Nukes never existed How does history change

>>2384723
cold war gets hot

>>2384723
two more world wars by now

biological and chemical weapons in place of nuclear warheads.

rich western nations, russia, china, japan, and south korea have environmentally sealed exoskeleton suits. that are used by special chemical weapons units. they flood a target area with nerve agents and then walk in to mop up anyone that got their mask on in time.

no nuclear power anywhere. aircraft carriers and submarines are still oil burners. submarines aren't the big threat that they are since they need to surface regularly.

at least a few countries were wiped out by a bio weapon attack. then the fire bombing campaign used to clean up the afflicted area.

>>2384723
For starters WWII would last at least 2 years longer.

>>2384803
That's almost more horrifying.

>>2384803
>>2384854
Brits had both plans and capability to drop Germany full of anthrax. If the second world war had lasted a year or two more they would have done so. That would have made a quarter of the whole European continent literally uninhabitable wasteland for decades if not centuries.

>>2384895
[Citation needed]

>>2384723

You still get a cold war, but on a more conventional deterrence basis: The Warsaw pact doesn't have as much industry and manpower as NATO, but NATO in turn doesn't want to start WW3 and see a death toll in the tens of millions and however many trillion dollars thrown down the drain to impose democracy on Russia.

Because, however, neither side trusts each other, you get a conventional arms race instead of a nuclear arms race, which will be orders of magnitude more expensive. Overall standards of living go down, which will be most pronounced in places like America and Western Europe.

>>2384725
>>2384766


What makes nuclear deterrence so impossible to break but not conventional deterrence?

>>2384803

There aren't really any known chemical or biological weapons that even come close to nuclear weapon destructive capability.

>>2384849

Japan was starving, and Olympic was in the wings. It wouldn't have taken 2 years to beat them down.

>>2384904
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vegetarian

>>2384915
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vegetarian

Not him, but you're making a serious false equivalence there. For starters, go look up Gruinard island, where they tested things. It only took 4 years of decontamination to get the place habitable again, not decades. It's just that the government didn't bother, since it was some literally where island and the expense wasn't considered worth it. If you're dropping these things over the agricultural heartland of Germany, I imagine they'll have different priorities.

>>2384927
>It only took 4 years of decontamination to get the place habitable again, not decades.
And that was a tiny island in the Scottish shore. Try to do same to a whole, large country.

>>2384967

So you need more formaldehyde and more people spreading it around. The process itself doesn't take that long, and the notion that half of Europe would be rendered uninhabitable for decades is stupid.

>>2384906
the right disease released onto a few cities would be just as dangerous as nuclear weapons.

>>2384999

Generally only if medical infrastructure breaks down. Even something like Anthrax is not particualrly transmissible between humans, and has a death rate of "only" about 25%, and is treatable with antibiotics to the point where death for someone who gets treatment is negligible.

An atomic weapon is going to vaporize a big chunk of a city and knock down a whole bunch of buildings, which makes it very hard to get emergency relief in. A biological weapon? Not so much. Which means that if you want your shit to be really deadly, it needs to supplement a conventional attack instead of being a replacement for it, which narrows the scope you can effectively obliterate with it considerably.

>>2384906
>What makes nuclear deterrence so impossible to break but not conventional deterrence?

MAD doctrine.

>>2384999
Does not damage the infrastructure tho.

>>2385117

Mutually assured destruction is simply two way deterrence. If you take an action to harm me (launching your nukes) I will take an action that raises the cost of it past the point of profitability for you (I launch mine and fuck up your country severely at the very least).


There is absolutely no theoretical reason that can't be duplicated with conventional implements.