Speaking as an RTS player with thousands of simulated battles but zero real combat experience, the bird’s eye view of ww2, with the benefit of hindsight, is that the nuclear bomb was the ultimate weapon and it could be deployed with almost no casualties to the attacker.
Also, the United States had vast resources and was in absolutely no strategic danger during ww2.
So, it brings to mind an obvious strategy. Post Pearl Harbor, get revenge with a few punitive strikes, but don’t start a broader war with Japan. Negotiate a deal, get the POWs back. Do invest heavily in a bigger navy.
Give much less lend lease to the Soviets - maybe none. Let them kill themselves fighting the Germans. Helping them is arguably one of the biggest strategic mistakes the USA ever made. Even to this day they are holding a gun to our heads in the form of thousands of ICBMs - the Nazis were never as dangerous as the Soviets became.
And in the meantime, put all the blood and treasure that went into fighting ww2 into rushing nukes into large scale production. The U.S. would also need a deployment strategy - perhaps a super-long range heavy bomber.
Once the nukes are available in quantity, well, the rest is obvious. Nuke all the major cities of Nazi Germany, nuke the Russians if a way to reach Moscow by air can be devised, nuke the Japanese…win the whole damn war with just a few thousand U.S. casualties tops.
I am aware that the biggest problem is period aircraft didn’t have the range to do this, and period short-range ballistic missiles were a research project by the Nazis rushed into production. Perhaps instead of “island hopping”, the U.S. could have devised a way to launch nuclear-capable bombers from carriers, and used this to basically just sail across the Pacific right for the Japanese home islands.
Nobody felt that nuclear weapons were a sure thing in 1941. We would have looked kind of stupid if we had based all of our strategic planning on a single weapon system and then found out it didn’t work - or would take twenty years to develop.
And nuclear weapons weren’t quite as war winning as you imagine. They ended the war in 1945 because Japan had already been greatly weakened by conventional warfare. Here’s a hypothetical; suppose the war had gone the same way it did historically but Japan had somehow managed to build two atomic bomb rather than America and had bombed Washington and New York in August 1945. Do you think the United States would have surrendered like Japan did? Of course not.
No, that isn’t the biggest problem, not by a long shot. The biggest problem would be “how can we figure out whether an atomic weapon is feasible at all?”
(N.B.: We didn’t have nuclear weapons during WWII; rather, we had atomic ones. That may sound like nitpicking, but I think it speaks to the OP’s understanding of the complexity and uncertainty surrounding the Manhattan Project).
Some physicists were concerned that an atomic bomb would set the earth’s atmosphere on fire, though I understand this wasn’t a serious worry at the Trinity site. Hitler was obsessed with “wonder weapons,” and the Germans put a lot of effort into the atomic bomb, but obviously never quite got there. On December 7th, 1941, it was not obvious that atomic energy could be weaponized at all.
Fermi’s Chicago Pile (great band name!) had demonstrated that a self-sustaining chain reaction was possible, but that was almost exactly a year after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. You’re suggesting that the entire US strategy for WWII should have been to sit on its hands and throw money at an esoteric science project barely understood by non-physicists. Convincing the President and the American people to accept such a plan is a total non-starter.
Given what was known at the time, even crackpots would have given that strategy a wide berth. As the bromide goes, hindsight is 20/20. You seem to be overlooking the fact that foresight is not remotely 20/20.
In hindsight, yes, it would have worked. But the postwar situation would be a lot worse. Having an economically prosperous NATO/West Europe (Marshall Plan, etc.) was good for the USA. Also, the United States would have to be in permanent extreme-vigilance mode from that point on, because Russia might always be looking for a way to get back. The Russians would want to build up their own nukes and retaliate - and the USA would have to nuke Russian weapons-manufacturing and nuclear facilities, over and over again, to prevent Moscow from ever “getting back”. Ditto perhaps for Japan, Germany, etc.
The biggest problem with this plan are the fact that nothing could have dropped an atomic bomb in 1945 except a heavy bomber, and there’s no way for a heavy bomber to take off from a carrier. The B-29 and Avro Lancaster are the two bombers that could have dropped it without lengthy and extensive modifications and both were too big for carrier use.
In addition, without the required achievement of air supremacy over the target it would be much too risky for the bomber to go in, especially against Nazi Germany. We didn’t have enough atomic bombs to be able to simply fill the sky with nuclear bombers and hope one got through. So you both need bases for the heavy bomber to take off of, and a ton of fighters to clear the skies for it which requires a lot of combat beforehand to achieve.
So basically you do have to refight WW2 in order to accomplish both those objectives.
Hindsight is 20/20 of course and it’s very important in these discussions to remember what would be reasonable assumptions given the knowledge at the time and what are products simply of Monday morning quarterbacking where we know all the answers and carefully construct scenarios to fit the results.
I can’t see any justification for this assertion. The only reason it can be stated was because the Nazis were defeated and there wasn’t a hot war with the Soviets. Had the Nazis defeated the Soviets and been able to obtain the bomb, there is no reason to believe that they would not also have become as dangerous if not more.
Japan would not have been defeated by atomic bombing alone. Most of the cities were already destroyed by firebombing already and we know that wasn’t enough. Without island hopping, then we couldn’t have gotten close enough to possibly invade Japan and without the threat of an invasion, Japan would never have surrendered.
