Timeline if Allies Use Atomic Bomb on Germany

Leaving aside the implausibility of Germany holding out until August 1945 (even without D-Day, they would have been lucky to make it to July), nuking a German target (probably Hamburg or some other suitable city in Western Germany) impel the Soviets to stop?
Because, it has been said, part of the American decision to use the Bomb on Japan was to demonstrate our strength to Russia and the world so they would not try any "funny business." After all, the Soviets were riding one big ego trip with the invasion of Berlin.
 
Because, it has been said, part of the American decision to use the Bomb on Japan was to demonstrate our strength to Russia and the world so they would not try any "funny business."

It was a secondary purpose, but a secondary purpose which it completely failed, as the subsequent Soviet entry into the war against Japan and it's conquest of Manchuria and Northern Korea shows. The Soviets were quite aware of the bomb and America's too limited supply there-of and that goes just as much for ITTL as OTL. Dresden or Hamburg or what-have-you going up in atomic fire is not going to deter them from finishing the job of overrunning Germany one iota. Nor would the United States want it too.
 
Until Hiroshima, the world did not know the true impact of the Bomb. Moving the Bomb from Japan to Germany only preserves the OTL impact and subsequent Soviet action. If you avoid deployment of the Bomb, and its disclosure to the public, the Soviets could have been much more aggressive. And the U.S. would be hard-pressed to use the Bomb as a show of strength if the enemies were already defeated.
 
Little Boy used over 4 critical masses worth of U235.

set aside half of that for a U235 implosion test 'Gadget' and the rest for Fatman.

Ready months earlier

That assumes that implosion bombs are perfectly efficient. They are more efficient than gun-type, but not perfect by a long shot!

It also assumes the implosion design can easily be redone for U-235 instead of Pu. I gather implosion bombs are indeed how we do fission uranium bombs nowadays, but also that we don't generally use U-235 for that purpose at all. My guess is modern fissionable triggers use some sort of optimized alloy. The art of making them use up most of their fissionable materials instead of just a small fraction is what it took decades of expensive weapons analysis and redesign to achieve. Nowadays the thing generally done is to use a fission explosion to trigger fusion explosion, which produces neutrons in a shower sufficient to cause a larger mass of fissile material not suitable for a direct fission bomb of any time to undergo fission. We achieve efficiency with the intermediate fusion step that produces sufficient neutrons to make nearly everything fission, and the much greater mass of fissile material releases more net energy than the more efficient but much lower mass of fusible material.

Not being a nuclear engineer nor privy to classified information, I can't be sure what the limits of practical pure fission efficiency are, but I am quite sure even the Fat Man design was very far from fissioning 100 percent of its fissile plutonium. Try 5 or 6 percent, maybe. (I have a book that gives more exact figures but I have probably packed it.:closedtongue:)

So no, simply diverting the gun material to the implosion program would hardly produce the leap forward you suppose. If a lot of money and effort were saved by not attempting to enrich uranium and doubling down on the breeder/chemical extraction process for plutonium, that might possibly help more. But it means bypassing the one design they had absolute confidence would give results, if inefficiently, and we'd still need a Trinity test. Trying to divert U-235 to implosion designs would require two Trinity tests, one for Pu based bombs, one for Ur.

Leaving aside the implausibility of Germany holding out until August 1945 (even without D-Day, they would have been lucky to make it to July), nuking a German target (probably Hamburg or some other suitable city in Western Germany) impel the Soviets to stop?

It was a secondary purpose, but a secondary purpose which it completely failed, as the subsequent Soviet entry into the war against Japan and it's conquest of Manchuria and Northern Korea shows. The Soviets were quite aware of the bomb and America's too limited supply there-of and that goes just as much for ITTL as OTL. Dresden or Hamburg or what-have-you going up in atomic fire is not going to deter them from finishing the job of overrunning Germany one iota. Nor would the United States want it too.

