it would take a few days for it to ready itself for a nuke strike.
I should point out that according to USAAF plans it should only take a few days but the USAAF plans assumed adequately-trained crews in adequate quantities, adequate numbers of decently-maintained aircraft, adequate numbers of adequately trained bomb assembly teams, and the forward bases from which the bombers were supposed to launch already outfitted with adequate infrastructure. In 1948, literally not one of these assumptions were valid.
If they should be stored in Germany, it would take a few conventional raids to bomb the airfields and set of a few nukes (I believe that PAL was not exactly prevalent in 1948 vintage bombs).
Leaving aside the misunderstanding of how nukes work threaded through this post, given the rapidity with which mainland Europe would fall the US might as well just give the USSR those nuclear components instead of airlifting them over to West Germany.
Tibi is spot on. It is not an easy decision to start chucking nuclear bombs around.
Eh, I'm a bit dubious. Even leaving aside that the US doesn't have much practical alternative, while there were some moral scruples among the civilian administration at the time about nukes, those heavily stem from the fact the country was at peace. Had a serious war started, those scruples would have eroded fast In 1939 the RAF refused to even consider bombing the Black Forest because the trees were private property of German citizens. By 1945 they were torching German civilian centers as a matter of policy and the attitude had become basically ALL WILL BURN! I'm not convinced that even today we're all that far away from normalizing atrocities. The fall can come very fast.
Not to say I condone it, of course. The very fact that national morals tend to become so loose in wartime terrifies me. But just because I don't like it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
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