Zone east almost as far as Iceland. British forces occupied Iceland when Denmark fell to the Germans in 1940; the US was persuaded to provide forces to relieve British troops on the island. American warships began escorting Allied convoys in the western Atlantic as far as Iceland, and had several hostile encounters with U-boats.
True. But not enough. And without US intervention, most would never have arrived.
One scenario- The Nazis take Dunkirk. Halifax is coerced into being PM. Germany gives GB a solid peace deal. GB stays neutral. In the east, Zhukov does not have that chance meeting with the incompetent Marshal buddy of Stalin, and instead is purged. Thus the Imperial Japanese win Khalkhin Gol, and the Northern thrust is done, not the Southern.
After a bit, Germany invades Russia, which, without support and without it’s best General- falls. Not to mention the Imperial Japanese pressing in in the far East.
Maybe the IJN, which had prepped for a naval war against America, gets it’s way later, maybe not. Two small things, early in the war, could have led to the Axis winning.
Yeah. The Imperial Japanese had two plans- either Northern strategy into Russia, or the Southern. They were SURE the Americans would intervene from the Philippines, etc. Mind you, it was indeed possible to seize the DEI without an immediate US entry into the war- American had already done very little about the Nazis taking Netherlands, France, Belgium, etc, so no way would they react with war if Imperial Japan took the DEI. But Imperial Japan did not think so.
In theory, that is what the USA did in early WW1, but Wilson was secretly providing/selling arms, etc to GB. A few large super uboats did come to America and bought small amounts, in WW1.
Right. Besides there is the morale issue- knowing they were alone, with no possibility of aid, that could have caused Stalin to have an even bigger nervous breakdown. Stalin needed Lend-lease, he even said so.
The only scenario I see the UK surrender, or even sue for peace, is if Churchill does not become PM, and/or King Edward VIII does not abdicate and pressures for accommodation with the Nazis. That is, a political defeat not a military one.
The Battle of the Atlantic went as long as it did due to two British fundamental blunders; they forgot the lesson from WW I re escorting convoys instead of using destroyers as sub hunter-killers, (as indeed did the US initially) and failing to use even a small part of their bomber fleet to patrol the Atlantic, the famous air gap, preferring to bomb fields in Germany instead.
The German navy started the war with ~1/10th of the active subs Doenitz thought were needed to bring the UK down - only 30-40 IIRC. As soon as the British start to escort convoys properly, air patrol the entire Atlantic routes, and get decent sonar and surface radar, the subs are dead.
Churchill was no doubt playing up the level of threat to help Roosevelt’s campaign to get Congress on board.
But thats with the US support. And even with it there were months when the U-boats were “winning” (that there was not enough material reaching the UK to meet their war needs, albeit temporarily). If you massively reduce the amount of material being sent to the UK in the first place, reduce the number of escorts available, and provide only a fraction of the replacement ships available to replace the lost ones (without the US shipyards churning out ships), then there is no debate, the UK loses the battle of the Atlantic.
The Northern strategy was militarily, politically, and economically unfeasible and a moot point. Militarily its unfeasibility had been exposed at Khalkhin Gol where the IJA had suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the Soviets in 1939 and showed their gross inferiority to the Soviets in armor, artillery, and mobile operations. Politically this led to Japan signing of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact in 1941. Even had the Japanese decided they wanted to backstab the Soviets and strike north in 1941, it would have been economic and military suicide. They were dealing with the rather pressing problem of imminent economic collapse and military impotence at the hands of the US led oil embargo unless they quit China to restore the flow of oil or strike south in order to physically seize a source of oil. There was no discovered source of oil in Siberia or Sakhalin Island in 1941.
The Japanese certainty that they couldn’t take the Dutch East Indies and Commonwealth possessions in the Pacific without sparking a war with the US was based on political reality, not a collective delusion on the part of their leadership. Far from ‘doing little’ about Nazi German aggression the US was actively in an undeclared naval war with Germany from summer of 1941, escorting Commonwealth convoys across the Atlantic with orders to shoot on sight any German or Italian ships or submarines encountered, along with publicly committing to “all aid short of war,” the destroyers for bases deal, lend-lease and all of that. Putting an oil embargo on Japan was throwing the gauntlet on the floor and both sides knew it. That Pearl Harbor was attacked was a surprise, that a war was coming was not. The US Asiatic Fleet had already dispersed from Manila Bay and US destroyers were both relocated to the Dutch East Indies and on their way to join up with British Force Z on Dec. 7, 1941.
The only way to make a plausible WW2 alt-history where the US wasn’t going to be at war with at least the Japanese would require a point of departure going back to 1898 with the US not taking the Philippines in the Spanish-American War for whatever reason, or coming up with some way that the US would plausibly accept Japanese hemegony over the Pacific to the point of voluntarily handing over the Philippines to Japan or somehow reassuring Japan that US control of the Philippines wasn’t a direct threat to their economy and ability to wage war. That’s an insurmountably tall order at the best of times - about on par with Japan willingly choosing to quit China in the face of the oil embargo - and these were far from the best of times. This was near the height of the Yellow Peril fears and the US had no problems putting everyone of Japanese descent into internment camps for the duration of the war.