# Could Germany have conquered the USA, "High Castle" style, with exclusive access to nukes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 4, 2015, 9:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397 "2015-12-04T09:18:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![AdamF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/adamf/32/6246_2.png) [@AdamF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AdamF)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2015, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/121 "2015-12-09T18:10:15Z")
> [@Habeed](#): > > Were Moscow and London smoking radioactive craters, … > There wouldn’t be tens of thousands of Russian troops attacking as they wouldn’t be supplied, … You are overestimating the effectiveness of early nuclear weapons. You would need several of them to level Moscow or London, assuming your aircraft could even reach the target and survive a daylight mission. And you would need a near-direct hit to damage the deep bomb-proof bunkers. A few bombs also wouldn’t make any dent in the industrial capacity. Consider that Germany was hit by over 1000 bombing raids, each with an effect similar to that of a nuclear bomb. > [@Habeed](#): > > They could also have nuked Mulberry Harbor, Eisenhower’s planning tent, vehicle depots, the list goes on. Mulberry would have capsized and would have been repaired in weeks. Mulberry A was actually badly damaged by a storm, and was not repaired only because using the same resources to expand Mulberry B was deemed more effective. German bombers could not have found Eisenhower’s tent if they were given a detailed map and Ike was using a searchlight to guide them in. ---
**Author:** ![AdamF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/adamf/32/6246_2.png) [@AdamF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AdamF)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2015, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/122 "2015-12-09T18:16:53Z")
I don’t see any scenario where the Germany could have built a nuclear bomb more than few months before the US. The Nazi party could not keep a secret to (literally) save their lives. And most of the time they didn’t even try. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2015, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/123 "2015-12-09T18:56:35Z")
> [@AdamF](#): > > Mulberry would have capsized and would have been repaired in weeks. Mulberry A was actually badly damaged by a storm, and was not repaired only because using the same resources to expand Mulberry B was deemed more effective. Oh come on. That is seriously downplaying the effects of an atomic bomb. ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2015, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/124 "2015-12-09T19:21:02Z")
Not really, low kiloton yield nuclear weapons just aren’t as devastating as people think. A lot of the popular ideas on nuclear bomb damage is based off of the belief that a bunch of cities would get nuked by the monster warheads being constructed at the height of the cold war (which had greater than 1 Mt yields.) In reality the majority of the stock has always been sub 500 kt bombs, and with WWII technology you’d be seeing sub 100 kt bombs. It’s worth realizing Hiroshima was never completely depopulated by being bombed, and it was a much smaller city than London. A lot of people seem to assume one bomb will destroy a major city AND make the entire region uninhabitable due to fallout. Instead, U.S. studies during the Cold War showed that if Moscow was hit by 48 Trident warheads launched from one submarine and targeting key C&C bunkers out of a population of 8.8m in Moscow proper 2.5m would die, 489k would be killed outside the city. Total deaths would be around 3m within 12 weeks. Remember fallout damage is governed by wind. In the U.S. analysis of a strike on Moscow 5 km downwind the fallout would be such that about 50% of adults in the area would die within 2-12 weeks . 11 km downwind there would be a 25% fatality rate among healthy adults, up to 83 km away fatal doses of radiation could be received by people standing in the open for long periods of time (but during the Cold War citizens of nuclear powers would have decent enough sense not to do this.) The risk drops down substantially after a few weeks. The U.S. study suggests Moscow would be functionally uninhabitable for generations, and the millions of survivors would be fighting to get away from the city which would probably cause a humanitarian disaster. But mind this is a strike on Moscow with 48 W76 warheads delivered by a trident missile system, each of these warheads has a 100 kt yield vs 21kt yield of the bomb used on Hiroshima in 1945. Also remember that “uninhabitable” in the 1980s is different than in the 1940s. There’d be a heightened cancer risk but it’s not like people would be dropping dead in mass numbers if they moved back to Moscow a few months later. There’d be a significant increase in cancer mortality but given 1940s thinking that may or may not matter. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2015, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/125 "2015-12-09T19:54:19Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > Oh come on. That is seriously downplaying the effects of an atomic bomb. No, actually I read the Tokyo fire bombing did more damage and killed more. And again, No, Germany didnt have any magic weapons. For example everyone loves the German jets but in reality US P51 fighters were shooting them down. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2015, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/126 "2015-12-09T20:24:46Z")
