The Germans would have the ME262 in 1945, which would wipe out obsolete British propeller driven planes. Speer estimated the Germans could have a nuke by 1947 if they devoted enough resources to it. At peace in 1942 Germany wouldn't have scuttled the nuke program and have the spare capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.
Gloster Meteor says hi.
As far as nuclear projects, scuttling the nuclear program was in no way the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that the Germans would've been patently unable to assemble enough fissile material due to the focus on using enriched uranium. I recommend reading
this forum reproduction of a transcript of captured German nuclear physicists and their reactions to hearing about the Hiroshima bomb. This, I think, is a key passage:
3. All the guests assembled to hear the official announcement at 9 o'clock. They were completely stunned when they realized that the news was genuine. They were left alone on the assumption that they would discuss the position and the following remarks were made.:–
HARTECK: They have managed it either with mass-spectrographs on a large scale or else they have been successful with a photo-chemical process.
WIRTZ: Well I would say photo-chemistry or diffusion. Ordinary diffusion. They irradiate it with a particular wave-length. – (all talking together).
HARTECK: Or using mass-spectrographs in enormous quantities. It is perhaps possible for a mass-spectrograph to make one milligram in one day – say of '235'. They could make quite a cheap mass-spectrograph which, in very large quantities, might cost a hundred dollars. You could do it with a hundred thousand mass-spectrographs.
HEISENBERG: Yes, of course, if you do it like that; and they seem to have worked on that scale. 180,000 people were working on it.
HARTECK: Which is a hundred times more than we had.
BAGGE: GOUDSMIT led us up the garden path.
HEISENBERG: Yes, he did that very cleverly.
HAHN: CHADWICK and COCKROFT.
HARTECK: And SIMON too. He is the low temperature man.
KORSHING: That shows at any rate that the Americans are capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would have been impossible in Germany. Each one said that the other was unimportant.
GERLACH: You really can't say that as far as the uranium group is concerned. You can't imagine any greater cooperation and trust than there was in that group. You can't say that any one of them said that the other was unimportant.
KORSHING: Not officially of course.
GERLACH: (Shouting). Not unofficially either. Don't contradict me. There are far too many other people here who know.
HAHN: Of course we were unable to work on that scale.
HEISENBERG: One can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942 after that meeting with RUST when we convinced him that we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done.
BAGGE: It wasn't much earlier here either.
HARTECK: We really knew earlier that it could be done if we could get enough material. Take the heavy water. There were three methods, the most expensive of which cost 2 marks per gram and the cheapest perhaps 50 pfennigs. And then they kept on arguing as to what to do because no one was prepared to spend 10 million if it could be done for three million.
HEISENBERG: On the other hand, the whole heavy water business which I did everything I could to further cannot produce an explosive.
There are three key facts revealed in this section of the transcript: first, that uranium enrichment in the 1940s is exceptionally expensive in manpower, facilities, money, you name it. This is something obvious if you read up on the Manhattan Project. Even the US had a hell of a time assembling the resources needed to enrich enough uranium for the few gun-type bombs they made. Second, the Germans spent a lot of time and research on heavy water - and as one of their scientists admits, heavy water cannot produce a nuclear explosive. And third, and most importantly: there is no mention whatsoever of plutonium.
Plutonium was the key to mass-producing fission weapons. It's much easier to create weapons-grade plutonium than uranium with the technology of the time. It's what the Soviets stole to get their nuclear program moving. Without any consideration of plutonium, it's going to take many, many years before German scientists get out of the heavy water rathole and convince Nazi leadership to invest in uranium enrichment. And even then, they don't have the resources to make more than a single bomb every two years.
So, yes, I'm fairly certain that 1947 date is either ignorance on the part of Speer or the usual tablespoon of self-serving
bullshit. The man was quite known for that...
