Reply #104: You think Roosevelt wouldn't have thought that far ahead? [View All]

[Solon]

You were right about the turn of event that lead us into WW2, hence the "begrudgely" part of my first post in the thread. We never would have even entered the war, no matter how much Roosevelt wanted to, in Europe, if Hitler didn't declare war. Also, at the time, even with all his power, Hitler would have still had difficulty with the war in the East, Britian would have still hurt him, and Japan would be too busy trying to conquer India to even devote as much resources as they could into the development of an atomic weapon, a theoratical weapon with dubious benefit at the time. Even in their most desparate times, Hitler still had more faith in the many off the wall schemes that the Germans were experimenting with, like Jet engines and such. We would still have been unscathed by the war, and the United States would have still had time to go forward with the Manhattan project and other things. The only difference would be we wouldn't have turned so many factories into war machine production and things like that.

Even by the end of the war, if we didn't participate at all, we would have still have preeminent Manufacturing power, as well as two oceans between us and the enemy. Even if they developed nuclear weapons first, they were still many years away from developing ballistic missles to actually make them reach our shores. Would it have happened? Most likely, but even then we would have caught up very quickly, and then MAD would kick in just as surely as it did between us and the USSR.