Um, were you quoting someone else in the top quote and I overlooked it? Because you seem to refute yourself very concisely!:winkytongue: We both agree, the Soviets weren't going to cower in fear of the USA's sudden awesome bomb. Besides they were supposed to be our allies and as you say, we'd be more pleased with the destruction of the Nazi threat than worried about the spectre of post-war Soviet domination of Europe. After all, it would be a devastated Europe they ruled.

And one reason the Red Army was so slow to stand down and go home was that back in the USSR behind them, there were very few homes to go to. With Hitler having stomped all over the western, most developed, quarter of the Soviet Union it would be years before reconstruction would provide adequate shelter and subsistence for all; given the need to plunder their conquests in order to make ends meet, it was best to just leave the forces to be fed near the sources, where they could be handy to extort them. Even if they feared to run the risk of American atomic displeasure, they were up against a wall and had little choice.

Also it is bizarre that you characterize the Soviet actions in the Far East as a failure of the alleged secondary purpose of deterring further Soviet advance. On the contrary until the Americans were sure the bombs would work, we and the British had been going all out to beg the Soviets to please please promise to come and help against Japan, and were regretful (though understanding and accepting) they wouldn't move on the Japanese until the Reich was defeated in the west. It would take deeper study to know just how many attitudes in Washington changed when Trinity proved successful, but of course we know right off the bat that few people knew about this at all; those left out of the need to know about the working A-bombs surely must have gone on thinking we'd need all the help we could get to defeat Japan. Even those who did know must have been somewhat uncertain just how persuasive a bomb or three would be on as fanatical and tenacious a foe as the Japanese--and those in the know also realized we had very few bombs. Stalin moved on Manchuria and Korea in accord with the agreed-upon and much urged by the Western faction master plan, and any regrets about Red Army successes in the East would wait for later years.

Note also that Lend-Lease aid to the USSR was drastically curtailed, IIRC, before the Germans had even finally surrendered and V-E day was celebrated. We expected Russian aid in the East after we'd already stopped payment, in consideration of services already rendered.

Because, it has been said, part of the American decision to use the Bomb on Japan was to demonstrate our strength to Russia and the world so they would not try any "funny business." After all, the Soviets were riding one big ego trip with the invasion of Berlin.

I think the Soviet "ego trip" had much more to do with the breadth of the success they'd already achieved before they got to Berlin. It was Churchill who was most worried about the consequences of allowing the Soviets to take Berlin single-handed. Eisenhower was unmoved by his arguments on the point. Of course Stalin wanted the Red Army to wind up controlling as much as possible. But in the end, it was not the Red Army that was asked to retreat to the pre-agreed division lines, at Yalta--it was Western troops who backed off west to allow the Soviets their alloted share. And Churchill wanted to renege and stand farther east than we'd agreed to.

Until Hiroshima, the world did not know the true impact of the Bomb. Moving the Bomb from Japan to Germany only preserves the OTL impact and subsequent Soviet action. If you avoid deployment of the Bomb, and its disclosure to the public, the Soviets could have been much more aggressive. And the U.S. would be hard-pressed to use the Bomb as a show of strength if the enemies were already defeated.

I used to believe that Truman was largely thinking of this but having read up on him more, especially in the first few months when he had to take over from FDR cold, I don't believe the factor of scaring the Reds was much in his mind. He was mainly thinking about how to minimize the loss of American lives. Although he had personally expressed contempt for the Soviets back in 1941, wishing they and the Nazis might just fight each other to death, I believe by 1945 and in accepting the office of Vice President under Roosevelt, he had long agreed to regard them as allies and planned to deal fairly with them, deferring to Roosevelt's judgement. In his first few months in office he was mainly concerned to live up to Roosevelt's example. As events developed, he gradually lost patience with the Soviets, but he gave them a lot of latitude first. So maybe this thought was in the back of his mind, or more likely that of many of his advisors, but the decision to drop the bombs was governed by the strategic alternatives that faced the Allies as a united whole, in their objective to end the war at least cost to themselves.

