Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[brightness]

There was no race for the bomb, not after 1942 anyway, certainly not in 1945. Nobody in their right mind up and down the military and scientific hirarchy in 1945 would suspect Germans or Japanese had come anywhere close to having the nuke or the ability to deploy them; there simply wasn't the industrial capacity left to do any of that work. Not even Britain had the capacity to carry on nuclear research on its own. Britain had its empire all over the world free from enemy bombings and there had never been the kind of sustained and massive de-industrialization bombing campaigns in Britain that Germany and Japan experienced in 1943-44 anyway. If allied leaders had suspected that either Germany or Japan had come close to being able to deploy nukes, they would not have dared to have engage in the kind of massacres against German and Japanese civilians. It's the same reason why chemical weapons were not used in WWII (aside from Japanese use against Chinese, who did not have chemical weapons), and the Cold War stayed cold.