Replies to post #651697 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Cincy Trader]

With hindsight of modern knowledge, it would be easy to conclude that Germany could not have developed a nuclear device. But keep in mind that in 1945 there were only a handful of people in the world who understood the concept of nuclear fission, and one of them was Werner Heisenberg. The U.S. was working on 2 methods to separate U-235 from U-238, electromagnetic separation and gaseous diffusion. We were also working to manufacture Pu-239 from U-238. It was indeed a massive undertaking and was certainly on more of a grand scale than Germany could have mustered. But keep in mind that in the 1920's and 30's, new breakthroughs in the would of nuclear physics were happening rather regularly. What if Germany had found a better method for Uranium separation or, perhaps, a simple method to create another fissionable isotope other than Pu-239 from one of the other heavy elements. I doubt that anyone could have been certain, at the time, that these things were not possible. We just didn't have enough of a knowledge base to draw from. It was, in fact, only 5 or 6 years earlier that Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch were able to confirm that isotopes of certain atoms could actually split in half.

In 1939, nuclear physicists were mostly an interesting curiosity to the outside world. After 1945, they became the country's most prized possession.

[brightness]

1. Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the political establishment in almost all countries were not entirely convinced of the tremendous destructive power the nuclear weapons would have. That's one of the reasons why Truman's advisors wanted the nukes deployed, in order to convince Stalin that the US indeed had a super weapon. Incidentally, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined killed less people than the firebombing of Tokyo five months earlier. The US army was planning for combat on irradiated battlefield as late as the early 1960's; that's after the hydrogen bombs, which were of comparable orders of magnitude more powerful than fission bombs as the latter compared to conventional TNT.

2. Neither Germany nor Japan had the industrial or economic wherewitheral to develop nuclear bombs. . . especially by 1945, when both countries had its fuel and electric infrastructures destroyed. Brits and Norwegian resistance had succeeded in destroying German heavy water production in 1943 . . . and even that heavy water production was part of a civilian nuclear power generation project. Germans had given up on nuclear weapons, thinking the development time horizon would be way too long to have any effect on the war; that decision had been made in early 1942.

3. Even if Germany were given in Feb 1945 all three nuclear devices that the Manhatten project produced before the end of the war in August, plus half a dozen more that would take the US until 1946 to have despite the industrial might of the US free from war time destruction, the Germans would still have lost the war. For one thing, by 1945 they did not have the means to deliver such a weapon; they'd have to detonate the devices on themselves to destroy invading armies in order to make sure the weapons were indeed detonated, assuming the train or horse wagon hauling it was not strafed and destroyed by allied fighter-bombers first. LOL.

4. Japanese were much much farther behind on nuclear weapons development, with even less means of delivery to Allied targets due to geography. Sure, detonating a nuclear device on board Yamato may have brought down a few more allied aircrafts than it historically did with AA guns, but it still would not be able to reach even Okinawa. None of the Japanese bombers had the carry capacity for a nuclear bomb of that vintage; none would pass Allied fighter CAP anyway (nor would any German, by 1945). No Japanese ship could reach even Okinawa by March 1945 without being sunk hundreds of miles away first.