Actually only the Lancaster could have dropped it and the sceintists and engineers designed the bombs with reference to its bomb bay dimensions. The Lancaster was basically a huge bom bay with wings and engines attached… The B-29 had a larger bomb load, but carried two medium sized bomb bays instead of one big one, and those could not carry the bomb. The Silverplate modification, which carried out the missions, was a factory level build, with one larger bay and one smaller bay.
Germany was working on it also and the attacks on their homeland slowed that effort down. Without the US entering the war, Germany might have succeeded, and with command of the seas of the Atlantic and even with rocket propulsion advancing in Germany could deliver it to the US homeland. Turtling would have also slowed or halted fleeing German scientists which would limit our knowledge in atomics. The war in Europe could not wait.
Japan OTOH may have been able to stall off. But this was based on a Hail Mary that may not have panned out, and also the delay would allow Japanese troops to harden their locations on various islands, for which a nuke is not the ideal removal tool. A larger battle in Alaska may have been a real possibility, as it was Japan did invade Alaska to a small extent and held a island.
What would have been our justification for bombing the USSR during WW2?
Also, the whole “nukes are available in quantity” thing would have taken a very long time. It wasn’t until a year after Pearl Harbor that we even knew whether we had access to enough uranium for the Manhattan project, let alone enough for numerous bombs. Also, massive resources went into developing the capability to produce enough fissile material for the Trinity test and the two bombs that were actually dropped on Japan. It wasn’t until 1945 or so that we figured out how to produce weapons-grade material in reasonably large quantities.
Also, despite the effort that went into maintaining secrecy regarding the Manhattan Project, foreign spies did extract information. Germany was working on nuclear weapons, and so were the Soviets, the latter conducting their first test in 1949. At the time (i.e. your decision point, just after Pearl Harbor), we didn’t know that; for all we knew, they might have been on the cusp of mass-producing nukes. Once your enemy has nukes, you can no longer use yours without risking a nuclear response; if Japan had had nukes in 1945, we would have been a lot more hesitant about bombing Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
Bottom line, not knowing in 1941 exactly how far along your enemies are on achieving nuclear capability, and not even when or even whether we would achieve nuclear capability ourselves, there really wasn’t a viable alternative to pushing back on Germany and Japan using conventional military force.
“Nuclear” and “atomic” are synonyms, and of the two, “nuclear” is the more accurate term. Ordinary chemical bombs rely on properties of atoms. City-killing bombs like Fat Man and Little Boy depend on the properties of the nucleus. The source of your confusion might be that we did not have thermonuclear bombs in WWII: That’s a bomb that creates a chain reaction via high temperature, or in other words, a fusion rather than purely fission bomb.
To the OP, we really couldn’t have rushed the Manhattan Project any more than we historically did. Throwing more money at the problem simply lets you hire more people, but there were no more people to be hired. You needed very highly qualified people to do meaningful work on the Manhattan Project, and all of them were already working on it. To put it in computer game terms, we were already working with the research slider on 10. The only way to get it done quicker would have required starting sooner.
Ugh. You’re totally right. I was using “nuclear” as an abbreviation for thermonuclear, but having done a little checking, common usage requires “thermo-“ to make the fission/fusion distinction. Thanks for catching my error.
To start with, developing the A-bomb early wouldn’t mean the Soviets wouldn’t have ended up with thousands of nuclear warheads. The Soviets gained important information from U.S. spies. Plus, if the Eastern Front campaign had been even longer and bloodier, Stalin and his successors would have been even more paranoid and more likely to develop WMDs even earlier, because the spies’ information would get there earlier.
Second, there’s the pesky problem of a delivery system. The B-29 didn’t have the range to reach Japan from either Hawaii or Alaska. That would require a B-36. The Air Force made the initial request for a ultralong-range bomber on April 11, 1942. That was 9 months before the Chicago scientists were able to successfully create a chain reaction. Meanwhile, the Air Force had put the B-36 on an accelerated schedule, but it still doesn’t make its first flight until 1946.
So even if you stipulate all the fissile material you want, the only way to drop it on Japan to use a B-29. The B-29 barely had the range to get to Japan from Tinian, which means you have to fight a long, bloody, island-hopping war in the Pacific to even get to Tinian.
Not to mention, the strategy calls for negotiating a truce with Japan, then building a superior force, then declaring war on Japan again on your schedule. How would that work?
And by the way, when Japan overran the Philippines in 1942, the islands were a U.S. commonwealth, every bit as much American as Alaska and Hawaii. How does the cease-fire negotiate its way around that.
Not quite as American as Alaska and Hawaii. The 1934 Tydings–McDuffie Act set the Philippines on a schedule for independence, and redefined Filipinos as aliens, not US nationals or citizens. Weren’t Alaskans and Hawaiians citizens by that point?
Your larger point is absolutely correct, of course. There’s no real-world way the US could have made peace with Japan, developed the atomic bomb, and then attacked them with it. Democracies just don’t work that way. Heck, one of the reasons that the US was considering actually invading the Japanese Home Islands at terrible cost was General Marshall’s belief that the American people would not put up with a seven years’ war.
The B-25 bombers used in the Doolittle raid on Tokyo carried four 500-lb. bombs. The Little Boy bomb used on Hiroshima (that was the smaller of the two bombs) weighed 9,700 lbs.
And remember, both Little Boy and Fat Man had to be armed while in flight, because a crash on take-off could detonate an armed bomb. The B-25 bomb bay simply wasn’t large enough to hold a bomb and give the bombardier work space to arm it.
Really, there comes a point where the physics and engineering hypotheticals get so complicated that it would be easier to send a B-52 back in time.