I’m sorry but this seems ridiculous. I’ve seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I know that they aren’t as powerful as modern weapons but “capsized and fixed in a couple weeks” is a bullshit summation of what an a-bomb on the Allied landing harbour would cause. All the personnel close by and ships docked would have been fucked. The harbour vessels would have been radioactive. Who cares if a Tokyo firebombing caused more damage than Nagasaki? An a-bomb where the Allies were staging the invasion of Europe could have been devastating depending on when it happened. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2015, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/127 "2015-12-09T20:52:57Z")
> [@](#): > > Comparing this yield to the observed damage produced a rule of thumb called the 5psi lethal area rule. Approximately 100% of people inside the area where the shock wave carries an overpressure of 5psior greater would be killed.[41]At Hiroshima, that area was 3.5 kilometres (2.2mi) in diameter.[42] So a 100% kill rate within a 2 mile diameter. 100% building destruction within a 1 mile radius is what the Hiroshima bomb did. Add in radiactive fallout. Yes it would be different over water. Yes a series of bomb raids over a flammable city is more destructive. But give me a break. If the Germans had an a-bomb before D-day it would have been a serious problem. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2015, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/128 "2015-12-10T13:56:45Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > No, they couldn’t build those tanks. If anyone had thought clearly about the problems, they wouldn’t have even gotten so far as a prototype. The big tanks were useless because they were too heavy and couldn’t cross most bridges. The ground pressure was quite high as well. > > The idea that the tanks would be useful in any military way was magical thinking on their part, and yet they made the attempt anyway. Thank you. This is exactly my point which I wanted you to make. Why is it that alt-hist people expect Hitler to no longer be Hitler except when it’s convenient for them? Hitler had his hands in everything, coming up with impossible ideas as well as generally screwing up the military. But when it comes to the parallel world, suddenly Hitler doesn’t touch it? The man who meddled in everything was not going to fork out a couple of billion dollars and leave them alone. Another reality was that Germany had a very inefficient manufacturing system. Look at their tanks, to take an example. Overly complex, required far more man-hours to produce and broke down frequently. They didn’t go into total war production until several years into the war because everyone in Germany expected the war to end quickly. And yet, you are claiming that that system could out produce the US, with all its resources, in a fraction of the time. Simply nonsense. > [@](#): > > I haven’t provided any reference because I have no idea what you are looking for. The vast majority of the work, including the key experiments that needed explanation, was done in Berlin by Otto Hahn. The explanation was made in Sweden, and the result distributed quickly. But the meat of the work–the hard chemistry that led to the unexplained result–was done by Hahn. Hahn had a huge lead over the Americans at this time with regards to the chemistry. My bad, I had wanted to get to Lise. > [@](#): > > Why was Lise in Sweden? Because she had only very recently left Germany due to persecution. She had actually stayed long beyond what was reasonable due to her love of the work, but was eventually forced out. The Nazis could have forced her to stay using any number of unpleasant means. There was a mass exodus of the top-class Jewish scientists starting in 1933, the year Hitler took office and Germany started passing anti-Jewish laws including one baring Jews from civil service and kicked them out of the universities. Lise was one of the few remaining ones because she was Austrian so the anti-Jewish law didn’t pertain to her, although she automatically became a German citizen in 1938 when Germany annexed Austria, at which point she fled. The large number of scientists who emigrated from Germany prior to the discovery of the potential for a nuclear bomb was another factor which clearly tipped the balance toward the democracies. Prior to the rise of the Nazis, Germany had an [extraordinary number of Jewish scientists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapon_project#Emigrations), especially in theoretical physics. > [@](#): > > An immediate consequence upon passage of the law was that it produced both quantitative and qualitative losses to the physics community. Numerically, it has been estimated that a total of 1,145 university teachers, in all fields, were driven from their posts, which represented about 14% of the higher learning institutional staff members in 1932–1933. Out of 26 German nuclear physicists cited in the literature before 1933, 50% emigrated. Qualitatively, 10 physicists and four chemists who had won or would win the Nobel Prize emigrated from Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, most of them in 1933. These 14 scientists were: Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Peter Debye, Dennis Gabor, Fritz Haber, Gerhard Herzberg, Victor Hess, George de Hevesy, Erwin Schrödinger, Otto Stern, and Eugene Wigner. Britain and the USA were often the recipients of the talent which left Germany.[41] The University of Göttingen had 45 dismissals from the staff of 1932–1933, for a loss of 19%.[38] Eight students, assistants, and colleagues of the Göttingen theoretical physicist Max Born left Europe after Hitler came to power and eventually found work on the Manhattan Project, thus helping the United States, Britain and Canada to develop the atomic bomb; they were Enrico Fermi,[42] James Franck, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Robert Oppenheimer (who was American, but had studied under Born), Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann.