Implications of a Nazi A-bomb

I know that technically the Germans were incapable of getting this done due to the Nazis scaring off anyone with competence on the subject and there were all sorts of other issues about the supporting industry. Handwave that away for the purpose of the discussion.

Let's say that in 1936 the Nazis start their program for a fission weapon based on the uranium path and get it done by mid-1943, having two bombs like the Fat Man by June/July. They have the capacity to make 10 by mid-1944 and somewhat more thereafter. They have no V-weapons program (no 1, 2, or 3) because all of the resources are plowed into the A-bomb (IOTL the Germans spent more on the V-weapons that the US did on the Manhattan Project). Let's also say for the sake of argument that they have a few functional enough He177's with the ability to carry it within a 400 mile radius from their base, putting Moscow and London in range, at night to survive the air defenses of the Allies.

What are the implications of this? Would it be enough to prompt a move to chemical or biological weapons by the Allies or Soviets? Would it make the peace that much harsher? A 20kt A-bomb is not enough to win the war, though it would cause all sorts of problems for the Allies. AFAIK it was considered just a better bomb rather than a WMD in the category of a chemical or biological weapon attack, but would that remain when the fallout effects start to crop up? Does it have any effect on how combat operations on the ground are conducted out of potential fear of a tactical usage of the bomb?

If the mods think this is too ASB for this forum feel free to move it, but I'm interested in the implications, rather than the feasibility of the technical issues.

If they nuke London, then Germany will be covered in Anthrax. They won't just go for the grazing areas (as I believe the plan was) but will just drop it everwhere they can.

It would be fairly horrific for all involved.

Maybe no Anthrax if it's Moscow, but then the war in the east will be over. If they decapitate soviet leadership, and can nuke transport hubs/massed concentrations of troops the USSR cannot continue in those circumstances. The USSR can't hit back with a doomsday weapon of its own afaik.

Nuking the Invasion ports would be devastating. They could 'waste' one on Patton's ghost army, though.

wiking said:

I know that technically the Germans were incapable of getting this done due to the Nazis scaring off anyone with competence on the subject and there were all sorts of other issues about the supporting industry. Handwave that away for the purpose of the discussion.

They have the capacity to make 10 by mid-1944 and somewhat more thereafter. They have no V-weapons program (no 1, 2, or 3) because all of the resources are plowed into the A-bomb (IOTL the Germans spent more on the V-weapons that the US did on the Manhattan Project).

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Sorry, handwave just isn't powerful enough.

Is still ASB Land.

Oak Ridge in 1944 used more electricity than Greater Germany could make in two years, then that they are short of copper(needed for calutrons) for cartridge brass and U-Boat motors. IG Farben couldn't make hydrofluoric acid in the quantities needed. The precursor for Chlorine trifluoride, the German production cost was 100 RM per kilogram for ClF3

You need tons of that for the Uranium Hexafluoride to feed the Calutrons.

Oh, and the refined Uranium Metal itself, first.

IG Farben was good.

They just were not in the same class as DuPont Chemicals in mastering Fluorides(offshoot is Teflon, also needed for enrichment) . Or Dow Chemicals and Uranium

The amount of resources needed would shut down near all other military production, and most Civilian, ending the War in 1942

Might as well go full ASB and say Nazi Scientists discovered how the Greek Hekatonkhires- the Hundred Handed Ones of legend, controlled lightning, and Hitler could shoot city destroying Lightning bolts from his ass on each Equinox.

Slightly better odds of that happening.

marathag said:

Sorry, handwave just isn't powerful enough.

Is still ASB Land.

Oak Ridge in 1944 used more electricity than Greater Germany could make in two years, then that they are short of copper(needed for calutrons) for cartridge brass and U-Boat motors. IG Farben couldn't make hydrofluoric acid in the quantities needed. The precursor for Chlorine trifluoride, the German production cost was 100 RM per kilogram for ClF3

You need tons of that for the Uranium Hexafluoride to feed the Calutrons.

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So go for graphite piles instead of uranium enrichment. The cost per bomb is higher, but the startup costs are a lot lower. And East Germany has uranium deposits, though if I recall correctly they didn't start being exploited until after WW2.

