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Alternate History General Discussion

Coiler said:
How likely/possible was a detonation of the warhead with nuclear-level force in the 1980 Damascus missile disaster? It didn't IOTL, but could it have, even if not at the full nine megatons?
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According to Schlosser, in Command and Control, which went into this particular accident in great detail, it looks pretty unlikely.
There was a brief period when Peurifoy, who was the delegate from Sandia Labs, was worried - when he'd been told that the re-entry vehicle was "remarkably intact, given the size of the explosion." This concerned him because the arming and fuzing system (plus batteries) were attached to the base of the re-entry vehicles. For a detonation, they had to activate, and if they were still attached to the warhead, that remained a possibility.

With them blown off of the warhead, the X-unit couldn't charge and the warhead couldn't detonate (it could, as described above, have the explosives detonate uncontrolled, scattering nuclear material everywhere, but that wouldn't cause a nuclear detonation.

When he got there, though, it turned out that the re-entry vehicle had actually been blown apart and the warhead had been effectively stripped of the electric power source necessary to cause a detonation.

From that, we can infer that the explosion would have had to had the re-entry vehicle survive the explosion (extremely unlikely given the power of the blast in the silo) AND malfunction in such a way as to trigger detonation (I'd like to consider that impossible, but enough other incidents occurred to make me believe that was plausible, such as the 1961 North Carolina incident). Overall, though - looks extremely unlikely to obtain a full-on detonation from that accident.
 
Christian said:
This might just be tunnel vision for me, but a lot of Red Britain timelines seem to always have Attlee as "super awesome and competent guy we should all listen to".
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I think it depends on the story (some even have Attlee taken out and shot and all that) but I’m fond of the occasional ‘Attlee but he’s Smedley Butler’ list/TL myself.
 
Time Enough said:
I think it depends on the story (some even have Attlee taken out and shot and all that) but I’m fond of the occasional ‘Attlee but he’s Smedley Butler’ list/TL myself.
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Despite Benn being even more to the left, I've only read one where he is more successful and makes Britain better. Always though British socialists admire Benn as much as Attlee.
 
Christian said:
Despite Benn being even more to the left, I've only read one where he is more successful and makes Britain better. Always though British socialists admire Benn as much as Attlee.
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Depends on the British Socialist, indeed I much prefer some of the figures related to Benn like Michael Meacher or Ken Coates myself.

I think the problem with Benn is that he failed quite consistently whilst at least Attlee got some wins in on a policy level. Additionally I haven’t seen many ‘Labour Wins 50’ timelines myself and the scant few, aren’t particularly great.
 
Time Enough said:
Depends on the British Socialist, indeed I much prefer some of the figures related to Benn like Michael Meacher or Ken Coates myself.

I think the problem with Benn is that he failed quite consistently whilst at least Attlee got some wins in on a policy level. Additionally I haven’t seen many ‘Labour Wins 50’ timelines myself and the scant few, aren’t particularly great.
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The Benn wins timeline I mentioned has him luck into being in charge when they found oil in the North Sea, so they managed to use that to shore up their popularity and use the oil money to be put into a Sovereign Wealth Fund and healthcare.
 
I'll admit that whenever I see a hypothetical country with nuclear weapons, my brain dives into detail as to what kind of enrichment/construction facilities it has and where they are.
 
The real AH question that the world's fate would hinge on: What if the Mayweather/McGregor fight never happened?
 
Japhy said:
Because no one wanted more colonial death squad projects
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The major petroleum producing countries were already independent of the imperial powers and had good relations with them in the years after World War II. The Gulf States even wanted the United Kingdom to stay because they feared what would happen after it withdrew (including proposals to pay for British forces to be stationed in the region), and they were spot on. Iraq tried to invade Kuwait after it gained independence in 1961 and went ahead and actually did it in 1990. There are also tensions between Iran and its neighbors Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Coiler said:
I'll admit that whenever I see a hypothetical country with nuclear weapons, my brain dives into detail as to what kind of enrichment/construction facilities it has and where they are.
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You can predict what kind of nuclear reactors a country might use too.
 
So looking back at the legend of D. B. Cooper (and @M_Kresal 's great story about him in Allo Americana) makes me wonder both about the alternate history potential of him directly (I hold to the boring official view that he almost certainly died in the leap, but fiction can be fiction), and what would happen if a 9/11-scale incident happened during the "Golden Age of Hijacking" (since thanks to kamikazes in WWII, the concept of a suicidal aircraft ramming would not be unknown).
 
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