Nuclear weapons would not have saved Nazi Germany even under the thesis that they could be produced at scale. The Germany economy was crashing and even though ‘productivity’ had increased from 1933 in terms of per capita GDP, real wages were still stuck at late 1920s levels with increased earnings coming from overtime and employment of women in industrial jobs (even as the regime espoused the ideal of women in traditional Hausfrau roles), as well as absorbing wealth of Jews fleeting the Reich or being ‘resettled, and creative accounting that removed millions Jews and other ‘undesirables’ from being citizens of the Reich. An increase in prosperity was assumed from Lebensraum, absorbing the industry and resources of annexed and conquered territory but the reality was between the destruction of war and the Soviet policy of “scorched earth” left little in the way of resources or agricultural productivity, and in particular Nazi Germany ran short of petroleum, turning to inefficient coal gasification and severe rationing just to keep the war effort doing.
Even if the threat of nuclear weapons could have driven Stalin to sue for a negotiated ceasefire (doubtful; the Russians were determined to resist conquest and maintain a buffer zone against invasion even to the point of literally throwing unarmed soldiers into the grinder to bring the German Army to a halt) it would not have stopped the US, which had both greater resources and the clear lead in development of the atomic bomb even before the formal initiation of the Manhattan Project due to research on nuclear fission and the aforementioned refugee physicists who were first collected under the British “Tube Alloys” program and then mostly transferred to the Manhattan Project. And while the the German Reichsluftfahrtministerium had a conceptual design for an Amerikabomber capable of making the over 7,000 nmi round trip to New York City or Washington D.C., it was never developed beyond the prototype stage and would not have been capable of reaching far inland to hit strategic targets where war materiel was being produced without being a one-way mission even if the Nazi regime could have found the resources to build a fleet of such aircraft, while the US could base a response out of the British Isles or Greenland.
Lacking the geographic isolation of the United States or the massive protective buffer zones of the Soviet Union, a ‘Greater European Reich’ would have always been in the precarious position of both economic and strategic vulnerability even before the era of intercontinental ballistic missiles (which they ironically fed through scientists and engineers captured by the United States and the Soviet Union in the post-war scramble). Alt-history notions aside, nukes would have not helped the Nazi regime stay in power.
The Aggregat program and the A4 (V-2) rockets it produced were also fantastically costly in terms of resources even though they were largely built with forced labor, and the entire effort was fraught with material scarcity, technical challenges, and sabotage, making these ‘terror weapons’ largely ineffective in terms of prosecuting the war. The plans for larger multi-stage weapons were almost exclusively paper studies and a few subscale prototypes and for all of the prowess the Heer had in propulsion they had major deficiencies in guidance and control technologies that would have made it impossible to make a weapon that could have flown much further than Southern England with any accuracy.
On December 18, 1944, a 42-year-old man masquerading as a Swiss physics student settled his 6-foot-1 frame into a chair in a Zurich lecture hall. Instead of simply listening to the brilliant insights offered by the physicist at the podium, the man was trying to understand enough of the scientist’s native German to identify key words—words that could change, or perhaps even destroy, the world. All the while, he was hoping the gun tucked into his jacket pocket wouldn’t fall out, as it had during his trip across the Atlantic.
The audience member was no ordinary student. In fact, he wasn’t a student at all. He was a retired baseball player named Morris “Moe” Berg, and the American government wanted him to assassinate a man dubbed “the most dangerous possible German in the field” of physics: Werner Heisenberg, director of the Nazi nuclear program.
By late 1944 the Americans were 99% sure that the Nazi’s had no nuclear program, but they knew that Heisenberg was dangerous. They thought of a number of schemes to eliminate him if necessary, including this essentially suicide mission.
Berg himself is a character too good to be real, a Princeton polyglot who got a law degree at Columbia and did graduate work at the Sorbonne, whose actual passion was baseball and was a decent catcher in the big leagues. And spied for the government starting in 1934.
These kinds of nascent technologies will ALWAYS have teething troubles. The ME-262 et al. were indeed wonder weapons of a sort, but had all sorts of issues with unreliable engines (lacking certain alloy components they tended to disintegrate even if babied). Same with the XXI submarine, which had issues with underpowered engines and overengineered hydraulics. The V weapons were terribly inaccurate and unreliable. It was a fantasy that they could have significantly sped up any or all of these techs to the point of reliability to make a difference in the war’s outcome, and note the Allies had their own jets soon after the 262 became operational, but didn’t want to have one crash in German-held territory and get reverse-engineered.
It wasn’t even clear then due to uncertainty at the prospect of miniaturizing a nuclear weapon and making it capable of surviving the dynamics of reentry with sufficient accuracy to even get within blast range of a city was technologically possible. The US Air Force wasn’t even interested initially in ballistic missiles (which were originally the US Army’s provenance) until the US Navy got into the ballistic missile and space launch business, and saw the challenge of a three-way turf war with both the Army and the Navy where strategic bombers would be the slowest and most vulnerable delivery option and then campaigned to run the land-based ICBM program.
As noted earlier, even if Germany had a few bombs, they lacked a delivery system. Atom bombs weighed around 10,000 pounds/4500 kg. Bombs that size could be carried by a modified Lancaster/B-24/He-177/B-17, but not at a speed or altitude sufficient to make them reasonably safe from AA or interception. Having spent enormous resources to make the weapon you don’t want it shot down, especially over enemy territory.