The Manhattan Project cost the US about $30 billion in today's money. The V2 program cost about $26 billion. You could run a stripped-down, plutonium-only version of the Manhattan Project at a much lower cost - about $15 billion, I'd guesstimate. The Nazis ending up with an A-bomb is very unlikely, but it's not ASB territory.

Asnys said:

So go for graphite piles instead of uranium enrichment. The cost per bomb is higher, but the startup costs are a lot lower. And East Germany has uranium deposits, though if I recall correctly they didn't start being exploited until after WW2.

The Manhattan Project cost the US about $30 billion in today's money. The V2 program cost about $26 billion. You could run a stripped-down, plutonium-only version of the Manhattan Project at a much lower cost - about $15 billion, I'd guesstimate. The Nazis ending up with an A-bomb is very unlikely, but it's not ASB territory.

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The oldest uranium mine in Europe was in occupied Bohemia. Also the Germans innovated the far less costly centrifugal uranium enrichment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gernot_Zippe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_centrifuge

Have Zippe invent his process sooner perhaps gets you the easier means than gaseous diffusion enrichment.

A much more basic problem will come when Heisenberg screws up the math and "shows" the atom bomb to be an engineering impossibility.

I should note also that starting in 1936 requires the Germans to start their bomb project before human-induced nuclear fission is demonstrated to be anything more then a theoretical possibility, which does not occur until December 1938 and is not realized to have occurred for another month. Until that happens, you might as well be asking the Nazis to invest in developing an Alcubierre warp drive.

Also, the Germans lack a bomber to carry it. The bomb bay on the He-177 does not have the correct dimensions to properly take on a Little Boy or Fat Man-style weapon. In fact, it also does not have the payload required for it. You need an aircraft with a much higher payload than 10,000lbs to carry a single 10,000lb bomb. The Enola Gay (nominal payload 20,000lbs) was badly overweight with Little Boy on board, to the point that takeoff was a considerable challenge. The raw payload capacity of the aircraft is only one piece of whether it can carry a single, very large bomb. The single bomb can't be cut up, which means it has to fit on both a volume and mass basis in one spot. Volume is obvious, but aircraft loading is also very specifically engineered. This is why the distributed load the He-177 can carry externally is greater than its internal maximum load - and it's not carrying both at the same time. The difference between an empty & fully-loaded He-177 is only around 10,000kg, and that includes the gas and crew. It cannot carry 13,200kg of bombs alone.

The He-177 has no "single weapon" configuration to its bomb bay, was never intended to carry a single 10,000lb weapon (no such thing in the German arsenal) and has both a narrower fuselage (like by ~50%) and a much smaller bomb bay than the B-29. Little Boy won't fit given the historical issues and a Fat Man design probably wouldn't even fit inside the fuselage (bomb has a diameter of five feet). Going on pictures, you can't put a nuke underneath the He-177 either (ground clearance is too poor and drag would be ludicrous). Trying to mount 10,000lbs on a wing would snap it right off, as it is more than 3x what the He-177 could actually carry on a wing pylon.

The He-177 is also far less suited to an overloaded kit-bash than the B-29. It's half the weight at designed full load, has inferior climbing ability, and has the mentioned smaller fuselage and had notorious structural, stability and engine problems.

It just won't work.

Hitler would probably use them to bomb Moscow and London, which would make the Brits unleash a chemical hell on Germany (though Germany could respond in kind. iirc they had lots of nerve gas but Hitler didn't want to use them).

A more competent leader might use them as mines, destroying enemy armies entirely and making them weary and slow to move. That might give the Germans some time to regroup and try to salvage the situation.

ObssesedNuker said:

A much more basic problem will come when Heisenberg screws up the math and "shows" the atom bomb to be an engineering impossibility.

I should note also that starting in 1936 requires the Germans to start their bomb project before human-induced nuclear fission is demonstrated to be anything more then a theoretical possibility, which does not occur until December 1938 and is not realized to have occurred for another month. Until that happens, you might as well be asking the Nazis to invest in developing an Alcubierre warp drive.

