Britain bathed in nuclear fire, America left all alone without any allies?
What would have happened if the Soviet Union had developed the atom bomb first?
In our real timeline, the Soviet Union was far too economically devastated by the war to have
any hope of developing a wartime nuclear weapons program. In fact, it relied heavily on stolen
research from the US's own Manhattan project to complete its first working nuclear weapon four
years after the war was over. Even after that, the nation struggled for a long time to develop
the delivery platforms needed to get a nuclear bomb from a manufacturing lab to a battlefield.
As early as 1910, Russian scientists were becoming aware of the potential of radioactive elements.
Russia, at the time struggling to keep pace with the rest of Europe,
nonetheless made great strides despite the many troubles caused by revolution and civil war.
Vladimir Vernadsky, mineralogist and geochemist, and founder of geochemistry, biogeochemistry,
and radiogeology, called for a survey of uranium deposits within Russia's borders
even before the revolutionary troubles of 1905. However, the nation had far more pressing concerns
and his request for an extensive survey of potentially valuable resources was ignored.
Other individuals however knew of the potential inherent in Vernadsky's research,
and privately funded such surveys until 1922, when the Radium Institute in Petrograd
officially took over the task under state direction. From 1920 until the late 1930s,
Russian physicists conducted joint atomic physics research alongside European counterparts
at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. At home though it was Abram Ioffe,
director of the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute, who guided the soviet effort
in nuclear physics. When the neutron was discovered by British physicist James Chadwick,
the LPTI's nuclear physics program was expanded to include the first cyclotron-
a type of particle accelerator- with energies of over 1 mega electronvolt,
leading to the first splitting of the atomic nucleus by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton.
The Russian government though showed little interest in this field of research as they
were far more concerned with the troubles from two back-to-back revolutions. Instead, their
early research was focused on the exploration of radium for medical and scientific purposes thanks
to its easy availability. Russian physicists nonetheless lobbied for an increase in funding
and attention to this emerging field of physics, but it wouldn't be until 1939,
when German chemist Otto Hahn discovered fission by splitting uranium, that scientists
in Russia and America both realized this could have serious military significance.
Early Russian efforts though were geared at using fission for power generation, as there
was deep skepticism that a working bomb could be built in any reasonable timeframe. However,
as World War II began a renewed emphasis on the military use of fission was placed
thanks to lobbying by Russian scientists, leading to a comission that was set up to
investigate how fission could be used to produce a working bomb. With the German
invasion of the Soviet Union practically all work was stopped on developing an atomic bomb,
as Stalin re-tasked Russian physicists into metallurgy, the mining industry,
or serving in the technical branches of the red army. During this time some research did continue,
all of it unclassified and shared for peer review in public scientific journals.
Georgy Flyorov, a Russian physicist serving in the Soviet air force, noted that the Germans,
British, and Americans had all suddenly stopped publishing any papers on nuclear science.
This led him to the obvious conclusion that all three of these countries had turned their efforts
to creating secret nuclear weapon programs, and were keeping quiet about their discoveries.
Stalin however had dispersed the research staff of the Radium Institute deeper inside Russian
territory, and tasked them with developing better radar and anti-mine protection
for ships. Nuclear bombs were a distant third. Flyorov wrote two impassioned letters to Stalin
in April of 1942, warning him that if the Soviets failed to develop an atomic bomb,
“the results will be so overriding it won't be necessary to determine who is
to blame for the fact that this work has been neglected in our country.” Basically,
if the Soviets didn't develop an atom bomb, there would be no survivors to blame for their failure.
Incredibly, Stalin took the letters seriously and immediately pulled Russia's best physicists from
their military postings and authorized the start of an atomic bomb project.
Anatoly Alexandrov and Igor V Kurchatov would be placed in charge of Laboratory
No. 2 as it came to be known. Kurchatov however was skeptical that developing
an atomic bomb was more important than the very pressing needs from the Russian front-
which at this time was not far from Moscow itself where the laboratory was located.