Realistically, a nuke mission required a Very Heavy bomber, and they were very expensive. The US spent more on the B-29 program than it did on the Manhattan Project. And had the B-29 been a failure, they even had money and resources to produce a backup bomber which could also deliver a nuke: the B-32.
Sheer logistics probably would have prevented a successful project. Besides Los Alamos the U.S. created two small cities, Oak Ridge TN for producing uranium and Hanford WA for producing plutonium, since nobody knew which would work in advance. They grew to house about 75,000 and 50,000 respectively. They were sited where they were because of ample hydroelectric power. Even with the highest priorities they had to scramble for materials. Most of the $2 billion cost of the Manhattan Project went to them. (I don’t care about the Consumer Price Index; people in 2025 should think of the cost at $1 trillion for a gut understanding of how much money that was.)
Could Germany have handled that on a purely speculative basis? Did they have sufficient spare electric power, materials, and workers? Was this something that could be trusted to slave labor?
Even more basic, America could build whatever it wanted anywhere it wanted knowing there was no real danger of it being bombed. Any site in Europe was within reach, though. A new factory city or two would have stood out. The Germans would have had to divert huge amounts of anti-aircraft protection to these cities and that would be another sign of their importance.
Maybe this would be possible if anyone were sure of the endgame, although it certainly would have hurt their other projects. Germany couldn’t do everything at once the way the Americans, the numerous, healthy, well-fed, well-paid, safe at home Americans could. The bomb was built on the back of logistics as much as brainpower. Germany was running at less than half speed on both.
Although the US only made five Little Boy weapons, it did make a number of other nuclear weapons using a 235U or composite pit (combining 235U and 239Pu) most notably using the Tsetse primary using in the B43 and B57 gravity bombs, the W44 dept charge, and the W50 and W59 used on the MGM-131 ‘Persing I’ IRBM and LGM-30A/B ‘Minuteman I’ ICBM respectively. In part this was because of the costs of producing plutonium and how toxic and volatile it was to handle it but also because the criticality threshold of 239Pu is so low that a simple pit made just from plutonium will blow itself apart too quickly for larger multistage and boosted fission designs. By the mid-Sixties weapon designers went to all plutonium pits as Hanford production scaled up but the US continued to produce and stockpile highly enriched uranium (HEU, >90% 235U) through 1992 for nuclear propulsion and research reactors to produce isotopes medical applications and research. US DoE Tritium And Enriched Uranium Management Plan Through 2060
There are controversial plans to use the HEU stockpile in civilian nuclear reactors in reversal to decades of policy and encouraging other nations to abandon HEU-based reactor configurations, and specifically the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE) despite proliferation and security concerns. The reality is that with sufficient resources and money, any nation-state could potentially produce HEU and construct fairly advanced nuclear weapons capable of being delivered by ballistic or cruise missile because the information and expertise to do so is now broadly available.
But at the time of the WWII, neither that experience nor the computational tools existed to develop and optimize a nuclear weapon that could be delivered by anything other than a massive bomber, and Nazi Germany wasn’t anywhere close to actually being able to construct even a crude nuclear weapon, which is why Hitler had an entire regiment of the German Army scouring through Egyptian ruins looking for historical artifacts of unspeakable destructive power. Unfortunately, US Army intelligence sent the worst archeologist they could find to go recover it first, leading the Nazis directly to the chamber in which it remained hidden and the world only lucked out that they decided to open it up and look into the Face of God instead of figuring out an effective way of deploying it agains the Allies.
I’d suggest a little closer to 1/3 of a trillion. The Manhattan project took around 0.4% of GDP, took three years to create the first bomb, and 3 years at modern GDP levels is $80T. That’s about $330B equivalent.
Still, in order-of-magnitude terms, you’re right. Much closer to $1T than the ~$30B you get if you just count pure inflation.
However, that runs into the “Jewish Science” problem. They initially rejected a lot of then-modern physics because Jews like Einstein help originate it. Which both hampered their ability to project what nukes could do, and their ability to do research on the matter.
I’m reminded of a comment I read on another message board about the Nazis. That many hypotheticals about “could the Nazis have-” (won the war, built a nuke, etc) founder on the issue that to make the answer “yes”, you need to change so much that they aren’t Nazis anymore. Their ideology guaranteed that they’d be at a huge disadvantage at nuclear research, between their desire to purge “Jewish science” & the Jews themselves, their prioritizing mass murder above actually productive endeavors, and their authoritarian tendency to declare the truth to be whatever they wanted it to be.
And here again Hitler screwed that up royally. First he insisted it be a fighter bomber which delayed it’s introduction. And second he insisted it be built in indestructible facilities. He killed more slave labor building the underground facilities than Allied pilots/planes.
The Messerschmidt factories were getting hit hard by the Allies and was the driving reason behind the underground factories. But they could easily have built the plane in cottage industry fashion and introduced it much earlier in the war.
Moe Berg was one of several major leaguers who toured Japan in 1934. One has to wonder if he did any spying there as well, despite not officially being a spy until after Pearl Harbor.