Vice versa, I don't think the Soviets were much affected in their decisions, east or west, by the news of the Bomb. Quite aside from American nuclear weapons, which he knew we had very few of and would be slow to accumulate, he feared the general conventional power of the rival capitalist powers. Clearly if we stood down and relaxed, our forces would become puny compared to the mobilized Red Army--as they did. But equally clearly, if we were motivated to another such great crusade as the latest war, and public support remained solid, despite their massive deployed force the Reds would be facing a devastating attack, as long as we chose to dig in and fight to a costly conclusion--as we had against Hitler and the Japanese militarists. To be sure, Americans and even Britons had not suffered nearly as terribly as the Soviet citizens had, and one might raise the question of whether we would make such sacrifices or call it quits--but part of what scared Stalin was that we had not had to suffer as much. We had plenty in reserve, and showed nary a sign of proletarian unrest to limit us. On the contrary, as in the USSR, the war tended to quell and even dissolve dissent on the home fronts, with forthright moral certainty as to both the cause and the likelihood of being rewarded with eventual victory.

Thus Stalin knew he was in a bit of a bind. If the Westerners attacked for no good reason, for reasons of evident greed or militaristic glory, perhaps then the support of the working classes could be undermined and the tables turned. But if was the Soviet Union that made the first aggressive moves, and did so for reasons that were on the face of it aggressive and greedy, the morale of the US and even British home fronts would probably be unbreakable; what sympathy that existed there for the Soviet cause would be evaporated, not by heavy-handed reactionary action but spontaneously. If the Americans really dug in and sacrificed, and were resolved not quit until the Soviet Union were eradicated, they'd pose a much worse challenge then Hitler's fundamentally corrupt and self-limited (by Aryanist ideology) regime ever could. Invading Americans might even be much more successful in getting formerly loyal Soviet citizens to turn coat and support the invaders, if they played their cards right.

So--the inherent ability of Western Europe beyond the alloted occupation zone of the Red Army to defend themselves, should the Yankees give up and go home, was low, and perhaps Soviet power could make inroads via soft means such as fair democratic victories, or anyway soften up the defense with subversion, and anyway France and Britain were exhausted while Germany was utterly beaten. In that sense, raw aggression would be an option. But it would be easy to make a fatal blunder that would bring the Americans back, in gradually rising force, and this time they were not green recruits but recent veterans of a long bitter fight. They'd be armed, after a lag for ramping up production, with the most modern weapons on the planet and would have excellent ideas how to use them.

All this is without even mentioning the existence of nuclear weapons. In the short run, the Soviet Union was vast and the American bombs would have to be delivered with propeller powered subsonic bombers; given the new jet engines that were favored for short-range interceptor defense (due to high rates of fuel consumption) and Soviet experience defending against the Luftwaffe, the Soviet Union stood a fighting chance against a dozen or so Nagasaki sized bombs. And meanwhile with a few years time bought, the Soviet Union too would be able to make its own bombs, and hold the great cities of Europe hostage, if their bombers could get through. Meanwhile also missiles might someday soon be able to carry nuclear warheads, hundreds of miles if not intercontinentally, and there would be no way to intercept these.

Had the Americans resolved to attack the USSR, and in such a fashion that there would be no questioning the justness of the cause on the home front, surely eventually the USA would prevail. But these are tremendous ifs, and quite unreasonable to suppose likely at the time. As long as Stalin held back from a clear provocation, the balance of power would hold and war would not happen.

The Bomb had very little to do with it, at first.
 
Um, were you quoting someone else in the top quote and I overlooked it? Because you seem to refute yourself very concisely!:winkytongue: We both agree, the Soviets weren't going to cower in fear of the USA's sudden awesome bomb. Besides they were supposed to be our allies and as you say, we'd be more pleased with the destruction of the Nazi threat than worried about the spectre of post-war Soviet domination of Europe.

I was more focusing on refuting that guy.

