Atomic bomb

An atomic bomb is a superweapon which operates according to Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, saying a small amount of mass can be converted into a large amount of energy. In an atomic bomb an atom's nucleus is divided and the mass of its subatomic particles is converted into enough destructive energy to destroy a city. In OTL, it was first developed by the United States but other World War II powers had atomic research programs. So far, only the U.S. has deployed an atomic bomb, dropping one on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, Japan in August, 1945, thereby ending World War II.

Atomic Bomb in Crosstime Traffic
In the home timeline, the atomic bomb was used by an unknown terrorist organization to destroy Damascus in 2033.

Crosstime Traffic was aware at least one alternate where the atomic bomb was never developed. In that reality, the Soviet Union and the United States fought World War VI in the 2090s.

Conversely, there were several alternates where an atomic war took place in the 20th Century. Explorers from the home timeline found that in some of these alternates the USSR had started the war whereas in others, the US had fired the first shots. Some of these were in the process of getting back on their feet. Others were completely devoid of human life.

Atomic Bomb in Curious Notions
The atomic bomb was first developed by the German Empire in the 1950s. Germany used the bomb shortly after during its war with the United States in 1956.

Atomic Bomb in The Disunited States of America
Most of the world possessed the atomic bomb by the end of the 21st century, including the various North American countries. The bomb had been used in the past, but that alternate had avoided full-scale nuclear war.

Atomic Bomb in In the Presence of Mine Enemies
The atomic bomb was first developed by the Greater German Reich. During the Third World War with the United States, Germany's use of atomic bombs proved decisive to victory. Philadelphia and Washington, DC were both destroyed with nuclear weapons.

Japan also had atomic bombs. Although Germany and Japan were allies, both realized that any war between them would destroy them both.

Atomic Bomb in "Joe Steele"
The atomic bomb was an idea that many scientists had theorized on in the years prior to World War II. Albert Einstein had even considered alerting U.S. President Joe Steele about the potential value of the bomb during World War II, but decided against it, fearing the tyrannical Steele would use it. Upon learning of this, Steele ordered the deaths of several scientists in 1946, until Edward Teller offered to build the bomb. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union began building their own bomb.

The first atomic bomb was used by the United States during the Japanese War, when it destroyed Sapporo, North Japan in 1949. In response, the Soviet Union destroyed Nagano, South Japan three days later.

Atomic Bomb in "Ready for the Fatherland"
Every major power in the world possessed a sunbomb by 1979, although only two had ever been detonated. The first was used by the Soviet Union to destroy American-occupied Tokyo, Japan in the 1950s. In response, the United States detonated a sunbomb on Vladivostok. If not for the death of Joseph Stalin and the intervention of Nazi Germany, the incident would have escalated into a world war.

Atomic Bomb in Southern Victory
The superbomb, utilizing the nuclear fission of uranium or plutonium, was first theorized by European physicists. Impressed by the idea of its destructive power--and afraid of what would happen if their enemies developed it before they do--a number of nations sponsored programs to research and build these weapons, despite the high costs in terms of money, resources, and personnel these projects entail, and the inability of physicists to guarantee that such weapons could indeed and would indeed be built. These nations included the United States, the Confederate States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and Austria-Hungary. With the exception of Germany and Austria-Hungary, these nations were not interested in reducing the high costs of their programs by pooling their resources with allies, though all of them were allied with other nations with an interest in uranium bombs. Germany and the United States did share information about the bomb. Britain also provided information to the C.S. in exchange for C.S. rocket technology. Without that trade, the C.S. might not have even had the one bomb they built.

Germany won the race, completing a superbomb in late 1943 and using it to destroy the Russian city of Petrograd the following year. Six additional bombings and counter-bombings took place throughout Europe until the war ended. In North America, the superbomb was used three times. The first was by the Confederate States in an attack against Philadelphia. The second and third were U.S. attacks on Newport News and Charleston, South Carolina.

Towards the end of the Second Great War, the theoretical possibility of an even more powerful sunbomb based on the nuclear fusion of hydrogen became apparent to U.S. and Confederate physicists alike. Actual work started in the U.S. in 1944.

After the war the Confederate nuclear program was shut down, and its scientists co-opted by the US. As Britain was not defeated and occupied, their program was still viable. Moreover, Japan and Russia were known to be working projects of their own. At his inauguration speech in 1945, U.S. President Thomas Dewey proposed a doctrine wherein the US and Germany would act as global police, acting to prevent additional nations from building a bomb while keeping tight regulations on those that had already built and deployed one.

List of superbombs used
(year and user nation in parentheses)
 * Petrograd (1944; Germany)
 * Phildelphia (1944; Confederate States)
 * Paris (1944; Germany)
 * Newport News (1944; United States)
 * Charleston (1944; United States)
 * Hamburg (1944; Britain)
 * London (1944; Germany)
 * Norwich (1944; Germany)
 * Brighton (1944; Germany)
 * Belgium (1944; Britain; bomber carrying the bomb was shot down and the bomb detonated, strongly suggesting that it was a gun-type uranium design as other types are highly unlikely to detonate in an accident)

Atomic Bomb in The Man With the Iron Heart
The Atomic bomb was first developed and deployed by the United States against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. This initially proved frustrating to Reinhard Heydrich, leader of the German Freedom Front, the resistance movement in occupied Germany, who'd hoped that Japan's continued war would divert US assets from Germany.

Heydrich remembered that the German government had begun an atomic bomb project of its own during the war, a project which had received little funding and support from the government. Hoping to build his own bomb, Heydrich personally oversaw a mission to retake several German physicists from British custody. Despite this substanial braintrust, Heydrich didn't have the materials to build a working bomb. However, the scientists did remember that a quantity of radium had been left in a garbage dump in Hechingen, which the GFF used to destroy the American enclave in Frankfurt.