[43] Otto Robert Frisch, who with Rudolf Peierls first calculated the critical mass of U-235 needed for an explosive, was also a Jewish refugee. You’ve postulated before that one potential reason the the West may not have been able to make the bomb would be that key scientists may all be killed in a plane crash, yet this is exactly what happened in Germany with the loss of the scientists. > [@](#): > > We aren’t talking about Pearl Harbor here. We’re talking about New York and other Eastern cities. Radar was _extremely_ new at the time. Your writing was not clear if you intended to discuss radar in general or just around New York. You stated that “they did not have radar.” Which is unclear as to the subject. No, radar was not “extremely” new at this time. It was key to the British victory of the Battle of Britain in 1940. The RAF was quite sophisticated in coordinating fighter defense in response to intrusions. The US had lagged implementation because it was not involved yet in the war, but had there been a necessity, it would have been infinitely easier than building the bomb. Not that it matters if new York had radar in 1941 because it was simply impossible for Germany to have a bomb then. You have yet to make a case for that. > [@](#): > > Well, in fact the answer doesn’t matter. Pearl Harbor demonstrated that radar made no difference, because it was so early in development that the strategy on how to interpret and deal with the signals was not developed yet. The attack on Pearl Harbor was seen on radar and ignored. Simply ignorant bullshit on par with your uninformed opinion that 15 fission bombs could kill 50% of the American population. Read up on the Battle of Britain. The base was still on the learning curve and had they gone to the UK, they could have directly copied it. > [@](#): > > If we did actually live in an alternate universe where the Pearl Harbor attack was deflected, and I suggested that in some other timeline the radar operator might have mistook the signal for something else and ignored it, you would be telling me that the US would never display such rank incompetence and that it would be magic to suggest otherwise. No, but you would suggest that the Japanese would have jets and tactical nukes. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2015, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/129 "2015-12-10T14:43:34Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > I’m sorry but this seems ridiculous. I’ve seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I know that they aren’t as powerful as modern weapons but “capsized and fixed in a couple weeks” is a bullshit summation of what an a-bomb on the Allied landing harbour would cause. All the personnel close by and ships docked would have been fucked. The harbour vessels would have been radioactive. Who cares if a Tokyo firebombing caused more damage than Nagasaki? An a-bomb where the Allies were staging the invasion of Europe could have been devastating depending on when it happened. Actually if they had just targetted 20-30 V2 rockets it would have had devestating effect with all that fuel and ammunition sitting around. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2015, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/130 "2015-12-10T16:00:55Z")
Don’t know about that. V2s only had impact triggering. Not sure how great they would have been on waterborne targets. ---
**Author:** ![AdamF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/adamf/32/6246_2.png) [@AdamF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AdamF)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2015, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/131 "2015-12-10T17:24:52Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > If the Germans had an a-bomb before D-day it would have been a serious problem. It would have been one of several serious problems. But it would not have been a deal breaker. Twenty Pershing missiles coupled with satellite images of the entire UK would have been a deal breaker. Several bombs, even if targeted and delivered properly would do a lot of damage, but not enough. And these bombs could not be delivered, as the Allies had a total air-superiority. And the Germans were completely lacking the reconnaissance and intelligence needed to located the few critical targets anyway. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2015, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/132 "2015-12-10T17:51:51Z")
I am not saying anything about their ability to deliver the bomb so there is no need for your silliness about Pershing missiles and satellites. I was just saying that assuming an a-bomb did go off, claimng it would be a mere 2 week repair job delay is ridiculous. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2015, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/133 "2015-12-11T13:24:00Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > Don’t know about that. V2s only had impact triggering. Not sure how great they would have been on waterborne targets. Just hitting the beaches would have been enough. The V2 left big craters in London. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2015, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397/134 "2015-12-11T14:07:53Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Actually if they had just targetted 20-30 V2 rockets it would have had devestating effect with all that fuel and ammunition sitting around. Well, other than feeling pretty silly targeting the beaches some two months after the landings, which is when the rocket became available, the V2 was not a tactical weapon. It simply lacked the accuracy. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-germany-have-conquered-the-usa-high-castle-style-with-exclusive-access-to-nukes/739397.md?page=6)