IIRC the US was several months away from having another nuclear weapon ready. The first two, as mentioned somewhere else in this thread, were a bluff of more to come but in reality it would have been awhile till the world saw a third nuke (or fourth if you count the one used for testing).
Well this faq disagrees with you
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq8.html#nfaq8.1.5
If this thing is correct the next nuke would have been ready in a couple of weeks.(And that the US only scaled back once Japan agreed to unconditional surrender.) Also this faqs suggests that if things went according to schedule there would have been around 20 bombs produced by the end of 45.
[nitpick]
Minor aside, but according to your scenario, the Allies lose the foothold in France, which would remain under Vichy control.
[/nitpick]
[hijack]
Other than that, I like this scenario. Why? Because under the Nazis, Germany develops the bomb. The US has the bomb, which we ship the technology to the UK. We know the Soviets will eventually develop the bomb (through the help of the Rosenbergs and Claus Fuchs), but it may take some time.
In any case, One, two three . . . FIVE nations have the bomb, and are at each others’ throats and at each others’ borders. Can we say HUGE “Cold War”?
[/hijack]
Tripler
Fascinating, isn’t it?
[/hijack]
Eh. I think even that is a long shot. it was Japan that bombed Pearl Harbor, after all, not Germany. The fighting in the Pacific lasted much longer, was much more wide-ranging geographically and bloodier overall than U.S. operations against Germany. People now tend to focus on the European theater more because of the historically unprecedented nature (at the time) of things like the Nazi Party and the Holocaust. But that doesn’t mean Americans at the time saw the war that way. Roosevelt asked Congress to go to war only against Japan, initially, and if Germany had not subsequently declared war on the U.S., we might have been diverted away from ever fighting in Europe at all.
By reading that Guardian article, I also found this in another article they did with the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The article is here: http://ads.guardian.co.uk/html.ng/Params.richmedia=yes&location=bottom&spacedesc=03&site=Guardian&navsection=1699§ion=103589&country=can&rand=2144361
Whoops, wrong link. Here’s the right one…
The article is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/article/0,2763,770583,00.html
Also, in regards to there being a third bomb:
Pearl Harbor or not, the use of the bomb against the Japanese was not a foregone conclusion. The arguments over whether to bomb a city and if so which city, whether to drop a demonstration bomb, or whether to continue using fire-bombing were long, loud, and intense.
And by 1944 the real fighting had concentrated in Europe. Far more of our troops, our supplies, and our focus was on Europe, for the good reason that everyone involved understood that in geopolitical terms the aftermath of the fighting in Europe would be hugely more influential on the world they knew than anything that would happen in the Far East, a relative backwater in that age.
As for the Tibbets quote, well, I’m not going to post any disparaging remarks about an 87-year-old’s memory except to say that none of it is true and none of it makes the slightest amount of sense. I mean, Utah?
Perhaps it’s a garbled memory of this, from Richard Rhode’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb:
Groves’ quote is taken from the “Manhattan Engineer District Records” 10 August 1945.
So, as anyone with sense will have assumed from the beginning, every single important person in the chain of command was fully involved and knowledgeable about a third core, it was being manufactured in the exact same way as the previous Fat Man and expected to be transported in exactly the same way, Tibbets and LeMay had nothing to do with it or say about it, he didn’t load it on his airplane because the thing didn’t exist yet, and it was never in Utah. If LeMay, who was “chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific” didn’t know about the third bomb, he was out of the loop, because his boss, Strategic Air Forces Commander Carl Spaatz, did, proposing on August 10 to place “the third atomic bomb … on Tokyo.”
Could Rhodes be wrong? Dave_D’s link says the same thing:
The core was never shipped. We didn’t have a third bomb ready to go. The Japanese surrendered officially on August 15, although they had signaled their intentions the day before.
a bit of a hijack… the allies perpetrated the equivalent of a nuclear attack on Germany with the firebombing of Dresden. Acknowledged as a purely civilian target, the allies nevertheless turned the city into one ferocious firestorm, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. This had nearly the same psychological effect as a nuclear bomb attack, complete devistation. More people were killed in Dresden than in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.
A previously classified US Navy intelligence report entitled, “Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of the German Atomic Bomb” dated 19 August 1945, had attached to it the affidavit of a German pilot Hans Zinsser. He said he was sent aloft in October 1944 to observe a nuclear weapon test blast and watched a boiling mushroom cloud rise to 22,000 feet with plasma ion discharges inside the cloud. An Italian war correspondent Luigi Romersa sent by Mussolini to observe the test reported witnessing the blast from a sealed bunker on 12 October 1944. Romersa was still alive in 2005 when the story broke in modern times and was re-interviewed in 2005. I suspect you can find Romersa’s interview on Youtube in Italian.