After all, it would be a devastated Europe they ruled.

Even a ruined Europe would offer plenty of remnant German tech and industry to loot and for the Soviets to put to extremely effective use.

And one reason the Red Army was so slow to stand down and go home was that back in the USSR behind them, there were very few homes to go to.

The Soviets were only slow to demobilize relative to the Western Allies, but when held to it's own standards their demobilization was quite a big drop. Soviet force strength dropped from the ~12.5 million in 1945 to ~3 million total in 1946. As the Cold War intensified, they ratcheted it back up to ~5 million as the decade turned which they would maintain until the mid-1980s.

Note also that Lend-Lease aid to the USSR was drastically curtailed, IIRC, before the Germans had even finally surrendered and V-E day was celebrated. We expected Russian aid in the East after we'd already stopped payment, in consideration of services already rendered.

The quantity of Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR do not begin to noticeably drop off until June 1945. In fact, May of 1945 saw the single biggest shipments (by tonnage) of lend-lease in the entire war at a whopping 768,295 long tons! For comparison, the second biggest month was December 1943 at 643,078 tons and the average from August 1943 to April 1945 seems to be in the ~500,000 range.

I do agree with the broad thrust of the rest of your post, even if I could nitpick on further details.
 
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One really interesting potential outcome of atomic use in Germany is the potential effects on the Cold War. West Germany, especially near the end of it, had a quite large anti-nuclear movement in OTL. ATL West Germany is likely to have much stronger anti-nuclear movement which could even potentially lead to prohibition of tactical nuke deployment there which would have huge effects on alt-NATO defense strategy.
 
Here are a few more facts that can help address the question of whether it would have been wiser to pursue gun-type U-235 bombs versus breeding plutonium for a bomb capability as soon as damn possible. If one can trust Wikipedia at all:

1) From this table of energy densities, I infer that a "kiloton" of TNT would be about 4.6 x 10^12 Joules, that is 4.6 TeraJoules, since the table is in millions of Joule per kg.
2) From higher up the table, the energy density of "Uranium-235 used in weapons" is 144 TJ/kg, it would then follow that completely fissioning 32 grams of U-235 ought to release a KT yield.
3) However, this page on the actual strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki gives "Little Boy's" actual yield as 16 Kt, and remarks that that is 67 TJ, so actually a "kiloton" is defined as more like 4.2 TJ, some 9 percent less, perhaps because of a different formulation of TNT or because in practice TNT falls short of its theoretical chemical energy release by some 10 percent. By this definition, it would require some 29 grams of completely fissioned U-235 to release the standard KT.
4) the same entry also remarks that the gun design actually fissioned only 1.7 percent of its material, from which we can infer:
5) 464 grams fissoned; and
6) 27.3 kilograms of U-235 were installed in Little Boy.
Note that this link gives much higher mass of uranium--64 kg at 80 percent enrichment for 51 kg of pure U-235, and a lower percentage of yield, at just 1 percent.
So in fact the more pessimistic number seems reasonable; we need 64 kg of U-235 to get 16 KT yield with this design. Probably relatively easy tweaks can raise the yield per kg.

The vast majority of the 64 kg of 80 percent pure U-235 was scattered without fissioning, and represented nearly the entire output of the entire uranium enhancement program over all the years it was underway.:hushedface:

Going on, the Nagasaki "Fat Man" bomb's yield was 21 Kt, and according to the page on the bombings contained only 6.2 kg of plutonium! It would seem then there is a factor of ten and more difference--more like 13.5. By the above lower figure for grams of uranium needed to produce 1 KT, we can estimate that the same yield would result from fissioning 610 grams--that is, of U-235. However, the plutonium was surrounded by a U-238 tamper/reflector--it is the momentum of this greater by far mass of somewhat fissionable material that, combined with its neutron-reflecting properties, allows just 41 percent of bare-metal critical mass to reach criticality. And the sources remark that "up to" 20 percent of the total yield is produced by secondary reactions in this relatively inert containing material. So actually, if this were the case at Nagasaki, one has a U-235 equivalent fissioning mass of 508 grams, with another 102 gram equivalent set of reactions happening in the tamper. I haven't yet found any figures for the exact mass of the tamper, but simple geometry suggests it would mass an order of magnitude more than the plutonium, some 400-1000 kg.

