I once read a story about time travelors from a future in which the Cuban Missile Crisis had resulted in nuclear war and mankind had been confined to fallout shelters underground ever since. Their machine only had enough power for five trips. Their initial trip averted the Cuban Missile Crisis, but nuclear war occured again before the sixties were over following a slew of assinations of US leaders. They went back in time again and prevented most of the assasinations and nuclear war was averted (this the the timeline we are in, they weren't able to save RFK or MLK). Ultimately they found that no matter what they did, they were just delaying the inevitable. They never considered killing Einstein or distracting him from his work. Instead they worked to make Russia colonize the West Coast to completely change world history. They reasoned that if WW2 and the cold war could be averted, there would be no impetus to invest the massive resources necesary to develop the atomic bomb.
I read somewhere that Japan was accually trying to seek piece before they got nuked, it could just be a speculation. I wouldnt trust the government around then though, they wanted to know the effects of a bombing. And i think Japan were screwed without an invasion. The Russians were the real reason behind the bombing. The US wanted to show them they weren't fucking around and needed to scare the Russians pre-cold war era. Russia was invading mainland China and kicking the Japanese out before the bombs hit the island. I don't think they would have hesitated to take Japan. So the US was like, "lets do something so destructive, so unimaginable, that the Russian government won't think about being hostile mofo's" Just what i've learnt
I think I read some where that many physicists believe that Special Relativity was no big deal and would have been developed at about the same time if Einstein had never existed. These folks also seem to believe that General Relativity was a tour de force that might not have been developed for another hundred years without Einstein. Atomic bomb technology does not require GR and possibly might have been developed without SR. Experimental evidence indicates that radioactive materials have a lot of potential as energy producers. The concept of critical mass could be developed experimentally. It was well known in the last half (maybe quarter) of the 19th century that the sun's energy output could not be due to chemical processes. While thermonuclear (fusion) bombs could not have been developed without supporting theory, fission bombs could easily been developed as a result of wondering about the sun's energy output & the energy inherent in radioactive materials. An erroneous connection could have led to the development of fission weapons. BTW: Quantum theory might have been delayed 10-20 years if not for Einstein. When he first proposed that energy was quantized, the world of physics thought he was crazy for at least 6 to 12 months, perhaps longer. Planck did not have a clue about the implications of black body radiation. I have often wondered why he is usually given credit for initiating the developmment of quantum theory.
