2 nukes aren't going to cut it against this bohemouth, nor is delivering them against a fleet of Me262s with sufficient metallurgy for reasonable engines going to be easy.
You're greatly underestimating the sort of air power/defense a Germany that has no continental threats or resource shortages would be able to put together.
And where the hell would the UK/US even be projecting air power from that could even be in range of threatening the Soviets? Iraq? That'd probably just trigger a Soviet invasion of Persia.
Depends on where those nukes get dropped.
Against Ploiesti and Baku, they would have a very significant effect.
Also, you can expect the Allies to pour money into their own jet fighters so there’s every chance those nuke missions are escorted by De Havilland Vampires.
The Soviets without Barbarossa would be able to produce them on their own just fine. And allied air superiority over the region wouldn't even be a given. Bombing the Romanian oil fields out of Cyprus is an operation fraught with peril as well.Good luck invading the Middle East without the massive quantities of trucks that came from US lend lease.
Do you mean the weapons effects themselves, or the strategic effects of the employment of multiple atomic bombs?
While the US may have wanted to produce 20-30 bombs a month this could not have been realised due to the 'poisoning' of the reactors with fission products known as the Wigner Effect. Two Fat Man were used in Operation Crossroads in July 1946 and the Fat Man was ordered into production at that time but only 9 plutonium cores were available in August 1946 and 53 cores by December 1948. The Wigner effect was so bad by mid 1946 that Groves order that more 6 Little Boy bombs be produced although no EU was supplied before this project reached fruition. The Navy ordered 25 Little Man in 1947 although only enough EU for 10 was supplied and only 6 polonium initiators by 1948.
The Wigner effect was heading towards a solution in early 1947 and in that year a more efficient redox extraction method which extracted both plutonium and uranium began being tested but not used until 1949.
Of course if the German-Soviet war was continuing after September 1945 this timeline of events would likely change; H reactor the 4th at Hanford would likely come on line long before 1949 and Little Man would likely enter 'production' rather than being abandoned and then having to recreated by reverse engineering from mid 1946. This would make better use of the reactor's limited ability to produce polonium initiators by spreading them over Plutonium and Uranium bombs. Nor would demobilisation cause a mass exodus from the Manhattan Project from late 1945, so maybe redox reprocessing is available before 1949.
I doubt the US would be able to deploy many more than 5 or so A-bombs in late 1945, which is hardly going to win the war in a single stroke, nor is waiting until 1946 going to make the situation vastly better.
However
| Month | Weapons |
| August | 4 |
| September | 3 |
| October | 3 |
| November | 5 |
| December | 7 |
| January | 12 |
The Soviets without Barbarossa would be able to produce them on their own just fine. And allied air superiority over the region wouldn't even be a given. Bombing the Romanian oil fields out of Cyprus is an operation fraught with peril as well.
Both. Nuclear weapons are more comprehensively destructive vis a vis factories, marshalling yards, and housing in their main area of effect than conventional bombing. Strategically, the Nazi leadership believed the repetition of several Hamburgs within the Ruhr would be economically crippling.
I'm running off Grove's numbers for gun type and implosion weapons produced from new and existing reactors from in the latter half of 1945:
Month Weapons August 4 September 3 October 3 November 5 December 7 January 12
And growing thereafter. The rundown of production IOTL is attributable to several factors:
1. The technical side of things. This was as you noted a question of funding and priorities as much as anything. No efforts were made between Summer 1945 and May 1946 to develop a means of recovering uranium fuel, and once a theoretical solution was established in 1947 it wasn't fully tested until 1949. Even then, the REDOX process wasn't implemented at all in production until 1951 - by that point investments in replacement Hanford reactors alone had yielded a steady rate of 10 bombs/month from June 1948 to June 1950. A continuing Manhattan project would have the resources and manpower for substantially more reactors and make intense efforts to develop a quick solution to the fuel problem. A doubling or trebling of production as a result of a doubling or trebling of effort, funding, and resources seems entirely achievable.
2. The production process. Because of the disconnect between interagency wants and needs no efforts were made to expand the number of reactors or upgrade them between 1945 and 1947, with the replacement of the Hanford reactors with 2 new ones only starting in August 1947. The uranium facilities at Oak Ridge, which were producing 8x the fissile material as Hanford (Albeit, the uranium gun-type bomb used 3x the fissile material) went unused because no gun type weapons were being built - their inefficiency was unjustifiable given the limited resources available for devices in peacetime, but in wartime uranium devices were intended to be produced well into 1946. Once again, we're talking about political capital and resources imposed by peacetime, not absolute limits.
3. The political context. in 1945-47 the US was actively pursuing nuclear arms control and, potentially, the transfer of all nuclear weapons to a neutral UN-run agency to preserve global peace. This de-nuclearization agenda, combined with the massive budget cuts to the US military, made the nuclear stockpile or the military's use of it substantially less important than in August 1945. Between 1945-48 even the president had limited information about the size of the nuclear stockpile, US production capabilities, etc., nor did the US military and decisionmakers. The Atomic Energy Commission was rudderless in its first couple years of existence, with Truman only directing it to make nuclear weapons its primary purpose in 1948.
Based on these points, I think it's fair to conclude that the plans for mass production of nuclear weapons in 1945-1946 were entirely achievable with the organization and resources of the Manhattan Project. Looking at the state of US nuclear production in 1945-1950 and concluding that this was the best that would be achieved had the war continued is like looking at the demobilized US Army in 1948 and concluding that this was all the mobilized Army of 1945 could achieve in 3 years. The 10 bombs per/month achieved in peacetime with a limited number of reactors in 1948-1950 should be considered a floor, not a ceiling (Not that 10 bombs/month falling on Germany is a small number either).
Their synthetic rubber industry, which the Soviets were a pioneer of.Where do the Soviets get the rubber they need for tires?