The sources say that only about 1/5 of the plutonium is estimated to have fissioned, which is to say 1240 grams--from which one might conclude that successfully fissioning U-235 is more energetic than plutonium, by a factor of nearly 2.5! This does point toward developing an implosion type uranium bomb--but one would have to be an expert on nuclear weapons to declare whether or not it is possible to get the same efficiencies at a given state of the art in a uranium design than in a plutonium one. All I know for sure is, the Manhattan Project had a plan for making an implosion plutonium bomb, but not one for U-235

Now it is not clear to me whether unprocessed pure natural chemically refined uranium would do for the tamper, or whether it is actually necessary to deplete it of U-235 somewhat to get the right reactivity and avoid a fizzle yield. In the former case, the implosion bombs stand a good chance to be a lot cheaper than the gun-type, because one is using an order of magnitude less high-grade fissionable material. Note though that the gun design is a lot lighter on auxiliary stuff; Fat Man had to be designed to fit within a highly modified B-29, and was just under 9.1 metric tons, but clearly only a small fraction of that was heavy metal, and of that only a small fraction was fissionable. Most of those 9 tons had to be chemical explosives to implode it. Clearly the gun design allowed for a bomb that was overall lighter and more compact, albeit rather long.

If it is necessary for the outer U-238 tamper to be depleted of U-235, well that was no hardship for the historical OTL Project, for the heroic efforts undergone to get less than 100 kg of fairly pure U-235 would leave very large stockpiles of depleted uranium around, which could be reclaimed by the implosion PU bombs.

But what we are trying to do here is see if there was a path for the first A-bombs to be available sooner; if we are going with focusing on the implosion design for its much superior efficiency, it is important to know whether we must nevertheless run natural mixes of the different uranium isotopes through some sort of isotropic mass separater to get depleted uranium. If so, we can probably use the enhanced stuff we remove in a breeder reactor to generate the PU. But we still have to make separation plants for the uranium, in addition to reactors and chemical separation we need for plutonium.

Finally, although we can perhaps get higher yields for a given input of unrefined uranium, we still need a good fraction of a critical mass of U-235.

It would appear that it might be correct that there could have been more bombs sooner if the project had concentrated on implosion and bypassed the gun design, but while that is clear in hindsight, how likely would any of the planners be to bet the whole farm on that one unproven design, and would it be possible to be as successful with a uranium core as with plutonium?

If in fact natural undepleted uranium is good enough for the tamper, then a gamble on developing only plutonium processing might pay off. The question is, could say 50 extra kg of refined plutonium have been available in addition to the 6.4*3, or about 20, we can infer was much of the total production of Pu by the time of the attack on Nagasaki? That is, we know there was one spare, one tested at Trinity, and Fat Mat dropped on Japan; 50 kg is how much actual pure U-235 was in Little Boy, so if producing one kg of Pu from X kg of uranium mined and chemically refined is equivalent to producing 1 kg of U-235, perhaps the rate of production of Pu could have been 3.5 times faster. If in fact it was 10 times harder to produce a gram of U-235 then we might have not 7/2 but 30 times the rate of Pu production. OTOH maybe the reason there was only some 20 odd kg of Pu for weapons in 1945 was that difficult as producing U-235 was, producing Pu was even harder, per kg, and totally abandoning all effort to obtain U-235 might just lead to 40 kg of PU total.

