Post by redsycorax on Sept 23, 2018 0:48:13 GMT
Okay, so Earth-X is a world where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan developed nuclear weapons "because the balance of power went the wrong way" because FDR died of polio early (presumably. The other logical scenario is that his would-be assassin Guiseppe Zangara successfully carried out his plan and FDR died in 1933, leaving his fiscal conservative deputy John Nance Garner in power for the rest of the thirties and forties. Isolationism and fiscal constraint mean that the Manhattan Project is either never funded, or is insufficiently funded, leaving Jewish Nazi physicists in the lethal hands of the Third Reich, unable to help the Allies develop nuclear weapons.)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guiseppe_Zangara
(Zangara plays a prominent role in Philip K. Dick's The Man in The High Castle (1962), based on precisely this scenario)
Postulate 2: In OTL, the situation was that Werner Heisenberg just wasn't as good a nuclear physicist as his mentor Niels Bohr, and because of that, Nazi Germany was unable to develop a functional nuclear reactor, let alone nuclear weapons. The Allied raid on Peenemunde in occupied Norway didn't help matters either. On Earth-X, presumably there weren't appropriate tactical or strategic circumstances available for any Peenemunde equivalent, or possibly specialist military personnel available in that context either. Bohr may have capitulated to Heisenberg's pressure and worked for the Third Reich, or else there was an erstwhile exemption for Bohr and other physicists)
Postulate 3: Therefore, Nazi Germany has functional nuclear weapons in 1944. It then proceeds to use them against (i) the Warsaw Ghetto (ii) Stalingrad and finally (iii) Moscow itself. Would such a murderous regime have any compunction against such murderous suppression of a significant Jewish insurgency? No. What about an annoying strategic knot? No. Or the capital of the Soviet Union? Nope. Therefore, Nazi Germany gets nuclear weapons, demonstrates willingness to use them and due to the destruction of Moscow, it has access to the resources of the former easterb USSR, which prolongs the war.
Unrelated Postulate 4: Sorry, but this is of neccessity a very, very dark alternate history precisely due to the Nazi ascendancy. Later incarnations of Earth-10 which depict an escalated Nazi Holocaust are probably exactly right in that prognosis. Instead of six million Jews, one million Gypsies (Sinti and Romani) and the other casualties of that genocide, the numbers murdered in the concentration camps would be far, far higher. Unfortunately, the original "Crisis on Earth-X" ignored the issue completely. Given that the world Jewish population was seventeen million (1939), the scale of the genocide would be much greater, especially if the Nazis invaded and occupied the eastern coast of the United States and the Palestinian Mandate, as well as the remainder of Soviet Jewry. There is no ethical way out of this narrative implication other than to acknowledge this and possibly foreground it within any attempted chronology. One wonders how the forthcoming DC Freedom Fighters series will handle it, especially if their Phantom Lady is Jewish, as depicted in Multiversity's Masterman series. That also depicts an engorged Nazi Holocaust, which haunts Overman throughout the glimpse we have of that Earth-10.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guiseppe_Zangara
(Zangara plays a prominent role in Philip K. Dick's The Man in The High Castle (1962), based on precisely this scenario)
Postulate 2: In OTL, the situation was that Werner Heisenberg just wasn't as good a nuclear physicist as his mentor Niels Bohr, and because of that, Nazi Germany was unable to develop a functional nuclear reactor, let alone nuclear weapons. The Allied raid on Peenemunde in occupied Norway didn't help matters either. On Earth-X, presumably there weren't appropriate tactical or strategic circumstances available for any Peenemunde equivalent, or possibly specialist military personnel available in that context either. Bohr may have capitulated to Heisenberg's pressure and worked for the Third Reich, or else there was an erstwhile exemption for Bohr and other physicists)
Postulate 3: Therefore, Nazi Germany has functional nuclear weapons in 1944. It then proceeds to use them against (i) the Warsaw Ghetto (ii) Stalingrad and finally (iii) Moscow itself. Would such a murderous regime have any compunction against such murderous suppression of a significant Jewish insurgency? No. What about an annoying strategic knot? No. Or the capital of the Soviet Union? Nope. Therefore, Nazi Germany gets nuclear weapons, demonstrates willingness to use them and due to the destruction of Moscow, it has access to the resources of the former easterb USSR, which prolongs the war.
Unrelated Postulate 4: Sorry, but this is of neccessity a very, very dark alternate history precisely due to the Nazi ascendancy. Later incarnations of Earth-10 which depict an escalated Nazi Holocaust are probably exactly right in that prognosis. Instead of six million Jews, one million Gypsies (Sinti and Romani) and the other casualties of that genocide, the numbers murdered in the concentration camps would be far, far higher. Unfortunately, the original "Crisis on Earth-X" ignored the issue completely. Given that the world Jewish population was seventeen million (1939), the scale of the genocide would be much greater, especially if the Nazis invaded and occupied the eastern coast of the United States and the Palestinian Mandate, as well as the remainder of Soviet Jewry. There is no ethical way out of this narrative implication other than to acknowledge this and possibly foreground it within any attempted chronology. One wonders how the forthcoming DC Freedom Fighters series will handle it, especially if their Phantom Lady is Jewish, as depicted in Multiversity's Masterman series. That also depicts an engorged Nazi Holocaust, which haunts Overman throughout the glimpse we have of that Earth-10.
