So let’s say that Hitler’s people develop the atom bomb at some point during the war. At what point during the war would it have been able to change the winner? I doubt that it would have been much use as the soviets approached Berlin, for one thing they wouldn’t have had the logistics to build any bombs at that point and for another it was just too late for anything to save them.
Germany was so far away from developing an a-bomb, that the hypothetical allows any outcome that you can imagine.
They were firing V-2s at London in September, 1944.
Where was the Russian front line in September 1944?
Of course, Oskar Schindler would have built them, and they would never go off.
The problem is that the German’s really had no way to delivering it. The Americans suspected they could have put it on a ship and delivered it to a port using a neutral freighter but even then that makes your targets highly limited. If the Germans could somehow smuggle the bomb into the River Thames and detonated it in London before 1943 they most likely could have forced England to surrender but then again that still leaves the Soviets (who they have absolutely no real way to deliver the warhead to) and the Americans (who they could detonate a nuke the same way in New York City or Washington DC, but the United States was already fully committed to dropping their own nukes on Germany if they detonated first).
Germany with a nuke in 1940/1941 could have won them the war since they could have won against France/England and occupied them with it but the moment they fight the Soviet Union all is lost.
One thing about the Soviet Union is, centrally planned economies have obvious single points of failure. A single nuke to Moscow would have killed the Soviet war machine, I think.
Sure, all the factories making tanks and planes would still be intact, and so would all the military units. But the pieces of paper - endless streams of them - needed to centrally plan the entire economy and to actually make sure the right number of tank sprockets are made, etc - all that paper gets vaporized, as well as many of the bureaucrats who were pushing it. I think the Red Army would have collapsed within months from lack of resupply.
If Hitler has just a handful of devices, well, yes, he could nuke London and Moscow. If either side appears to be recovering, drop a couple more on key targets. Remember the incredibly tight concentration of Allied Forces during the weeks immediately following D-day? Imagine what a few nukes could do to blow holes in the Allied pocket. Or just hit the assembly areas in Britain, used by allies to organize their forces for that invasion.
Alt Fiction Autor Robert Conroy addressed that in Himmler’s War. Conroy is far more clued-in than most Alt-Fiction authors.
Bottom line: Things would’ve been ugly; Germany still goes down hard.
How many weapons did Conroy reckon they had, and how did they deliver them?
Little Boy weighed 9,700 Lbs, and the V-2 warhead was 2,200 Lbs of amatol.
They managed one, and clandestinely smuggled the pieces-parts (and assembly team) into a Moscow suburb. By truck - Two trucks, actually.
I think the Russians would have kept fighting to the last man/woman/child with broomsticks and rocks if they had to. And they probably would have run out of broomsticks pretty quick.
Conroy indicates that, yes. He suggests that bombing moscow and eliminating the top brass would have caused sufficient confusion and power scrambling to allow a more organized retreat and consolidation of defensive positions, with subsequent stalling of the Soviet drive - Not from a lack of desire for vengeance on the part of teh Soviets, but basically due to chaos and improved defenses.
Of course, the entire premise of the book is “What might happen if someone dropped a stick of bombs on Hitler?”