Making a better World War II

My twin brother and I grew up during World War II, and then in its long aftermath, when we lived with our military family in occupied Japan and Germany. WWII was the central pivot of the 20th Century. Before it, there were seven world powers; after, two.

I later was a postdoc working with renowned physicist Edward Teller, who told me many inside stories about the Manhattan Project that built the nuclear ("atomic") bombs. My natural, science fictional instincts tinkered with the many what-if notions about how the war might have been different, and one became concrete in my mind: what if we'd gotten the bomb earlier?

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