And would it come at twice the pace, pushing back the date the first test article could be assembled, back before V-E day, so that a second and third could be ready to use on Europe's western front in the winter or early spring of 1945? Or earlier, in autumn or winter '44? That would depend on the date at which the batch that was used in spring '45 OTL was started. I think also that the way plutonium is generated, it is done in batches, unlike the steady slow trickle of U-235 accumulation. One makes a reactor core, and runs it for a time, then shuts it down, takes all the residue of the core, dissolves it chemically, and chemically extracts the plutonium. If there is a way to run it as a continuous flow, that won't be the first design. It could be that instead of getting 6.2 kg ready much earlier, that same 6.2 is available the same day it was OTL, only now it is accompanied by 35.2 more instead of just 15.2. In that case, the effect of doubling down on plutonium implosion would be not to accelerate the Trinity test at all, but rather to leave Truman with 3 spares instead of 1 after Nagasaki--3 not 4, because Hiroshima would also have been a Fat Man drop instead of using up the surplus Little Boy.

IMHO, no big mistakes were made in the Manhattan Project. It took as long as it took, yielded the product it did, and any rival program pioneering the first A-bomb would have had to plan on investing as much and taking as long for the same results. We know how in hindsight it might have gone faster, but this was not known in advance, and so perhaps--if we know many details, some of which might still be hidden under a cloak of secrecy, of the exact processes needed--we might describe a low-probability time line in which the project leaders took foolhardy chances on wild intuitions and got lucky with earlier, cheaper success. And bear in mind, since they had no rational way of knowing this path to success in advance, that a larger number of TLs involve equally bold risks being taken that do not pay off, leaving the Project up a blind alley, without having "wasted" resources on pursuing the lines they should have to come to a successful result. And all of these TLs taken together are a low-probability subset on the fringes of TLs where the Project management was more sensible and spread resources around to cover many contingencies, some of which pay off--in about the same time frame as OTL.

In order to talk about using A-bombs on the Third Reich, we must either be in one of those improbable ATLs where the American directors took a stupid chance on concentrating on one path they could not know would work, and it nevertheless did, and even then the pacing of various items might not allow for much acceleration. Or we are talking about one where the Axis has done better, has lasted longer while the Allies are behind schedule relative to OTL.

Berlin by the way is clearly a sensible target--if one can get to it! But it was only late in the war that bombers achieved the necessary range and fronts advanced far enough to allow forward bases close enough. And any aircraft headed to the German capital along the known shortest routes from Allied bases would be running a gauntlet of determined air defense. Not so the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Even if Tokyo had been chosen as first or second target instead, the B-29s approached over open ocean, over waters the Japanese were too devastated and exhausted to patrol effectively; what air defense was attempted was a point defense. Berlin in a Reich still standing high enough that the city has not already fallen to the Soviets is going to have point defenses superior to those the Japanese could manage late in the war, and an airplane headed there will first have to fly over all sorts of other well-defended potential targets. This is bad enough in terms of bomber attrition, such that few crews survived 20 missions. But when one only has a literal handful of bombs, can one take the risk that the single airplane that is carrying it will not be one of the ones shot down before it reaches the target?

I suspect that if A-bombs are available on the Allied western European front, they are going to be used somewhere else first, despite the obvious desirability of taking Hitler out. Someplace like a major U-boat base, or a strong knot of army forces concentrated, or maybe Hamburg or Bremen. Too bad this will tip Hitler off to hide from any B-29s his people detect.
 
That assumes that implosion bombs are perfectly efficient. They are more efficient than gun-type, but not perfect by a long shot!

It also assumes the implosion design can easily be redone for U-235 instead of Pu. I gather implosion bombs are indeed how we do fission uranium bombs nowadays, but also that we don't generally use U-235 for that purpose at all.

There was talk OTL in July 1945 of using a composite 33%Pu-239/66%U-235 for a fission test, but Oppenheimer and Groves decided that they wanted Little Boy, since that was as much as a 'sure thing' as there could be with an Atomic weapon.

