The wiki article on Deutsche Physik says that the ideas of Philipp Lenard were not met with resounding success among the Nazis. In fact, Lenard tried to discredit Heisenberg himself, but was ordered to stop by Himmler.
Assuming this is accurate, it sure seems like the Nazis were willing to bend at least a little on this front.
I agree that the US probably could have held out, and maybe even developed a response. As you say, there’s a lot of land. The question is whether the US would have been willing to sacrifice, say, half the population in the short term. I certainly don’t see that as guaranteed.
Hitler believed he could get his goals without nuclear weapons. They didn’t have the resources to create the bomb until well after the Jewish scientific community was gone.
It would be easier to argue that it didn’t take that much science or that the gods gave it to them.
Where are you getting “half the population” from? How many nukes are they getting? How far can they send them?
Let’s just skip the facts and give them death rays, and you are right, the US will quit.
Now , TokyoBayer and I have often disagreed on whether or not the Axis could have won (I think there were several political moves that early on could have brought about a limited Axis victory), but I agree- there’s simply no way in hell,* absent Magical Space Aliens riding Unicorns, armed with Holy Hand grenades of Antioch, backpack nukes and the Spear of Destiny-* the Axis could have mounted a successful invasion of mainland USA.
Nuke London or Moscow and tell the USA more will happen and thus get them to agree to withdraw? Sure, *maybe. *
But old Abe said it best "All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. "
So, ok, the GNP of the United States was 88 billion in 1939, rising to 139 billion in 1945.
A certain poster keeps jumping up and down, claiming it is a miracle direct from God, were Germany to reach under the couch cushions and come up with 5 billion (2 billion for nukes, 3 billion for a bomber equivalent to the B-29) from it’s GNP of 46 billion in 1940.
I ain’t saying it’s likely, but it ain’t no “level 3 miracle”. I’d say it’s about a level 1 or 2. Level 1 if Hitler actually gets convinced with the “AmerikaBomber” + Nukes he can rule the world.
My production rate of 3 a month is based on the Operation Downfall estimate of “about 15 nukes to support the troops”. The per unit cost of the bombs used was not a fraction of the 2 billion Manhattan Project cost/2. I saw another estimate saying they could provide about 1-2 per month on an ongoing basis.
A certain poster also mentions the “1/7 electricity” production figure, a figure that was required for one of the three main ways fissionable materials were made, Calutrons, a method so inefficient they ditched it soon after the war.
Finally, I didn’t say the U.S. couldn’t build nukes. I’m saying if the Nazis keep it a secret long enough that they actually have them - then the U.S., when they build the gigantic laboratories actually used for the Manhattan project, will need a lead time of several years to catch up. And if those actual laboratories had been nuked (by the 3 billion dollar bomber the Nazis could have made but didn’t because they had other priorities), it would not have been easy to recover.
And yeah, it’s also not a “1945” invasion. In Man in the High castle, it was a 1952 “victory-Americas”. So the Germans get years to consolidate their hold over all of Eurasia (be pretty hard for Stalin to stop anything if the tank plants and Moscow had both been nuked) and work out an invasion plan, continually bombing the USA the entire time, from the Soviet capitulation in 1943 until the invasion start in 1946 or so.
The continuous bombing campaign would annihilate the U.S. federal government, major industrial centers, all the main shipyards, the main U.S. navy fleets, backup governments that try to form, and population centers. So when the Nazis actually invade they are actually trying to control a number of small cities separated by radioactive wastelands, and they probably have millions of troops recruited from Russia, France, etc.
I guess there is 1 difference between my scenario and the Phillip K Dick novel. New York ain’t going to be intact. No way you can win this without nuking a major financial coordination center. New York gets vaporized, and it will be very difficult to finance a resistance against the coming Nazi invasion.
Oh, and to forestall an obvious objection : the 5 billion pricetag for a Nazi Manhattan project + long range heavy bomber is not paid all in 1 year, that would be 1/8 of GNP. It’s spread among about 3-5 years. (so parts of it were started in 1936)
I could see it moving to a cold war if the Nazis somehow got the bomb, but the US would have it soon after, but there is no way for them to invade the US.
This is the problem with alt-hist fantasies, is that it’s Monday morning quarterbacking. You are going for a Hail Mary pass, assuming that it’s going to work perfectly, when people at the would have no idea if it could work or how to make it work.
If it possible that Germany minus the Jewish physicists could have created the bomb in super secret, with far less resources, in less time and could find the magic solution? The problem is that it was not just one tiny issue, there were whole ranges of problems. All of these things take time to solve, even if they have the resources and money to solve them.
