Re: What if no Manhatten Project

Don't back-project.

Once the Bomb was built, the concept of an
absolutely decisive weapon was proven.

Before, it was blue-sky. Nobody _knows_
that it will work or how powerful it could be.

"The leader of one of the powers" cannot
decide on his own to spend billion$ on a
blue-sky project; nor is it likely that a
leader would make such a decision without
strong encouragement from the relevant
scientists.

Other players would be involved, mostly
in opposition: the "conventional" armed
forces, which want every available penny
to maintain as much as they can of their
wartime establishment and continue
acquiring the latest developments; the
politicians, who want to cut military
spending for domestic needs and to
reduce taxes.

Stalin, of course, could override all
such objections, but not Truman or
Attlee.

Yes, something like the Cold War
will develop. But not immediately.
There was no serious perception of
threat in the U.S. for several years.

I agree. The Cold war was going to happen anyway, and if you're the
leader of one of the powers, and there's a chance that you can develop
a new super waepon, then you're going to do it, because
a) war might break out any time, and it might help to win it, and
b) the other lot might get there first.

In this TL, where the A-bomb has not actually been used against
people, so that no one knows quite what it will do (some people will
have a theoretical idea, but theory is nothing compared to actually
seeing pictures of what it's done to a city and the inhabitants),
there must be a good chance that the Cold War will go hot. Mutual
paranoia, and the feeling that being nuked may be an acceptable price
to pay to win the war, could easily do that.

It's even possible that nuclear weapons won't be classed in the
'special' category. In that case they might be used against smaller
countries just as a big bomb. The US might use them in Korea or
Vietnam. The USSR might use them in Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Britain
might use them against Egypt.

All in all, not a nice world.

Question whether the post V-E day effort would be minimal, certain
areas like B-52 and B-36, nuke submarines, ballistic missiles all got
boosts over fears of Soviet expansion. Dominos.

Not in the sense of who won or lost.
But the use of the Bomb ended the
war a lot sooner than if it had been
necessary to invade and conquer
Japan on the ground. Hundreds of
thousands of additional deaths
would have occurred.

People were dying in large numbers
in Japanese occupied China and
SE Asia. Public health was on the
verge of collapse in Japan, with
massive outbreaks of typhus and
cholera threatening. The Soviet
campaign in Manchuria and Korea
was quite destructive. The continued
fighting and skirmishing in the
Philippines, New Guinea, and the
South Pacific was drawing blood.
There was a huge British campaign
in train to liberate Malaya. Japanese
HQ was contemplating the wholesale
slaughter of all PoWs and possibly
of all civilian internees as well.

All this is in addition to the enormous
casualties that would be almost
certain if the Allies invaded Japan.

So "the outcome" was deeply
affected by the Bomb.

Stalin was not in any particularly
aggressive mood at the end of the war.
He took what he was given (a lot),
helped Mao take China. It's not clear
how much he was deterred by the U.S.
Bomb and how much by the sheer
exhaustion of the USSR by WW II.

Probably around 1950 in the USSR.
Soviet scientists were speculating
on the possibility of atomic weapons
in 1940. In 1942, a young scientist
in Army service wrote to Stalin urging
research into what might be a war-
winning weapon. Stalin met with the
leading physicists; they told him the
Bomb was possible but probably
not achieveable during the war.  So
he decided to set up a paper project
to be activated after victory.

This decision may have been
influenced by intel from Soviet spies
in the Manhattan Project, which
provided confirmation - the Americans
and British thought it was possible too!

However, even with intel from the
successful MP, the USSR took until
1949 to build a Bomb. Without that
intel, it takes longer. And there is a
possibility that Stalin purges physics,
as he did biology, in which case the
Soviet Bomb is set back many years.
(OTL, Stalin _knew_ the Bomb was
for real, and left physics alone.)

Bomb projects in the US or UK won't
get much support after V-E Day if
they aren't already showing promise
of success. Besides the difficulty of
getting the necessary budget in
peacetime, a large proportion of key
scientists in the field would oppose
the project on pacifist grounds. OTL
they supported it out of fear of Nazi
Germany; that's gone.

I am reading a bio of Szilard.

I get the impression that a wrong turn or two in the early efforts to
engineer the nuclear chain-reaction might have led to no big US A-bomb
development effort during the war.

The Bomb was not important for the outcome of WWII.   But I guess it
might have slowed down Soviet agression in Europe and W. Asia.

If the project was delayed and there was no big push during WWII,
then when would the Bomb have been first tested, if ever?