Postwar, in 1946 the Composite Cores were the majority of stocked fission material, 72% of stored cores were of this type at the start of 1948

Operation Sandstone, Shot Yoke in April 1948 tested an all U235 levitated core in a Mk 3 Fatman, 49 kt.
 
Fat Man was also a "surer thing" compromise; a design with a hollow core, where the chemical triggers would squeeze two ellipsoidal lobe ends of fissionables (also behind a large mass of tamper U-238 I suppose) into the central hollow was on the boards of the MP, but the simpler if less efficient Fat Man design was deemed to be less tricky.

Clearly the argument that in hindsight they should have gone for more efficient designs is pretty open-ended; I'm taking the position that they couldn't go that way the first time around, and had to reserve the more sophisticated approaches for later. We know from hindsight that accumulating material was the major hitch and so perhaps they should have aimed higher in efficiency, but note also that we aren't looking at achieving modest yields with less material, but rather at getting bigger bangs out of the same or even more material. I would imagine the details of just how small a bomb you can make with really frugal amounts of fissionables remains a highly sensitive subject, whereas we can be more free discussing how to make really big bangs with lots of the stuff--since obtaining the material is the bottleneck. Bad guys out there just might be able to scrounge up small amounts of material so it would not do to be too clear on just how little one strictly needs or what the trade-offs are.

The fact that obtaining enough material is the bottleneck is why the Axis could not reasonably come up with a bomb of their own too; this is where the deep pockets, wide open spaces, and freer access to global resources of the USA in alliance with Britain came in the most handy. An ATL Germany that was not Nazi and thus did not alienate so many of her best potential technical workers might possibly have substituted a highly developed technical sphere for most of the Project, but actually accumulating the material would require large and expensive plants even given the sources of fissionable raw materials (which do exist in the Third Reich's territory).

But without Hitler, I don't think Germany would have gone onto a collision course with the rest of civilization either; they'd muddle through the Depression years painfully and probably with an authoritarian regime, but not one as crazy-bold as the Nazis. So the ability might be there, but not so much the will. If Germans participated in a Bomb project, it might be in coalition with the British and French, with all three nations turning a nervous eye eastward to Russia. The high cost of the program would probably convince them all that while it would be important to develop the art and have some stockpiled reserve bombs handy, they shouldn't go into a crazy program to ramp up to Armageddon, not unless the Soviets showed signs of doing so themselves. Some sort of negotiated detente with the USSR after Stalin dies seems likely enough, and that would head off the OTL massive arms race. I could see the developed world untroubled by wars between themselves for what would now be amounting to a solid century and counting.

So it is a darn good thing it is not at all easy to accumulate sufficient fissionable material to make a big bang, and that the secrets of doing so with the bare minimum necessary are not widely known.

Bottom line for this WI--few if any bombs available to pelt the Third Reich with, for good or for ill.
 
Concerning targets, would Nuremberg and Munich already be sufficiently damaged by traditional bombing campaigns to be of value as atomic targets?
 

Ramontxo

Donor
I think he meant "get the bomb" as in Germany is going to get nuked, not that they'll have a bomb.[/QU

So i did. I think it was in "A war to be won" that i read that no German General seamed to realize a more prolonged war would have mean a "Nuked" Reich. (As if only Hitler would have let me...)
 
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I'm ripping off the internet:

http://www.feldgrau.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33941
"A Traveller's History of Germany" must be the oddest of sources for this question. Still, leafing through it last night I found (pp. 251-2 - the following list is altered to read from lowest percentage of destruction to highest)

Berlin 33%
Munich 42%
Stuttgart 46%
Nuremberg 51%
Frankfurt 52% (I assume this refers to Frankfurt-am-Mainz)
Koblenz 58%
Aachen 59%
Dresden 59%
(Note: U.S.S.S.B. says 61% for Dresden and 59% for Magdeburg which, oddly, is not listed herein)
Bremen 60%
Hannover 60%
Mainz 61%
Kassel 69%
Kiel 69%
Bremerhaven 79%
Bonn 83%
 
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