Other country getting the A-bomb first

What other country can get the A-Bomb first?


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USSR might have a problem with procuring uranium. In the 1930s known reserves were in Belgian Congo (company mining it was owned 30% by Brits), Canada, US and a mine in Czechoslovakia.
USSR had no real idea on how to enrich uranium or that plutonium can be used as fissionable materiel until they cheated and copied off Manhattan Project

This is a real problem for the USSR that shouldn't be underestimated.
 

Perkeo

Banned
Weimar Germany somehow survives the year 1933 (an understated AH scenario IMO) and faces the following situation: With the Treaty of Versailles arms restrictions, Germany desperately wants a loophole to obey the words but violate the spirit of it. Since a small Reichswehr also means less military spending, and the reparations won't impede Germany's ability to fund the project, especially it ITTL the Treaty of Lausanne is still present.

The Manhattan Project as we know it will most likely be butterflied away by the said PoD, since without the Nazis, many of its top heads won't be in the US, including the ones who brought nuclear fission to the attention of politics.
 
No, Germany had the technological knowledge. They just choose not utilize that knowledge for ideological reasons.

That would be the technological knowledge in the heads of the people who left Nazi Germany and worked on Tube Alloys and the Manhattan project then? Those left behind had as much chance of building an atomic device as I do, though I do have the advantage of knowing that it is technically possible. :p

Only the Soviet Union would be totalitarian enough to get it done in peacetime.

Well the UK and France developed their first atomic weapons in peacetime. Admittedly the British programme owed a great deal to the wartime Manhattan project.
On that subject both the British and Soviet programmes owed a great deal to knowledge Klaus Fuchs brought back with him.
 
USSR might have a problem with procuring uranium. In the 1930s known reserves were in Belgian Congo (company mining it was owned 30% by Brits), Canada, US and a mine in Czechoslovakia.
USSR had no real idea on how to enrich uranium or that plutonium can be used as fissionable materiel until they cheated and copied off Manhattan Project

Sure, but what precisely can the USA and UK say to keep them from getting that, precisely? Leaving aside that the USSR had its own reserves and that it developed its own enrichment abilities from concepts it knew were feasible in theory before the war, how would the USA and UK say "No Uranium for you" without giving away that they're afraid a fantastic weapon can very much be made?

And frankly put in a real sense there's nothing wrong with spying your way to the Bomb if you still develop one. In those kind of stakes a fair play results in Cerenkov Radiation for a street light.
 
Well the UK and France developed their first atomic weapons in peacetime.

Yes, but would they have been able to explain the cost?

On that subject both the British and Soviet programmes owed a great deal to knowledge Klaus Fuchs brought back with him.

Whilst Fuchs was certainly important his impact is often overstated. For instance, Beria's insistence that Soviet scientists build a perfect copy of Fat Man arguably hindered the Soviets from building a more efficient test model.
 
Well the UK and France developed their first atomic weapons in peacetime. Admittedly the British programme owed a great deal to the wartime Manhattan project.
On that subject both the British and Soviet programmes owed a great deal to knowledge Klaus Fuchs brought back with him.

After both the USA and USSR had shown it could be done. Would this be the same without a WWII ending in time for nukes?
 
Interestingly the first Churchill knew of the UK's post-war nuclear programme was when he became PM again in 1951. The Attlee government had kept it completley secret, even at a time of financial austerity.
Without WW2 IMVHO nuclear weapons would still be developed by someone, but it would be at a much later date than @. The knowledge was out there.
 
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