The most obvious is the 1986 Chernobyl event for me.
1953 - The Corn man doesn’t win the power struggle in the CPSU after Stalin dies.
1956 - The Corn man does not attempt any kind of “de-Stalinization” but doesn’t really change much about his policies.
1960 - The ANPO protests in Japan escalate, as Kishi’s plan to use fascist forces to crack down on them doesn’t get blocked or some other circumstance.
1963 - Kennedy doesn’t die
1965 - Malcolm X escapes the assassination attempt.
1968 - The events of May 1968 escalate into a revolution for whatever reason (backing from the PCF, DeGaulle doesn’t call for early elections, etc. and either a radlib state is created in Western Europe or NATO intervenes just like the Warsaw Pact did in Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia that year. Martin Luther King survives the assassination attempt.
1969 - the Neo-Nazi NPD passes the 5% electoral thresshold in the West German elections. Brezhnev dies in an assassination attempt that was prevented IRL.
1970 - The fash coup plot in Italy, the Golpe Borghese, is attempted or possibly succeeds.
1973 - The US escalate the war in Vietnam yet again, turning it to a forever war. Allende finds out about and prevents Pinochet’s coup.
1974 - The Left wins the power struggle in post-revolutionary Portugal, creating a socialist state in western Europe, likely influencing the developments in Spain, where Franco was not long for the world. The Turkish invasion of Cyprus escalates into a war between Greece and Turkey - both military dictatorships, and both in NATO. Nixon stubbornly refuses to resign.
1975 - Thatcher loses the Conservative Party leadership election and the rise of the neoliberals is at least delayed.
1976 - A different faction wins the power struggle following Mao’s death.
1977 - Ethiopia gets defeated by Somalia in the Ogaden War.
1978 - A different faction wins the power struggle in the Iranian revolution. The Sino-Vietnamese war starts early with China rushing to defend its ally… the Khmer Rouge. A different cardinal is chosen to replace John Paul I, lessening the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland.
1980 - Reagan loses the US Presidential Election to Carter or another lib. The USSR decides against intervening in Afghanistan.
1981 - The USSR marches in to suppress the “Solidarity” campaign in Poland, much like in 1956 or 1968, but likely facing way more resistance.
1982 - The Falklands War doesn’t escalate, and Thatcher doesn’t get the boost in popularity from nationalism from that.
1983 - The diplomatic incident of the Rangoon bombing escalates to a second Korean War.
1984 - Andropov is succeeded by someone else.
1985 - Gorbachev doesn’t get the job.
1986 - Olof Palme survives. No Chernobyl Disaster.
1991 - The August Coup in the USSR succeeds.
No Chernobyl Disaster.
great list, but I’m actually going in the opposite direction on this one.
A more severe one? Alright, it’s your scenario - I just listed some possible divergence points.
I think the worst case scenario for Chernobyl was that Eastern Europe would become uninhabitable. I’m not changing the Chernobyl exclusion zone’s size though, instead the Chernobyl disaster will be caused by alien infiltrators for the purpose of conjuring a colossal alien demon thing. In my story the USSR is basically the last country on earth that’s not secretly controlled by aliens.
Dipping back into the 40s but only because I think it’s really interesting—What if Henry A. Wallace had stayed FDR’s vice president in 1945 instead of Truman? Dem party elites conspired in Truman’s favor at the convention as Wallace was considered too far left and too friendly towards the USSR.
The Truman Doctrine and other foundations of the cold war and US Anti-communism evaporate. Would there even be a cold war? Probably, but a minimum of 4 more years of non-adversarial relations with the USSR might have set things on a better track.
Also, Japan almost certainly doesn’t get nuked which is nice.
The JFK assassination was pretty big. It wasn’t contemporary knowledge but Nixon ratfucking the Vietnam negotiations to get elected is definitely a big event for the history books.
In the 80s we had the Iran Contra affair and arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq war. Fucking Reagan…
Massive electoral fraud in Illinois and Texas is what got JFK into the presidency and Nixon out. Nixon didn’t make a stink because he thought he’d have another shot. Imagine Nixon in charge during October Crisis.
The 1971 India-Pakistan war and creation of Bangladesh
I’m going to need a little more hand-holding on what to do with that, I’m very unfamiliar with the general region.
Basically East Pakistan ( now Bangladesh ) wanted independence from Pakistan. Which led to the Pakistani military committing genocide with deaths estimated from 300k - 3 million
Eventually war breaks out with a Pakistani preemptive strike on Indian airfields. The war lasts around two weeks with an Indian/Bangladeshi victory. Around 8-10 million refugees went to India.
The US supported Pakistan and did not want India to intervene. Mainly because India had good relations with the USSR I suppose. The USSR supported India and Bangladeshi Independence and would support India against the US and China
So during the war the US sends in a carrier group to the Indian Ocean to send a message, which was countered by the USSR sending their navy. Nixon tried to get China to send troops to the Indian border but they did not agree. China had defeated India recently in the 1962 and supported Pakistan.
So there are many ways things could’ve gone differently. What if China and the US did enter the war, or just one of them? What if the the USSR was neutral here? I want to read a lot more about this time period
How were Pakistan and Bangladesh ever able to be one country with the large distance between them?
I think that the biggest shake-up that comes to mind for me would be the French and US going through the proposed plan to use atomic bombs against the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu. The use of atomic weapons in this colonial context would lead to global shifts in culture and politics.
