Point of divergence

**Point of divergence** (POD) is a specific major event in the background story of an alternate history that occurred differently than it did in real life. It is the point in which this altered timeline branches off from reality, either with drastic or minor consequences.

## **POD for this universe**

### Official POD

In a series of stories written by Phillip A. Leavenworth, the point of divergence happened after January 8, 1918 when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson proposes his Fourteen Points solution to World War I. In reality, Wilson's Fourteen Points were largely ignored save for the fourteenth point which proposed the idea that an international assembly to handle international affairs. Some alternate historians suggest that if the Fourteen Points were fully implemented that the rise of the Nazis or even World War II may not have happened altogether. However, in this timeline, the implementation of the Fourteen Points at the Treaty of Versailles alters the future.

### Visible POD

Several stories are set in different decades which resemble those of our timeline, however, with some subtle differences. These differences become more noticeable the more time from the POD the story gets.

### Other PODs

* Vladimir Lenin selects Leon Trotsky as his successor leaving Josef Stalin without influence in what would become the Soviet Union.
* With the outcome of WWI being less harsh on the Germans the Nazis do not come to power, however, a fascist movement still occurs led by Otto Dickel.
* President Franklin Delano Roosevelt keeps his Vice President Henry A. Wallace on his ticket and thus results in his ascension to the presidency upon FDR's death in 1945.
* Trotsky's expansionist ideology of global communism leads to a two-pronged variation of World War II where the allied forces fight Soviet Russia in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia. However, unlike OTL where Germany and Japan were allies, Russia and Japan are not allied and are at war with each other.
* The Atomic bomb is still developed by the United States, however, five nuclear weapons are used against western Russia. This results in a repudiation of Soviet communism and an early end to the Soviet Union. Russia becomes a Nordic-style social democracy called the Republic of Russia.
* The invasion of the Japanese mainland, Operation Downfall occurs in late 1945 and ends in Spring 1946 as Japan surrenders and accepts allied assistance to repel Soviet Russia advances in Asia.
* The post-WWII landscape revolves around an over forty-year long Cold War between the liberal United States and fascist Germany.
* Also in the post-WWII-era, William Winslow becomes a visionary space entrepreneur and sets in motion the Space Race between the US and Germany by aiding in an experimental orbital mission in the African nation of Zambezi.
* The Space Race still occurs, however, as a conflict within the Cold War between the US and Germany. The US beats Germany to land two Americans on the Moon in 1967.
* Later, an international Mars mission is launched with American, German, and Russian astronauts to set foot on Mars in 1997.
* Fascist Germany collapses in the early 1990s in a similar fashion as the Soviet Union collapsed in OTL.
* In the mid-1990s, Apartheid South Africa becomes a pariah state developing its own nuclear weapons, an US-backed coalition ends their program in an invasion.
* An asteroid nearly destroyed the planet Earth in the late 1990s but is thwarted by the expanded international space programs of the time. This incident results in the creation of an international space agency, an international-version of NATO, and the United States Space Command as a separate branch of the US military.
* Sometime in the 1990s, a French-Canadian scientist offers a theory for superluminal travel and designs the first spacecraft capable of traveling faster-than-light.

## Terms

* **OTL** Original Timeline
* **ATL** Alternative Timeline