Despite their best efforts over the next three years though, Russian physicists were unable
to make any headway in developing a uranium-based bomb. Many expressed the futility of their effort,
but all knew that any day now Germany could unleash nuclear armageddon on them from the
air. There was no way they could have known that Germany's own nuclear weapons program had
barely made more progress than theirs thanks to Hitler's paranoia leading to him splitting
up the research efforts across multiple, completely independent laboratories. This
division of labor and lack of information sharing crippled the Nazi atomic weapon
program and ensured they'd have no hope of developing a nuclear weapon during the war.
The Russians got a break when NKVD spies stole data from the British
on using plutonium instead of uranium for a nuclear weapon- the first of many
leaks to come that would bolster the development of Soviet nuclear weapons.
In America, the efforts of British and US scientists were combined after it was determined
that the two nations needed to unite their efforts to prevent the Germans from developing a nuclear
weapon first. Britain very reluctantly agreed to a program based out of the US
due to basic necessity- if Germany were to invade Britain such a program could not be defended
or kept secret. At the time, Britain led the world in the development of nuclear weapons,
but was forced to share that knowledge- again, reluctantly- with the US.
Germany was not blind to allied research into nuclear weapons,
and had attempted to penetrate the United States with many spies. However,
these efforts went largely unsuccessful and most German spies were caught. Japan also attempted
to infiltrate the American nuclear program with spies but met with no success either.
The Soviets however were extremely adept at spying, and enjoyed the benefit of having
the sympathy of a great deal of Americans and British, as well as foreign emigres. The Soviet
Union had devoted a great deal of resources into infiltrating its two wartime allies,
while both the US and Britain had failed to plant so much as a single agent in Moscow. In
the US hundreds of Americans provided classified information to Soviet handlers out of sympathy,
and the Communist Party of the United States of America had thousands of members, some of which
would happily share secrets with Soviet spies. The CPUSA was largely made up of highly educated
intellectuals fed up with the exploitative nature of capitalism and given their education
were often involved in technical military efforts, putting them in prime position to
gather classified materials to share with Soviet spies. However, not all CPUSA members were willing
to betray their country, and the intelligence gathered by the Soviets was limited in scope.
In Britain though Soviet sources were even better placed, and the Soviet Union
first learned of a possible US-British atomic bomb program in September of 1941,
a full year before the effort was formalized. It's believed that the leak came from John Cairncross,
a member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” who divulged a large number of state secrets
to the Soviets during the war. At about the same time, Donald Maclean also informed the
Soviets of a potential atomic bomb project. Almost immediately, the NKVD launched a massive effort
to place sources within the burgeoning American Manhattan Project- though most
of these attempts were foiled by the FBI and Manhattan Project counterintelligence agents.
In February of 1943, Soviet attempts to contact physicists conducting work
related to the bomb project at the “Rad Lab” at University of California, Berkely,
were discovered by the FBI, and the scientists in question were placed under twenty four hour
surveillance. Those deemed vulnerable to Soviet influence were assigned away into the military
to work on unrelated projects to prevent them from leaking classified information.
One, caught leaking information in 1944, was immediately discharged from the project,
and early that same year the FBI learned of several other employees leaking information to
the Soviets. So close to success, it was becoming clear that the Manhattan Project was a leaky boat,
but nobody knew just how thoroughly the Soviets had penetrated it. They wouldn't
find out until 1950 that one of the project's innermost members was a Soviet spy all along.
Klaus Fuchs was a German communist who fled to England in September of 1933 in order to
avoid persecution. While there he earned his Ph.D. In physics in 1937,
later earning a Ph. D in science and applying for British citizenship. However, the war broke out
before his application could be processed and he was sent to an internment camp in Quebec,
Canada to ride out the war. However, Max Born, the scientist he had been working under,
pressed the government for his release, and it was granted. Fuchs returned to Edinburgh to resume his
work in January 1941. In May 1941 he was offered a spot working on the British atomic bomb project-
shortly after he offered his services to the Soviet NKVD due to his communist sympathies.