The US could make the B-29 for 3 billion (development costs were less than that, but were still enormous) because we had years of experience making heavy bombers. Germany did not.
Hell, in our real world, Germany invaded France in 1940 with inferior tanks. They knew they needed better tanks, they were working on them, they had all of the motivation to succeed, but they didn’t have the resources or money to solve it in time. And that was Germany, the designers of the best tanks in the world by the end of the war.
Nazi Germany was spending a hell of a lot of money on rearmament as it was. They were able to finance a lot of things later by plundering the countries they conquered, but they could not have made that kind of investments in the mid to late 30s.
This wasn’t inventing a technology which no one knew would even work or not. This wasn’t making a better version of an existing gun. This was all from scratch, and it’s absurd to believe they could do this by 1940.
I donno. Maybe Hitler was just a slacker.
I doubt the Amerikabomber would have worked with 1940s technology, even had they tried.
So this US, with virtually unlimited resources and cash to burn can make 1-2 a month, but Germany, at a fraction of the size can make 3. OK, just skip it and give them magic.
Where are you basing the bombers on? They get unlimited range as well?
Yes, that’s what happened in this universe. We’re talking about the one where Hitler pursues nuclear weapons. Hitler plausibly could have weighed the evidence slightly differently, and decided that nukes were actually necessary to his plans.
I really don’t understand what you’re arguing here. Basically, you deny any possibility of L1 changes, like Hitler having a slightly different opinion on something. Since that’s evidently not possible, you assert that the only remaining possibilities are L3, like death rays.
Just the Eastern seaboard. Looking at the figures, half is probably too high. Probably more like 25% of the pop could be taken out with a dozen nukes along the East coast.
The Junkers Ju 290 probably could have delivered them. One way, of course, but it becomes worth it for nuclear weapons. It had a range of ~6000 km and that’s about what was needed to make it to the US. You would have to strip the craft to the bone but it could have been done.
Mid-air refueling was another possibility. The possibility was known about well before WW2, though evidently the Germans never pursued it.
It’s not a matter of one man simply looking at things “slightly differently.” There are so many impossibilities in this that the timeline simply is impossible without divine intervention.
The problem is that the OP, you and others are trying to put specific constraints which place the scenario outside of reality. Hitler hated the Jews more than he would have wanted to invade the US. He would not have accepted turning over the project to Jewidh scientists and as per your quote, Germany lacked other scientists.
Obviously, in a parallel universe the parallel Hitler would love Jews and offer then vacation homes and free puppies, but at some point they are no longer Nazis.
Nuclear fission wasn’t discovered until 1938, yet people want Hitler starting research in the mid 1930s.
Likewise your suggestion of a bomber which carries less than the weight of the atomic bombs and an assumption that Germany could carry out a feat impossible in our universe without the US able to develop any response. Rather than attempt to find things which the completely informed may swallow in order to fit into the TV series, wouldn’t it be easier to just go with magic?
In a parallel universe where Hitler isn’t Hitler, nuclear fission if discovered a decade earlier, and Germany has infinite resources, and everyone in the US is stupid and blind then sure the US surrenders.
The problem is that you don’t need nuclear weapons if you have all that.
It’s not one or two L1 changes. It’s a series of a sufficient number at least L2 (if not L3) that it becomes L3.
If you want to debate what could Germany do in the 1940s with 1960s technology and unlimited resources, that’s fine. Just don’t pretend it was possible.
I didn’t say they’d turn the project over to the Jews. Just that they’d use them.
Lots of scientists in the US program were doing basically grunt work. It wasn’t the fun theoretical stuff; it was stuff like calculating the neutron absorption of a particular core configuration. The Germans were happy to enslave the Jews in all kinds of other areas, so it’s not a great stretch to think they might use them for more things.
By Germans…
Only a tad less: the Ju 290 could carry 3000 kg, while Little Boy weighed 4400 kg. It is not magic to imagine that 1400 kg could be trimmed from the bomb and the craft.
The US bombs were not made as light as possible anyway, because the B-29 was available. Had that not been the case, the bombs would have been made lighter. I suspect that making the case out of aluminum instead of steel would have saved most of that. This isn’t 60’s technology, or even 50’s technology. It’s just stuff that the US didn’t do because we didn’t need to.
And again, it’s not about the US being unable to develop a response. It’s about that response requiring too high an intermediate cost.
No. Your position is that America is special, that somehow having maybe 2x the total GNP of Germany gives it magical, unbeatable powers that in no possible scenario it could have lost the war or failed to prepare for an attack.
