One for the political historians here. Something that’s been rattling around in my what if files for a while.
For whatever reason nuclear weapons were never developed. Nagasaki and Hiroshima never happened but we still won the war. The Cuban missile crisis never happened, because, no nukes.
Beyond that it’s all hypothetical so any likely case scenario is valid.
Any thoughts on the matter?
What defines a “world war”?
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
That’s obviously a definition with some wiggle room – what constitutes “all or most”? Which nations are the “principal nations”?
From the '50s through the '80s, if there had been a war between the NATO nations and the Warsaw Pact nations, I imagine that it would have been defined as a world war.
I think so, yes. Without the 2 Japan bombs, there wouldn’t have been a graphic depiction of the true horror of nukes. Sooner or later someone was going to use them for the first time. The Japan bombings kept the US and Soviets from actually going hot. Similarly, India and Pakistan haven’t ever truly fought again since both got nukes.
ETA: ninja’d by kenobi_65, but leaving for continuity.
I would presume that it would involve two or more of the “superpower” nations engaged in a conflict for domination of physical or economic assets. Likely involving large expenditures of personnel, material, and money.
Merriam-Webster: Definition of World War
a war engaged in by all or most of the principal nations of the world
Good enough for me. But use whatever definition you think applies to your ideas.
Speculative territory here.
US never bothered to launch Manhattan Project (too costly, not enough certainty of results, Oppenheimer made same error than Heisenberg,…)
as in our timeline, Germany is crushed in May 45, Japan’s fleet is sunk and it’s air force is gone by August 45. Following the accords of Yalta, Stalin declares war on Japan August 9. The red army conquers Manchuria, Korea and North-east China before winter.
In spring 46, Russian paratroops land in Hokkaido, and Americans attacks Kyushu.
Japan surrenders, either after total occupation (and very heavy losses in civilian population), either after Truman assures the permanence of the emperor.
We are in May 46. Japan is parted between USSR (north), Nationalist China, UK and USA (south) with Tokyo as Berlin as 4-parted city. Korea is divided at the 38th parallel.
historically, tensions arises rapidly: evacuation of Persia, Greece civil war, Berlin crisis in 48, Chinese civil war, Korea war in 50.
Without the nuclear umbrella, each of this crises could (and one is all is sufficient) have triggered a major conflict between Allies and USSR.
And without nuclear weapons, WW3 would have lead to WW4 some decades later…
35 nations contributed 3-million combat troops to the Korean Conflict. 25 nations in Vietnam War, 2.5 million combat troops. World War I involved belligerents from 19 nations.
Does it matter that most of the nations in Korea and Vietnam were on the same side?
The hypothetical is that nukes were “never developed”, so this isn’t an issue.
And as others have pointed out, within 10 years of the end of WWII, we already had some pretty serious conflicts and wars, even with the existence of nukes to hold everyone back at least a little. Without nukes, it’s a near certainty that there would have been a major war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the 50s or 60s. Both sides saw the other as an existential threat.
Hell, there were people in charge at the end of WWII who were pushing us to keep going east, and take out the Soviets right after the Nazis. Does anyone think these people would have been less inclined this way if nukes didn’t exist?
Basically, the question asked is if Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) saved the nations of the Earth the same devastation as WWII. The atomic bomb attacks on Japan probably aren’t even in the top five most horrifying events of that war, so nukes weren’t the only reason the superpowers would want to avoid another war. But even if that wasn’t the case, a hot war between the US and USSR might have brought about the economic exhaustion that ultimately doomed the former a lot sooner and swifter than the Cold War did, with a much lower body count (countless surrogates died in the Cold War.).
OK, my bad - then yes, without nukes, I think for sure we have a WW3 and maybe WW4 by now. The 20th century would be one big series of world wars with some pause for breath in between.
As someone noted in another thread, a historical perspective of the last 120ish years could realistically call the entire century “The Hundred Years War.”
The “West” has pretty much been involved in some war or another since at least 1900, almost continuously, and as for the US at least, the conflicts have been more or less about the same thing.
IMHO there would have been a WWIII, but not a WWIV. It would have been bloody, likely worse than WWI and WWII put together, but the western nations would have likely emerged victorious. There were many lessons we didn’t learn from WWI that lead to WWII, but one of the ones we did learn was that the end goal of a Great War should be complete defeat / unconditional surrender of the enemy nation rather than something like the Treaty of Versailles. I assume that in a world without nukes, we wouldn’t have forgotten that lesson. After defeating the USSR and China, the western powers would have forced them to accept a western style constitution and to become western countries the way we forced Japan to accept the MacArthur constitution and to become a western country in our actual timeline. At that point, having witnessed the suffering that the Soviets and Chinese would have endured in such a war and with the Soviets and Chinese now also being western powers, I think the third world nations would have embarked on strategies to westernize peacefully rather than considering military options. So yes to WWIII, no to WWIV.