In 1943 Fuchs was sent to Columbia University in New York to work on the Manhattan Project. He was
recontacted by Soviet intelligence in 1944, just in time for Fuchs to be transferred to Los Alamos,
birthplace of the atomic bomb. While by then the Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project
with various other spies, Fuchs was one of the highest placed Soviet agents, and his efforts
led to the Soviet Union developing an atomic bomb anywhere from one to two years ahead of schedule.
He would be discovered in 1949 when decrypted cables from the US Army Signal Intelligence
Service's Venona project revealed that Fuchs had been spying for the Soviets. He
was arrested in January 1950 and served 9 years in prison before being deported to East Germany.
Despite a large number of well placed spies though, the Soviet Union still failed to
produce a nuclear weapon during the war, taking until 1949 to develop their own atomic bomb.
The reasons for this were largely due to logistics, as the Soviet Union had failed
to take uranium mining seriously until 1942, and by 1943 was still only producing a few tons of
uranium concentrate per year. The Americans, with the help of Belgian businessman Edgar Sengier,
had in 1940 already blocked the Soviets off from access to uranium in Congo, South Africa, and
Canada, seriously setting back Soviet efforts. In 1946 the first Soviet nuclear reactor went online,
but production was still insufficient to fuel it- instead it was fueled from seized German
stockpiles from their own failed program. For the Soviet Union to have developed
the atomic bomb first it would have had to listen to Vladimir Vernadsky's calls
in the early 1900s for uranium surveys. But with two revolutions and a bloody civil war,
uranium was the last thing on any Soviet leader's mind. With the devastating invasion of the Soviet
homeland by the German army during World War II, other priorities took precedence- there could be
no nuclear program after all if the Germans simply overran the country with their superior forces.
But what if the Soviets had developed the first atomic bomb?
Surprisingly, not much of world history would have changed. The United States was already well on its
way to development of an atomic weapon and would have followed with its own bomb within months or
a year at most of a Soviet bomb. However, life would likely have been a lot harder for Germany,
as you could expect that along with Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Berlin would have suffered the wrath of
atomic hellfire from a Soviet bombing. A second nuclear bomb would have likely been dropped on
the infamous Wolf's Lair bunker, incinerating Hitler and decapitating German leadership.
Neither bombing would have been necessary to end the war, as the German army was on the verge of
collapse already, but the Soviets would have likely carried out the bombing in retaliation
for the atrocities the Germans committed against Soviet citizens in their invasion. Berlin would
have paid the price for millions of dead Soviet citizens, and razed to the ground in nuclear fire.
The post-war period would have likely played out exactly the same,
as even the US- which bluffed about the number of nuclear bombs it had after the strikes against
Japan- struggled to produce nuclear bombs quickly. Any plans Stalin might have had to
use nuclear weapons to subjugate Europe would have been placed on hold due to the simple logistics of
actually building nuclear weapons- and then finding efficient ways of delivering them.
The US after all was only able to successfully bomb Japan because its air forces had been almost
completely destroyed, and American bombers could fly over japan with complete impunity.
The allies however still had strong air forces, and Soviet bombers would have found
it impossible to penetrate French and British skies deep enough to deliver nuclear strikes.
It would be well over a decade before rocketry had advanced to the point that a nuclear
weapon could be delivered with any measure of success, and by that time the world would have
been meeting the Soviet nuclear capabilities with their own. Even more importantly though,
it's doubtful Stalin had the stomach for further conflict after the defeat of Germany,
and even more doubtful his armies would have obeyed such orders to continue carrying on a
war that had so thoroughly decimated them and their homeland for half a decade.
Now go check out What If There Was A Nuclear War Between The US And Russia,
or click this other video instead! Nerf nuclear Gandhi!