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Or just with Heisenberg believing that you didn't need any control rods or moderators (i.e. any successful Nazi nuclear program would rapidly result in a reactor meltdown that kills their best physicists and contaminates a good chunk of the Fatherland.)

Or just with the fact that the Nazis had multiple competing nuclear programs... one of which was funded by the Reichspostministerium.... i.e., the Post Ministry.

Asnys said:

So go for graphite piles instead of uranium enrichment. The cost per bomb is higher, but the startup costs are a lot lower. And East Germany has uranium deposits, though if I recall correctly they didn't start being exploited until after WW2.

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Graphite moderation gets you on the plutonium track, and then you have nobody to figure implosion.

The 'Martians' all work for the USA

Graphite reactors, in high power configurations needed for Pu, are very dangerous-- see the near disaster that was the UK Winscale design, and the actual disaster of Chernobyl.

Add in the Nazi cluelessness on proper control rods, Allies will be unable to invade Germany alright: the Radiation from the meltdown is too deadly.

But the Nazis still need a way to refining ore to pure Uranium Metal, they don't have the cheap Iowa State process by Frank Spedding that allowed 65 tons of Metal a month to be refined.

Nazis were at the kilogram rate

pardon my ignorance but what would be impact of coal dust/fuel air explosive as compared to A-bomb?

and if they had developed that weapon, which seems more to their strength in chemistry rather than theoretical physics, couldn't it be packed with radioactive sand, etc? a dirty bomb?

ObssesedNuker said:

I should note also that starting in 1936 requires the Germans to start their bomb project before human-induced nuclear fission is demonstrated to be anything more then a theoretical possibility, which does not occur until December 1938 and is not realized to have occurred for another month. Until that happens, you might as well be asking the Nazis to invest in developing an Alcubierre warp drive.

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Exactly!

marathag said:

Graphite moderation gets you on the plutonium track, and then you have nobody to figure implosion.

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Actually, I'll bet German engineers can figure out implosion.

But can they get the ultra pure graphite they need? What does it take for them to even realize they need it?

For the Nazis to get the bomb when pressed on all sides in a war to the knife, when the power and resources and so on were all desperately needed by other programs - if available at all, is impossible. Even if they magically support 'Jewish Physics', figure out the need for control rods, get Heisenberg to make the correct calculations, extract enough ore out of Joachimsthal, figure out how to purify it, etc., etc.

So, in other words, allow 6 or more independent PoDs, each of low probability, and they STILL can't get a bomb by war end.

Nope.

No way.

No how.


Even if Britain surrendered (close to ASB itself) and the Germans took out Soviet Russia (probably ASB), and you had all those other PoDs, then Germany would be plastered by B32s carrying US nukes from Iceland before they had a bomb of their own.

Radiological weapons, however, probably run into Hitler's

Radiological weapons, however, probably run into Hitler's aversion to chemical warfare, and the reality is the Germans (presumably) would know that to open that door opens the door to the British and Soviets using gas and various other unconventional weapons.

The thing about fission weapons is that even theoretically, they were understood (in the West) to be a geometric increase in power beyond high explosive ... and after TRINITY, there was no doubt.

"one bomb" indeed...

Best,

B-36s, I think...

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

Exactly! ... then Germany would be plastered by B32s carrying US nukes from Iceland before they had a bomb of their own.

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The B-32 was a "heavy" variant of the B-24, developed in parallel with the B-29; which, if one wanted to fly one way tickets over Occupied Europe from Iceland, would be quite efficient.

I think you mean the B-36, which was the "bomb Europe from the Western Hemisphere" design, which actually could make a round trip. Iceland would only help.

The original 1941 design looked a lot like the historical B-36, except with the twin stabilizers akin to the B-24. Here's a great source:


http://books.google.com/books?id=Rt...gTNjoCQCg&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

TFSmith121 said:

The B-32 was a "heavy" variant of the B-24, developed in parallel with the B-29; which, if one wanted to fly one way tickets over Occupied Europe from Iceland, would be quite efficient.

I think you mean the B-36, which was the "bomb Europe from the Western Hemisphere" design, which actually could make a round trip. Iceland would only help.

