As 1943 begins, the Race attempts to consolidate its hold over Latin America, Africa, and Australia while it is engaged in a fierce struggle with the advanced nations of the world: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Nazi Germany. While capable of resisting the invaders, mankind has been dealt a heavy blow by the nemesis from the stars. The Race maintains its unquestioned air supremacy over the entire world as humans are reduced to moving their ground forces by night and using their own aircraft only in the direst emergencies. With supplies of petroleum severely limited, people have taken to using horse-drivencarriages to replace automobiles and kerosene lamps to replace electric lights. But even as the human race huddles in the darkness, physicists and engineers work desperately to develop the first human atomic bombs, which represent what might be the only hope of driving the Race off Earth.
After a rapid conquest of Spain and Portugal and the capitulation of Italy, the Race focuses on driving its forces in France eastward, toward the heart of the German Reich. Among the officers of the Wehrmacht struggling desperately to hold back the tide of the alien forces is Colonel Heinrich Jäger. Fresh from his stay in Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat, Jäger is puzzled by the relationship he has formed with Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, the Ukrainian pilot who flew Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to Bavaria for a conference with the Führer. He is much enamoured with her but wonders if love can develop between two former enemies.
Jäger is given command of a panzer regiment near Belfort and is charged with keeping the Race from reaching the Rhine. Although the latest panzer models, the Panther and the Tiger I, give the Germans a fighting chance, they are still woefully inferior to the Race's landcruisers. For their part, the aliens are stunned that humans are capable of designing and deploying new tank models within such a short space of time, as the Race's rate of technological development is centuries slower. Jäger is abruptly pulled out of frontline service and ordered to assist the German atomic bomb program in Wittelsbach.
In the United States, Jens Larssen, a physicist, leaves Chicago in search of the metallurgical laboratory that has relocated to Denver. After crossing the Great Lakes, he moves swiftly across Minnesota and the Dakotas. Larssen is not so much driven by the need to hasten atomic bomb development as he is by a desire to be reunited with his wife, Barbara. Unfortunately for Jens, under the impression that he is dead, Barbara has started a relationship with Corporal Sam Yeager, a soldier responsible for guarding captured alien prisoners of war. Yeager serves as a translator for the metallurgical lab since he has learned the rudiments of the Race's language. Jens arrives in Denver before the lab and sends a courier out to find Barbara with a message that he remains alive. Barbara learns that her husband is still alive just after she revealed to Yeager that she is pregnant.
In Illinois, after the successful drive by Patton that liberated much of the state, the Race begins to advance upon Chicago once more. US soldiers fight valiantly, but the flat open country gives the alien landcruisers a decisive advantage. Slowly but surely, the Race draws closer and closer toward Lake Michigan.
Jäger manages to return to the front lines in Belfort after an unproductive stay with German physicists working on atomic research in Wittelsbach. Not long afterwards, Wittelsbach is destroyed by an out-of-control nuclear reaction produced by Nazi scientists. The resulting nuclear meltdown alerts the Race to the virtual certainty that Germany is engaged in nuclear research.
It is not alone. On Stalin's behalf, Molotov visits a secret research laboratory several miles north of Moscow that has Soviet researchers struggling to turn the sample of plutonium that had been captured by German-Soviet forces in Ukraine the year before into an atomic device. They have minimal success and Molotov attempts to encourage them with threats of torture and death if they fail. That produces no marked improvement in the advances made by Soviet engineers.
In Japan, a captured killercraft pilot of the Race, Teerts, is interrogated by Japanese researchers attempting to understand the dynamics of nuclear fission. As a pilot, Teerts claims to have limited knowledge of atomic weapons, as he drops them, not builds them. The Japanese refuse to believe him and use torture to make Teerts more cooperative.
In the United States, the metallurgical laboratory finally reaches Denver and begins working on atomic research. Its work is helped by a small shipment of plutonium that Colonel Leslie Groves brings from Boston, where a British submarine had been entrusted with delivering it to the US government. The plutonium is one-fourth of the material stolen from the Race during the German-Soviet operation in Ukraine. It had come into the possession of the British by way of Jewish partisans, who had commandeered a portion of the plutonium consigned to Germany when they briefly held Colonel Jäger in captivity in Poland the previous winter. Unfortunately, the plutonium in question is not enough to build an atomic bomb. The metallurgical lab must produce a substantial amount of the precious plutonium before Americans can hope to wield a nuclear device in the war against the Race.
Jens Larssen meets with his wife upon her arrival in Denver and learns that she has married and become impregnated by Corporal Sam Yeager. In a difficult decision that leaves everyone emotionally upset, she decides to keep the baby and to remain with Yeager. Jens takes the news badly, and his work on the atomic bomb project suffers. To keep him out of trouble, Groves orders Larssen to travel to Hanford and to consider the possibility of transferring the metallurgical lab there to facilitate the production of plutonium. With an M1903 Springfield rifle slung over his shoulder, Jens heads off to Washington State on a bicycle.
Jäger, supervising the efforts to recover plutonium from the melted-down reactor in Wittelsbach, is recruited by SS StandartenführerOtto Skorzeny to help take back the city of Split from the Race, who have been offering the Independent State of Croatia incentives to turn away from the Germans and toward them. It is also an effort to lure Skorzeny into Split to be killed. However, Skorzeny and Jäger, with superior maps, dig a tunnel into the middle of the Race's garrison, and, with numerous Croat soldiers and FG 42 battle rifles, which are superior to the Race's infantry weapons, completely reduce the garrison. Every member of the Race in Split is either killed or taken prisoner. Among the dead is Fleetlord Atvar's chief intelligence officer, Drefsab.
