an interesting counterfactual

The weightiest historical “what if” of the past century is surely “what if Hitler had never come to power in Germany?” So many things about today’s world map would be different, and we can only guess vaguely at how much unknown human talent vanished from the world in that war without ever being noticed.

But one specific Hitler-related “what if” interests me especially while rereading Rhodes. Namely, it seems reasonably clear to me that if Hitler had not come to power, Germany would have been the first country with an atomic bomb. With people like Teller, Szilard, Bethe, Frisch, and Meitner still in the country to work with Heisenberg and others in a non-Nazi environment (heck, even Bohr might have chipped in had Germany been a functioning democracy) it’s hard to see anyone beating the Germans in that race. Germany would have become a superpower and would surely still be one, and with a much larger territory and perhaps population than it has today. Fermi would have remained in Italy and not been directly involved in any bomb work (he was mildly reluctant about it to begin with).

What did America have? Oppenheimer, who was more an ingenious organizer than a prime mover of the bomb; Lawrence, who couldn’t have put together a bomb without the largely foreign talent base used at Los Alamos.

One would also imagine that the German university system would still dominate the world under a Hitler-free scenario. It’s hard to recover fully from firing many of your best faculty members for no good reason.