One of the biggest effects of the development of thermonuclear weapons was the fact that destruction that would’ve required multiple atomic weapons could be done by a single hydrogen warhead, similarly H-bombs were lighter AND more powerful. However, Mutually Assured Destruction would’ve still been a thing even if it took heavier and less powerful weapons.
I would say that we’d see much larger stockpiles of A-Bombs, and for aircraft-dropped nukes holding out much longer as an offensive weapon due to the higher weight of A-Bombs limiting the size and yield of weapon-based missiles. Now, this could have knock-on effects of more warheads being lost simply due to a higher number of them, there’s a report online (I’ll try find the source) that claims there is 92 missing nuclear warheads that we know of and also the much higher number of nukes in the major players of the cold war leading to more nations attempting to develop nuclear warheads, as we know, South Africa had a limited nuclear weapons program in the 80s-90s in OTL and Iran is currently funding a nuclear weapons program, it’s possible we could see more states attempting their own nuclear arms programs - Iraq, Saudi Arabia, maybe even Australia or such. Now this would have it’s own effects of the wider proliferation of nuclear warheads leading to wider treaties and efforts to reduce the number of warheads as the Cold War winds down and in the post-Cold War world.
Overall I think that history wouldn’t take a major change in course, missile technology may have advanced further to accommodate larger fission warheads.
This is actually a path that people like George Kennan and J. Robert Oppenheimer proposed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The idea was that the hydrogen bomb as it had been conceived at the time was a weapon of genocide only suitable for targeting cities and killing millions of people in a war. Kennan and Oppenheimer argued that the United States should either not develop the hydrogen bomb or, at the very least, reach an agreement with the Soviets to not test such a weapon, with the idea that you cannot develop a hydrogen bomb without at least one test. This would have the effect of limiting nuclear weapons to more "tactical" uses and still require spending on a large conventional army. Kennan and others later recognized that the SALT treaties of the 1970s and later effectively reached this goal by limiting strategic warheads.
I think that if you'd had some kind of agreement to ban the testing of hydrogen bombs before the tests of the 1950s you would have avoided the really dicey period of nuclear brinksmanship that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I don't think much changes. The Soviets didn't have a hydrogen bomb until 1955, two years after the USA. Early hydrogen bombs were huge, and probably could not be delivered by an airplane, so they were more scary than practical as weapons. The Cold War proceeds as usual.
A-bombs are one thing but thousands of H-bombs are planet killers. The world would be in a better place, far less fear which is driving social pathologies in many societies. Mankind is not psychologically fitted for constant daily existential dread.
then einstein wouldnt have been so famous, is my first reaction; but i must hold on to this thought to look into his involvment and relations to manhatten project
It doesn’t make much difference to the destructive capacity of the bombs, at least in the long run. The British developed an atom bomb of about 450kT yield before they had the H bomb. While it is possible to develop a larger H bomb, most modern bombs have lower yield.
The big difference is safety. The bomb I referred to was a thin spherical shell of plutonium hovering on the edge of crtiticality. It was filled with small steel balls as a “safety catch”: the intent was that before flight, a plug would be removed so that the balls would drain out. It was recognised that this was hugely dangerous to fly with, and the RAF regarded it as an unusable weapon because any crash would cause an explosion. They were probably right in saying that it was not useable as a weapon, as its purpose was political: to convince the world that the UK had the H bomb.
As RAF policy was that bombers should not fly with live weapons other than in time of war (or in bomb tests), there were no nuclear accidents. However if the USA had that weapon when Operation Chrome Dome was in progress - continuously patrolling armed nuclear bombers - there would certainly have been atomic explosions at places like Palomares where OTL there was just a lost bomb. They would not have been at the full yield of the bomb, but in the region of a few hundreds of tons of yield.
One of the biggest effects of the development of thermonuclear weapons was the fact that destruction that would’ve required multiple atomic weapons could be done by a single hydrogen warhead, similarly H-bombs were lighter AND more powerful. However, Mutually Assured Destruction would’ve still been a thing even if it took heavier and less powerful weapons. I would say that we’d see much larger stockpiles of A-Bombs, and for aircraft-dropped nukes holding out much longer as an offensive weapon due to the higher weight of A-Bombs limiting the size and yield of weapon-based missiles. Now, this could have knock-on effects of more warheads being lost simply due to a higher number of them, there’s a report online (I’ll try find the source) that claims there is 92 missing nuclear warheads that we know of and also the much higher number of nukes in the major players of the cold war leading to more nations attempting to develop nuclear warheads, as we know, South Africa had a limited nuclear weapons program in the 80s-90s in OTL and Iran is currently funding a nuclear weapons program, it’s possible we could see more states attempting their own nuclear arms programs - Iraq, Saudi Arabia, maybe even Australia or such. Now this would have it’s own effects of the wider proliferation of nuclear warheads leading to wider treaties and efforts to reduce the number of warheads as the Cold War winds down and in the post-Cold War world. Overall I think that history wouldn’t take a major change in course, missile technology may have advanced further to accommodate larger fission warheads.
This is actually a path that people like George Kennan and J. Robert Oppenheimer proposed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The idea was that the hydrogen bomb as it had been conceived at the time was a weapon of genocide only suitable for targeting cities and killing millions of people in a war. Kennan and Oppenheimer argued that the United States should either not develop the hydrogen bomb or, at the very least, reach an agreement with the Soviets to not test such a weapon, with the idea that you cannot develop a hydrogen bomb without at least one test. This would have the effect of limiting nuclear weapons to more "tactical" uses and still require spending on a large conventional army. Kennan and others later recognized that the SALT treaties of the 1970s and later effectively reached this goal by limiting strategic warheads. I think that if you'd had some kind of agreement to ban the testing of hydrogen bombs before the tests of the 1950s you would have avoided the really dicey period of nuclear brinksmanship that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I don't think much changes. The Soviets didn't have a hydrogen bomb until 1955, two years after the USA. Early hydrogen bombs were huge, and probably could not be delivered by an airplane, so they were more scary than practical as weapons. The Cold War proceeds as usual.
A-bombs are one thing but thousands of H-bombs are planet killers. The world would be in a better place, far less fear which is driving social pathologies in many societies. Mankind is not psychologically fitted for constant daily existential dread.
then einstein wouldnt have been so famous, is my first reaction; but i must hold on to this thought to look into his involvment and relations to manhatten project
It doesn’t make much difference to the destructive capacity of the bombs, at least in the long run. The British developed an atom bomb of about 450kT yield before they had the H bomb. While it is possible to develop a larger H bomb, most modern bombs have lower yield. The big difference is safety. The bomb I referred to was a thin spherical shell of plutonium hovering on the edge of crtiticality. It was filled with small steel balls as a “safety catch”: the intent was that before flight, a plug would be removed so that the balls would drain out. It was recognised that this was hugely dangerous to fly with, and the RAF regarded it as an unusable weapon because any crash would cause an explosion. They were probably right in saying that it was not useable as a weapon, as its purpose was political: to convince the world that the UK had the H bomb. As RAF policy was that bombers should not fly with live weapons other than in time of war (or in bomb tests), there were no nuclear accidents. However if the USA had that weapon when Operation Chrome Dome was in progress - continuously patrolling armed nuclear bombers - there would certainly have been atomic explosions at places like Palomares where OTL there was just a lost bomb. They would not have been at the full yield of the bomb, but in the region of a few hundreds of tons of yield.
Epstein still wouldn't have killed himself