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mind_messing -> RE: Semi-OT: Reasons "The Man in the High Castle" couldn't happen (1/20/2016 2:09:19 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Lokasenna
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ORIGINAL: mind_messing
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ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58
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ORIGINAL: mind_messing
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ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58
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ORIGINAL: wdolson
It's not to say Germany probably couldn't have made atomic weapons eventually, but it probably would have taken a fair bit longer than the Manhattan Project took.
I'm not sure what 1940s A-weapons get you against the US in that era. They were small and the US was a 50% rural nation. A huge, heavily-armed one.
If you just want to kill the urban population gas is a lot cheaper and easier. If you want to destroy the industry then fire works too. But after you burn the cities and destroy the factories you still don't control the US or get any production out of it. And has been said, we have guns.
I think it would be more of a breakdown of political will than the national resolve of the country to keep fighting.
If your enemy drops a bomb that vaporizes your biggest cities in an instant, it takes a special kind of leader to put that to one side and demand that the fight is carried on in the countryside with shotguns and hunting rifles. If that leader isn't in the right place at the right time, then what good is it?
Ah, the European demand for centralized control. [:)]
Here it wouldn't take a leader giving orders. County level or even lower. Extended families even. Get your gun, kill anyone wearing THAT uniform. Once you do kill them pick up their hardware. Rinse, repeat.
The US population in 1940 was about 130 million. Mostly educated, mostly, even the rural women, familiar with firearms. And really, REALLY pissed off at invaders. I knew about 1775 at the same time I learned to read (age 4). And the Brits weren't even invaders, sorta kinda.
Would the insurrection during the War of Independence have been as widespread if the Continental Congress decided to sue for peace after Brandywine?
In the novel the US surrender is precipitated by two atomic bomb attacks that cause the US Government to sue for peace. Hearing that over the radio is a pretty big incentive to co-operate. I could understand the situation you're imagining if the government had taken the opposite tack - run for the Rockies and blast calls for insurrection all over the airways, but if you hear your government on the radio telling you that it's over, people tend to accept that it's over. August '45 in Japan is proof of that.
I disagree, particularly in a country as geographically large as the US. wdolson's point about garrisoning the US being essentially impossible is, as Bullwinkle has said elsewhere, "on fleek."
The books has a collaborationist government installed in the Eastern USA. I imagine that in a real-world scenario that the transition to being a Nazi client state would have been a gradual process. Japan and post-war Germany didn't become what they are today overnight.
Take Japan in '45 as the textbook example. There was a willingness (begrudging, if not outright fatalistic) that the American invasion was to be met with every able-bodied person armed with what-ever they could get their hands on.
Two atomic bombs, the Soviet invasion and a speech on the radio and it was all over. Bar a few isolated fanatics and the holdouts, the war ended pretty abruptly.
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