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Comment by kiryin | Hacker News Reader

It's good to keep in mind that nuclear power is a (arguably beneficial and good) "halo product" of nuclear bombs, not the other way around.

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Szilard proposed the possibility of a self-sustaining fission reaction in 1933. In a hypothetical universe where WWII never occurred and the Manhattan Project never existed, it seems likely that we would still have had nuclear power plants at some point in the twentieth century. And of course, bombs too.

That's a really interesting hypothetical universe, and I think it could have played out in various ways. For example, without the Manhattan Project, perhaps fossil fuel companies would have become even more powerful and prevented any commercial research into "dangerous" nuclear energy.

Also, without nuclear power, climate change would have become a problem much sooner, when nuclear technology was more experimental and costly. Perhaps the money that went into nuclear weapons would have gone into space programs instead, and we'd have the option of beaming energy down from orbiting solar panels.

> Szilard proposed the possibility of a self-sustaining fission reaction in 1933. In a hypothetical universe where WWII never occurred and the Manhattan Project never existed […]

For a good history on this see The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

It doesn't just look at the MP, but the first third (?) is about how nuclear physics developed in the early 1900s (Rutherford, the Curies, Fermi, etc) as well.

Szilard was actually 'inspired' by H. G. Wells' (sci-fi?) novel The World Set Free:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Set_Free