Germany may not have developed nukes, but they had jet aircraft, SAMs, supertanks, ballistic missiles, assault rifles, submarines that didn’t need to surface…all things the Americans never developed for this war.
Had they decided to go for nukes and slightly better long range bombers instead, it would have been a different war. Sure, they didn’t know either would work - but neither did they know that most of the tech I just named above would work either.
And no, no amount of Level 1 miracles makes a level 3. Ever. You specifically defined a level 3 miracle as something known by known science to be impossible. Having 1945 technology in 1941 is not an example of that.
You’ve basically outlined what has to have happened. A prominent German nuclear scientists in the early 1930s makes a slightly sooner discovery of fission. He convinces the Fuhrer it’s going to lead to a super-bomb guaranteeing victory in future military conflicts. Germany spends a mere half billion a year or so from 1935 onward developing it. They are successful in keeping the effort a secret, enough of a secret that the details of what they are doing do not leak to foreign powers. Once they get a successful test detonation in 1940, they blitzkrieg Europe and this time can nuke Paris and Moscow and other strategic targets. The need for a long range bomber causes them to develop one. America tries to develop a nuke, but has a bit of a mishap where certain professors convince everyone to dump the resources into fusion, causing America to fall years behind. (kind of like today how certain American chemists have monopolized the funds intended to develop molecular manufacturing to instead develop conventional synthesis improvements)
None of these are miracles. It’s just an alternate universe where a few hundred people do stuff slightly different. I guess you see this as the same thing as death rays, something that is physically not known to be possible.
Check out the history of the anti-Jewish nature of Nazis, the timeline and the actions of the scientists.
Look, you don’t have to make your alternative universe realistic. You’re working too hard trying to come up with increasingly implausible scenarios. It’s just simpler to make the Nazis not Nazis, give Germany unlimited resources and magic.
As did you happen to glance at which country that discover happened? Did you notice why those particular scientists were there?
And all in less time than the US could manage. Got it. This is where the magic comes in. The US, with all her resources couldn’t do things which your Nazis can, just 'cuz they were a little luckier. Nope, life doesn’t work that way. Not on this scale.
The basics were 40s technology developed by a country with the capacity to invent it, but you are looking for the ability for transoceanic bombing from a country which lacked that. Sorry, I forgot you are in an alternative universe where Jewish scientist gets free hugs.
They’ve got to have the vision of how all this works, implement it perfectly, without hick ups, or requiring any redesigns, figure out what all of the necessary support technologies are, invent, design, test, and build all of these in parallel. They’re going to do all this while building up their conventional forces to attack the Soviets.
See, you ignore the steps which the US would take, such as massing fighter aircraft to shoot 'em down. You’re pretending that these bombers can reach Oak Ridge and that the US wouldn’t simply move people and factories out of harms way.
You need a parallel universe with a stupid America for it to work
Address how Germany gets the nukes by '41 sans scientists, with the bombers sans money and then gains an ability to invade the States. Address the concerns Germany had for fighting the Soviets. Address the economics on the late '30s.
I would have no problem if you weren’t trying to make all of this happen by Germany by 1941. Historians agree that the only country in our universe with the capacity during the war to develop the bomb and the bomber was the States, yet you want to have it done by a country with less than a 1/3 of the GNP (comparing Germany in '39 to America in '45) and which faced far more real expenses.
America didn’t have a huge enemy next door which had to be defended against. Oh, I forgot, we’re in a universe where Nazi have crystal balls and know exactly where to spend every Reichsmark so they don’t have to build all those pesky things like subs and tanks. Just build the atomic bomb because they know it’s going to work.
And the US will blissfully allow the Germans to nuke Paris, London, and Moscow all the time picking daisies while singing kumbaya. The president will take up fiddling lessons while the entire East Coast burns, and will insist on locating atomic research facilities in New Jersey.
Simultaneously all in '39, too. Remarkable. See all they needed to do was to reassign a couple of engineers from designing assaulting rifles and they would have had the nukes and super planes.
What makes your fantasy a level three is that it all has to go perfectly by a country without sufficient resources all the while requiring the enemies to cooperate.
Just give them honest magic and then debate whatever it was that you wanted to.
I agree that Germany had the resources to build a nuclear arsenal. My argument is over how other countries would have reacted.
The United States also had the resources to build a nuclear arsenal. I don’t see it as plausible that the United States would have chosen to not build a nuclear arsenal when it had the ability to do so and knew Germany was building its own nuclear arsenal.