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Gah! that looked wrong when I typed it! Thanks for the correction.

marathag said:

Graphite moderation gets you on the plutonium track, and then you have nobody to figure implosion.

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The basic idea of implosion is not that hard to figure out. Implementing it is harder, but if the North Koreans can manage it, then why can't the Nazis?

The obstacles you're raising to a Nazi A-bomb are real and legitimate, but they're not insuperable. The program could have been better organized; chance could have produced a few more genius physicists with Nazi inclinations; Heisenberg could have avoided his calculation mistakes; someone in Germany could figure out the Iowa State process. These things are not likely, but they're not impossible, and, historically, unlikely things happen all the time.

A Nazi A-bomb is very improbable, but very improbable is not the same thing as ASB.

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

Exactly!


Actually, I'll bet German engineers can figure out implosion.

But can they get the ultra pure graphite they need? What does it take for them to even realize they need it?

For the Nazis to get the bomb when pressed on all sides in a war to the knife, when the power and resources and so on were all desperately needed by other programs - if available at all, is impossible. Even if they magically support 'Jewish Physics', figure out the need for control rods, get Heisenberg to make the correct calculations, extract enough ore out of Joachimsthal, figure out how to purify it, etc., etc.

So, in other words, allow 6 or more independent PoDs, each of low probability, and they STILL can't get a bomb by war end.

Nope.

No way.

No how.


Even if Britain surrendered (close to ASB itself) and the Germans took out Soviet Russia (probably ASB), and you had all those other PoDs, then Germany would be plastered by B32s carrying US nukes from Iceland before they had a bomb of their own.

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It wasn't just figuring out the theory, or even acquiring sufficient fissile material, both of which are minefields of their won. You have to develop the proper method for creating the initial implosion. That was done by Dr. George Kistiakowsky (a Ukrainian/Russia emigre who fought for the White's in the Russia Civil War). Without his expansion of, and research into, the Chapman-Jouguet Model, which resulted in the break-through that allowed a one dimensional model to work in a 3D world, you don't get implosion, you get a fizzle.

As an aside, both the B-32 and B-29 can make a strike from Western Iceland to Berlin with a 10,000 bomb load. Be much less pleasant in a B-32, since it was not pressurized.

Asnys said:

The basic idea of implosion is not that hard to figure out. Implementing it is harder, but if the North Koreans can manage it, then why can't the Nazis?

The obstacles you're raising to a Nazi A-bomb are real and legitimate, but they're not insuperable. The program could have been better organized; chance could have produced a few more genius physicists with Nazi inclinations; Heisenberg could have avoided his calculation mistakes; someone in Germany could figure out the Iowa State process. These things are not likely, but they're not impossible, and, historically, unlikely things happen all the time.

A Nazi A-bomb is very improbable, but very improbable is not the same thing as ASB.

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What is initially the work of genius eventually becomes the task of craftsman.

A better example is that the USSR, despite have more or less a full set of plans/research dropped on them by the GRU, took four plus years to replicate the Gadget. Another excellent example is the UK, which, despite having scientists working on Manhattan (although they were rather uselessly denied access to the full design, since that bird had already flown), took until 1952 to join the Club.

The other, critical, element that both the UK & USSR enjoyed, as have the other nuclear states, is that they KNEW, sure as the sunrise, that the device could work.

Asnys said:

The basic idea of implosion is not that hard to figure out. Implementing it is harder, but if the North Koreans can manage it, then why can't the Nazis?

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DPRK had the bonus of 60 years of knowing it was possible, plus assistance from Abdul Qadeer Khan, who had been working on nuclear programs since 1972

And the basic idea on implosion was not easy.

assembling a critical mass worth of fissile material with a cannon, while sounds easy, actually had a lot of effort to develop.

Implosion?

You need the Martians, Seth Neddermeyer for the implementation and George Kistiakowsky to be able to 'shape' the shockwave with shaped charges.

Then you worry about the industrial power needed to refine uranium

Seleucus said:

Or just with the fact that the Nazis had multiple competing nuclear programs... one of which was funded by the Reichspostministerium.... i.e., the Post Ministry.

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Nazis take going postal very seriously.