Korea? Local conflict. Never endangered any of the participants outside North & South.
But yeah, the division of Germany was stupid and a war would have come out of it.
Pretty much this is true since Og the caveman.
Those small conflicts are really nothing on a international scale.
The last conflict that might be considered a “war” is the invasion of Iraq. The rest is all small local conflicts.
Yes, another World War would have broken out without nuclear weapons.
The ‘beauty’ of nuclear weapons is that they can hold capitals/leadership/centers of gravity at near-immediate risk, especially now that ICBM/SLBMs have been around for at least 60 years.
To wit: I can destroy or heavily damage the warmaking capability of a belligerent, or kill those belligerents’ politicians involved in waging the war. But, my opponent can do the same thing to me.
Better to keep conflicts contained to a certain threshold, with achievable objectives, lest my command and control of the situation be annihilated, leaving my country adrift without political leadership to prosecute that war. “I shouldn’t start a major World War, if I run the risk of personally being vaporized.”
But then again comes the corollary: “If you fire a decapitation strike, who do you negotiate a cease-fire with?”
Tripler
Nuclear weapons are a necessary evil.
Regarding the OP, yes, I feel that without nuclear weapons we’d have had at least one more World War level conflict, most likely evolving out of some skirmish or misunderstanding (or bloody mindedness) in the European/Soviet theater. But I do wonder if the lack of nuclear WMD would have lead to a proliferation of chemical (and later biological) weapons?
As Tripler pointed out, one of the reasons MAD worked is that even the leaders would be at risk of retribution as the technologies advanced, which gave those in command a reason to step back. But with chemical weapons, you can easily convince yourself that can wipe out your enemies while only risking the battlefield. Which could possibly have made casualties worse, as well as hideous consequences and implications for post war infrastructure to support countless blinded/crippled/paralyzed soldiers and bystanders.
Not sure this is a better/worse scenario. Probably worse from the POV of individuals and military (and much, much worse if they ended up going the biological route after years of chemical options), but without rolling the dice on MAD which came a lot closer to happening than anyone is comfortable with (and still could!).
During WW2, the only ones to use chemical weapons were the Japanese, against the Chinese.
During the 30’s, the major idea was that future war will be of bombing cities with “gas bombs” that will drive down the moral and trigger surrender. Has it happened? no, because nobody dared use them, for fear of retaliations.
Even if gas-masks were distributed for the civilians, only explosives were used (and later napalm by Americans).
Everybody had been shocked by the gas war of WW1 and nobody was eager to start a new one. Even in the last stages of WW2, the Reich didn’t use chemical weapons against the allies or the Russians.
Oh, and on Unconditional Surrender: it took all the might of the Red army AND a continuous air war AND a two-pronged attack by the Allies to finally crush the Reich.
In a WW3 in Europe, either the T-34 are on the channel and mainland Europe is forever Red or the Pershings need to roll from Frankfurt to Omsk…that didn’t turn well for those who attempted that…
Most probably some years of destruction and a peace/truce negotiated (like in Korea after 3 years of blockage on the 38th parallel)
So in my variant of the hypothetical, there’s some physics reason why nuclear weapons don’t work, so there’s no component of “Russians figure it out in 1952 before the US” type stuff.
That assumed, the war would probably have ended in 1946 after the invasion of Japan.
After the war, you’d have had the Russians and US staring at each other over the German borders, and at some point a real war would have broken out. I’m not sure what form it would have taken; certainly after the Cold War had ended, it seems clearer that the Soviets weren’t the unstoppable juggernaut that we(the general public) was led to believe, and the US had a strategic bombing capability after 1945 that the Russians did not have.
But the crystal ball gets a lot murkier after about 1948 or so; so much of the Cold War military history was shaped by nuclear weapons- the force structures, airplane development, naval development, rocket development, and so on… I mean, the space program may have been long delayed without the pressures of nuclear weapon delivery driving the development of rockets during the Cold War. Similarly, most bombers during the Cold War were developed specifically to carry nukes, not conventional bombs. Something like the B-52 may have been very different if designed from the start to primarily carry a large load of 500 lb bombs like the B-29 had been. Or not… I don’t know. Maybe we’d have gone with swarms of ICBMs carrying conventional warheads? Who knows?
I agree with @FrenchDunadan that a war in Europe between the Soviets and the West would have ended up more or less Korea-like. Neither side had enough force to overwhelm the other; the Russians didn’t have the naval power to seriously interfere with the NATO supply lines across the Atlantic, and the US didn’t have the conventional power to overwhelm the Red Army. The determining factor would probably be how effective strategic bombing would have been; if the US/Britain could figure out the critical targets and effectively destroy them from the air, then it’s possible that could mess up the Soviets to the point where the Allies could have got the upper hand on the ground.
It would have been an insanely bloody affair however, and the pressure to negotiate an end to it would be very strong.