Some people have brought up the idea that Germany might build up its nuclear arsenal secretly and not reveal its existence until it was completed. I find that possibility doubtful. Building up an arsenal of seventy-two nuclear weapons would have required a lot of resources and it’s hard to imagine any country could have concealed a project that size.
For the sake of the hypothetical let’s say that the Germans DO get the bomb in 1941. Now what?
Is Hitler going to worry about the U.S.? Hell no! At that point he isn’t even at war with the U.S. He’s going to use it against the Soviets and the British.
First time he uses it, it’s not a secret anymore. Pacifist leadership or not, the U.S. takes another look at the Einstein-Szilard letter, and convenes the first meeting of the Advisory Committee on Uranium in mid-1941 instead of that October. Instead of grudging, inch-by-inch support, the Manhattan Project gets enthusiastic bi-partisan support and even more funding and resources.
Meanwhile, what’s left of the Soviet Union and the U.K. are building hardened laboratories in hard-to-find places. Their active spy networks in Germany are pooling their intelligence and sending it to scientists in both countries, and forwarding it along to the U.S.
Now the Germans have the bomb, but there are also THREE other countries working on it. And because they’re pooling information, they’re able to work a lot faster than the U.S. would by going alone. And because they know the broad outlines of the work, they’re able to figure out which of the Nazi facilities are nuclear, and the RAF bombs the hell out of those.
Now, instead of three bombs per month, the Germans are lucky if they can complete one bomb in three months. Meanwhile, the Soviets, the British and the U.S. (either alone or in some combination) are dedicating even more resources to building their bomb. Instead of mid-1945, the U.S. tests Trinity no later than early 1944. By then, the B-29 is fully operational, but even if it isn’t, the Air Force can strip down a B-17 and shove a bomb into it for the relatively short trip from Britain to Berlin, the Navy could nuke one of the ports, or the Soviets could simply haul their bomb up to the front lines (which were in the Ukraine at that point) and blow the hell out of the German land forces.
In other words, if Germany gets the bomb in '41, they lose the war a year earlier!
The US could make the B-29 for 3 billion (development costs were less than that, but were still enormous) because we had years of experience making heavy bombers. Germany did not.
I doubt the Amerikabomber would have worked with 1940s technology, even had they tried.
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In fact, every long range heavy bomber they did build was a failure- the He 177, the Fw 200 Condor, the Me 264 (canceled early) , etc. And the Amerika Bomber wasn’t even started planning until 1942, with some prototypes submitted in 1943, and production in 1944.
Basically all of your arguments come down to comparing apples and oranges, pretending that they’re both apples, and then claiming that you need magic to turn one of them back into an orange.
Again, the Germans don’t need a B-29. That’s what the US used because that’s what we had. It was overkill for the purpose of delivering atomic bombs. But it meant that Little Boy and Fat Man needed very little weight optimization.
The Junkers Ju 290–the one that actually existed in reality–was capable of delivering 3000 kg over a distance of 6000 km. You claim that it’s absolute magic to suggest that this was incapable of delivering an atomic bomb of the same basic tech level as Little Boy, which was 4400 kg, over the same 6000 km distance. But that’s crazy talk; just scaling the bomb down slightly would put you under the limit, not to mention many other possible changes.
It’s not even an L1 change; it’s L0, which I’ll define as the stuff that just logically follows from earlier L1-3 changes. There’s zero cost to it–you’re just operating on a different set of constraints. Not doing so would be the “magic”.
About the only thing you can say on this particular front is that the Ju 290 was slightly later than the 1941 timeframe. That it might have been developed 7 months earlier if a few more resources had been put toward it–or even had they just skipped those parts of the program which weren’t relevant to atomic bombs–is also not magic.
Technically speaking, they don’t even need an aircraft—nuclear artillery was available by the early 1950s, and the Germans had artillery pieces capable of firing heavier projectiles than Little Boy by about the time they’re getting nukes in this scenario. It’s even less of a stretch to suppose that, with an earlier lead on Bomb development, they might have made sure they had a warhead suitably rugged enough for use on a shell, or that the guns’ development and entry into service could have been slightly accelerated.
Not an ideal platform, in some very important ways, but in the right circumstances, perfectly serviceable. And probably good enough to serve as a stepping stone for more optimized delivery systems.
Lets say the Germans have 1 nuke a month to use on the USA. And we never get it and have no chance of stopping it being dropped (the second part seems particularly suspect IMO).
Anyway, any standard nuke of that era will only blow the fuck up of an area of couple square miles.
America is a big assed place. Spread out your wartime production facilities and your population and the Germans could bomb you every month forever and they would barely dent either your population or your production.