As the summer of 1943 begins, forces of the Race creep closer to Germany and have reached the outskirts of Chicago. Moscow appears to be on the brink of collapse when the Race advance is abruptly stopped by the human detonation of an atomic bomb, planted as a landmine, between Kaluga and Moscow. The story ends with the balance of power in the scope of the conflict dramatically redefined.
Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. While at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb. After his conviction in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom, then migrated to East Germany where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientific leader.
The Manhattan Project was a program of research and development undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and with support from Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army component was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys. The Manhattan Project grew rapidly and employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion. Over 80 percent of the cost was for building and operating the plants that produced the fissile material for the weapons. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
Building on major scientific breakthroughs made during the 1930s, the United Kingdom began the world's first nuclear weapons research project, codenamed Tube Alloys, in 1941, during World War II. The United States, in collaboration with the United Kingdom, initiated the Manhattan Project the following year to build a weapon using nuclear fission. The project also involved Canada. In August 1945, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were conducted by the United States, with British consent, against Japan at the close of that war, standing to date as the only use of nuclear weapons in hostilities.
Colonization is a trilogy of alternate history books by American writer Harry Turtledove. It is a series continuation of the situation set up in the Worldwar tetralogy, projecting the situation between humanity and The Race nearly twenty years afterward, in the mid-1960s.
The nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. During this same period, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, other countries developed nuclear weapons, though none engaged in warhead production on nearly the same scale as the two superpowers.
The Soviet atomic bomb project was the classified research and development program that was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II.
Homeward Bound (2004) is a science fiction and alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is the eighth and final work in his Worldwar series fictional universe. It follows the events of the Colonization trilogy and gives some closure to the storylines.
The Worldwar series is the fan name given to a series of eight alternate history science fiction novels by Harry Turtledove. Its premise is an alien invasion of Earth during World War II, and includes Turtledove's Worldwar tetralogy, as well as the Colonization trilogy, and the novel Homeward Bound. The series' time span ranges from 1942 to 2031. The early series was nominated for a Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 1996.
The Metallurgical Laboratory was a scientific laboratory at the University of Chicago that was established in February 1942 to study and use the newly discovered chemical element plutonium. It researched plutonium's chemistry and metallurgy, designed the world's first nuclear reactors to produce it, and developed chemical processes to separate it from other elements. In August 1942 the lab's chemical section was the first to chemically separate a weighable sample of plutonium, and on 2 December 1942, the Met Lab produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, in the reactor Chicago Pile-1, which was constructed under the stands of the university's old football stadium, Stagg Field.
Colonization: Second Contact is an alternate history novel by American writer Harry Turtledove. It is the first novel of the Colonization series and the fifth installment in the Worldwar series.
Designated Targets is a science fiction novel by Australian writer John Birmingham, the second volume of his alternate history Axis of Time trilogy.
Atomic spies or atom spies were people in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada who are known to have illicitly given information about nuclear weapons production or design to the Soviet Union during World War II and the early Cold War. Exactly what was given, and whether everyone on the list gave it, are still matters of some scholarly dispute. In some cases, some of the arrested suspects or government witnesses had given strong testimonies or confessions which they recanted later or said were fabricated. Their work constitutes the most publicly well-known and well-documented case of nuclear espionage in the history of nuclear weapons. At the same time, numerous nuclear scientists wanted to share the information with the world scientific community, but this proposal was firmly quashed by the United States government. It is worth noting that many scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were deeply conflicted about the ethical implications of their work, and some were actively opposed to the use of nuclear weapons.
Worldwar: In the Balance is a 1994 alternate history novel by American writer Harry Turtledove. It is the first novel of the Worldwar tetralogy, as well as the first installment in the extended Worldwar series that includes the Colonization trilogy and the novel Homeward Bound. The plot begins in late 1941, while the Earth is torn apart by World War II. An alien fleet arrives to conquer the planet, forcing the warring nations to make uneasy alliances against the invaders. Meanwhile, the aliens, who refer to themselves as the Race, discover that their enemy is far fiercer and more technologically advanced than expected.
Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance is an alternate history novel by American writer Harry Turtledove. It is the third novel of the Worldwar tetralogy and the third installment in the extended Worldwar series, which includes the Colonization trilogy and the novel Homeward Bound.
Worldwar: Striking the Balance is an alternate history novel by American writer Harry Turtledove. It is the fourth and final novel of the Worldwar tetralogy and the fourth installment in the extended Worldwar series, which includes the Colonization trilogy and the novel Homeward Bound.
Final Impact is a science fiction novel by Australian writer John Birmingham, the last volume of his alternate history Axis of Time trilogy.
1945 is an alternate history written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen in 1995 that described the period immediately after World War II in which the United States had fought only against Japan, which allowed Nazi Germany to force a truce with the Soviet Union, and the two victors confront each other in a cold war, which swiftly turns hot.
Colonization: Aftershocks is an alternate history and science fiction novel by Harry Turtledove. It is the third and final novel of the Colonization series and the seventh installment in the extended Worldwar series.
The Metallurgical Laboratory in Wah is a federally funded and research and development national laboratory located in Wah Cantonment in Punjab, Pakistan.
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