Opponents of American occupation in Germany used the atomic bomb as to help building their case for withdrawal, arguing that this weapon would be sufficient in holding down Germany should the Nazis rise again, or should the Soviet Union seek to expand its influence in Europe.

Atomic Bomb in The War That Came Early
Based on information that had leaked out of Germany, Albert Einstein and other scientists convinced the government of the United States to attempt to build a new type of bomb powerful enough to level a whole city. However, by 1942, the project, headquartered in Tennessee, had cost millions with nothing to show for it. Herb Druce convinced the government to shut the project down.

Atomic Bomb in Worldwar
Explosive-metal bombs were the weapons which held the key to war begun when the Race invaded Earth in 1942. At the outset of the conflict, only the Race possessed them, and detonated several high in the Earth's atmosphere in an effort to disrupt Tosevites' radio signals. Atvar also used them to destroy the cities of Berlin and Washington, DC early in the war.

Unbeknownst to the Conquest Fleet when it arrived, humans had already discovered the divisibility of the atom and the tremendous energy yield it could produce. Most of the major combatants in the interrupted World War II had begun programs to build such weapons.

The Soviet Union struck first when they built a bomb using plutonium captured in the destruction of one of the Race's starships. They buried this bomb under a stretch of line they controlled near Kaluga, then withdrew. When the Race took possession of this area, they detonated the bomb via radio. Since the Race enjoyed air supremacy, this became the humans' preferred tactic for delivering the bomb. It was used by both the United States and Germany when each of those countries developed bombs entirely of their own manufacture.

By the end of the war, the US, the USSR, and Germany had all learned to build explosive-metal bombs on their own. Though reluctant to risk rendering the planet uninhabitable, Atvar retaliated to each human bomb by destroying a city in any nation that used such a weapon, each time it did so. He also destroyed Tokyo, thus precluding the Japanese from building a bomb before the end of the war (though they did succeed in building one in 1965) The Race also destroyed Sydney and Melbourne in Australia with explosive-metal weapons to break the back of the Australian resistance.

These tactics did not deter the atomic-capable human governments, which were engaged in a war for survival. Eventually Atvar was forced to negotiate with these governments, creating the uneasy truce which would exist on Earth for decades to come.

Concurrent with the Peace of Cairo, German SS commando Otto Skorzeny smuggled an explosive-metal bomb into the Race-controlled Polish city of Lodz at the behest of Adolf Hitler with orders to detonate the bomb and force the return of Poland to German control. He was prevented from doing so by Russian pilot Ludmila Gorbunova; Jewish militia leader Mordechai Anielewicz; and Panzer colonel Heinrich Jäger, an old comrade of Skorzeny's from many a mission against the Race. With their plan foiled, Germany agreed to let the Race remain in Poland.

Anielewicz's militia took possession of the bomb and continued to control it, with the tacit approval of the Race, for twenty years, despite serious doubts about the continued serviceability of the bomb in the absence of technical maintenence. In the chaos during and after the Race-German War of 1965, the bomb came into the possession of renegade Jewish fundamentalists who smuggled it into Germany with the intent of detonating it as punishment for Germany's genocide of the Jews. Anielewicz commanded a joint task force of Germans and Lizards and appeared to convince the renegades to yield, but in fact the renegades had tried to detonate the bomb and found that it was not in working condition.

In the next twenty years, human explosive-metal weapons improved. Most importantly, they were coupled with rocket technology to create nuclear missiles, allowing the human powers to use these weapons against the Race's orbital starships. These weapons were used many times both on land and in space in the 1960s: by the United States in President Earl Warren's attack on the Colonization Fleet; by the Race in its retaliatory attack on Indianapolis; and by both sides in the Race's 1965 war with Germany. They were even carried aboard the Admiral Peary when it journeyed to the Tau Ceti system.

List of explosive-metal weapons used
(year and user nation in parentheses)

Before the Peace of Cairo

 * Several in the atmosphere around Earth (1942; the Race)
 * Berlin (1942; the Race)
 * Washington, DC (1942; the Race)
 * Near Kaluga (1943; USSR)
 * Tokyo (1943; the Race)
 * Outside Breslau, in Oels (1943; Germany)
 * Munich (1943; the Race)
 * Chicago (1943; USA; the bomb was nicknamed "the Fat Lady")
 * Seattle (1943; the Race)
 * Miami (1943; USA)
 * Pearl Harbor (1943; the Race)
 * Rome (1943; Germany)
 * Hamburg (1943; the Race)
 * Outside Denver (1944; USA)
 * Orlando/Apopka, Florida (1944; the Race)
 * Sydney (1944; the Race)
 * Melbourne (1944; the Race)
 * Alexandria (1944; Germany)
 * Copenhagen (1944; the Race)
 * Saratov (1944; USSR)
 * Magnitogorsk (1944; the Race)

After the Peace of Cairo

 * Twelve starships of the Colonization Fleet (1962; twelve bombs, the United States)
 * The Hermann Göring, asteroid belt (1965; the Race)
 * Nuremberg (1965; the Race)
 * Marseille (1965; the Race)
 * Lyon (1965; the Race)
 * Istanbul (1965; Germany)
 * Warsaw (1965; Germany)
 * Lodz (1965; Germany)
 * Bucharest (1965; Germany)
 * Most major German cities (1965; the Race)
 * German attempts to destroy Cairo (Three all failed; 1965)
 * Indianapolis (1965; the Race)
 * Bikini Atoll (1965; Japanese test site)
 * Various test sites within the territory of various human not-empires.