- “Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of the German Atomic Bomb,” issued by COMNAVEU London on 25 January 1946 by Captain R.F. Hickey, USN. The file location in US National Archives is NARA/RG 38, Box 9-13 Entry 98c. “Top Secret Naval Attache Reports 1944-1947.”
Also there is allegedly a wreck of a six engined german aircraft in the waters 2.5 miles SW from Owl’s Head Maine USA which a diver claimed online some years ago she had removed a Junkers constructor’s plate from. This would equate to a Junker Ju-390.
There are also witnesses to this aircraft wreck in the sea off Owl’s head about 17/18 September 1944 and then ten days later the bodies of three luftwaffe aviators being fished from the sea in Penobscott estuary.
I suspect there was an intent if not an attempt.
Something more than a nitpick; Normandy was not in Vichy France.
Something folks need to consider.
All that massive work to build the bomb was to build the infrastructure to produce enriched uranium and plutonium. And a shitload of basic research and engineering to make a workable bomb and figuring out the methods to make the shit to make the bombs.
However, once that all was in place and we figured out what worked the bombs would and could keep coming if neccesary. It wasn’t like we spent a fortune to build two or three of them and then we would be out of em. We spend a fortune to build an assembly line so to speak and we could IIRC pump out roughly one a month at the end of the war.
We sorta bluffed the Japanese that we had a shitload of em. But on the otherhand it wasn’t like we had 2 or 3 and then we were out for good either. Even a good city nuking every other month is gonna kinda suck.
For zombie kicks I googled “Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of the German Atomic Bomb”. Unsurprisingly the results were various conspiracy sites such as whale.to, abovetopsecret.com, and something entitled “'Secret Societies Threaten to Take Over America: The Rise of the 4the Reich” by J. Marrs.
More interesting is a google of Captain R.F. Hickey, who was an actual person. The problem is, he was the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Hancock at the end of WW2 and later Rear Admiral commanding CARDIV5 during the Korean War (warning, pdf file). It’s rather hard to believe he took a detour in his career to write intelligence reports on interviews with Luftwaffe pilots claiming to have witnessed German atomic bomb tests.
I’m torn between “cite, please,” and “bull.”
As I pointed out in another thread, many of those who worked on the Manhattan Project did so because they feared Germany would develop a bomb before we did. They felt betrayed by our actual usage of nuclear weapons after that threat no longer existed. That doesn’t mean we intended to use those weapons on Germany absent a equivalent threat, but they weren’t being made based on the perception of a threat from Japan.
If you want some interesting insights into home-made atomic bomb making, read TOm Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears. Skip the crappy movie although part of the book and the movie are about how do you respond if there is a terrorist attack with nukes?
There’s a lot of techincal detail about the construction of a good home-made bomb; but ultimately, the number one impediment is how to get sufficient fissible material. It’s one of the major delays in both the Manhattan project and Iran’s current effort. The problems are even worse for a private group, simply due to the scale and amount of processing required, not to mention the technical complexity. It’s not a job for cheap labour or zombies. (Clancy cheats by having the Israelis deliver the necessary material in the novel.) Plus, if you try to buy enough raw material like yellowcake, that will attract the attention of any CIA analysts not already busy fabricating evidence of yellowcake sales.
My understanding is that there was no idea about fallout until after the bombs were detonated. Possibly they knew about residual radiation and maybe not but when people started dying in Japan after the original explosions, it was a real “holy crap!” moment for the scientists.
Actually the Japanese were not impressed by the bombing of Hiroshima. Prof Nishina reported to the Japanese War Cabinet that USA could not have many bombs and accordingly the Japanese did not surrender because of use by USA of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was the sudden invasion of Manchuria, Korea and the Kurils which finally persuaded the Japanese to surrender, not Allied A-bombs.
You only need about 150 grams of Uranium or Plutonium if you use the Nazi method developed between 1942 and 1943 by Schumann and Trinks. They applied a plasma pinch external to the Uranium with explosive hollow charges causing a small thermonuclear detonation between Lithium-6 and Deuteride to spark a fissile explosion in Uranium.
Also youdo not need a huge enrichment plant or a nuclear reactor either… just type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron to transmute Thorium 232 or Uranium 238.
Several of these synchrotrons were discovered by ALSOS in Germany/Austria in 1945.
Do you have some cites for this? In the other thread your cite went to a board discussing aircraft. You’ll have no problem discussing the details here, there are plenty of physicists who will understand it. This doesn’t seem to be commonly known information.