Along with a cowboy to ride it down to its target, while we’re at it. 
But it is the stated position of the United States Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events.
To be fair the B-36 Peacemaker was specifically designed to drop bombs on European/Asian targets while taking off from North American bases, had it’s first flight in 1947 and post-war was the atomic bomb workhorse for S.A.C. In addition it was only delayed til post-war because it was given a lower priority than the B-29 since having English and Chinese airstrips made it less needed for a full intercontinental bomber.
Given full turtle mode you could have B-36s coming out in 1944 (since it began it’s life before the B-29).
All this talk about the B-29 and the atomic bomb reminds me that the B-29 cost more and required more man-hours to build than the Manhattan project. Of the 2 projects, during WW II the B-29 was the more important one and many strategic decisions by the US took the B-29 into account. Given the uncertain success of the bomb, we can’t say that about the bomb. It didn’t have much effect on the war-up until the very end of course.
Okay, so let’s say you have a squadron of B-36s in 1944.
How do you accelerate the Manhattan project, since it had all the resources it needed?
And just for the sake of the hypothetical, let’s say you have an A-bomb available in December 1944. The Allies have been battling their way through France and Belgium for six months, but the Germans counterattack with the Battle of the Bulge. And in fact, since the Soviets wouldn’t put up as much of a fight on the Eastern Front, Germany can fight even harder. Wouldn’t you use your atomic bombs against the Nazis?* And if you did nuke Berlin, would you find it so horrifying that you wouldn’t use the bombs on Japan?
How much history do we need to rewrite to make the OP’s scenario even possible?
*Because that’s certainly what the European scientists who fled the Nazis, without whose help you wouldn’t have an atomic bomb in the first place, sure thought that’s what they were working toward. Not to mention the military leaders, the British and most of the American public.
I don’t follow this train of thought. The Allies were fine with firebombing Dresden, Tokyo, etc. The use of one nuke on Hiroshima was promptly followed up by another one on Nagasaki days later. If the Allies did nuke Berlin, I think their response would be “Wow, this is great, let’s nuke Japan as well as soon as we can.”
In real life, the battle damage assessment from Hiroshima came in right as the Nagasaki attack occurred.
It led Truman to order a stop to any further bombing without his express approval., more here
He told his Cabinet member (and predecessor as VP) that he did not want to kill “all those kids”.
So in the context of a vicious war, the powers that be were uncomfortable with wanton destruction.
I don’t see how inflicting massive collateral damage on more counties would prevent other countries from getting nukes. Not unless you think having nukes allows you to rule the world with an iron fist forever. It’s not a death star or anything. And once they got them I think they’d be much more likely to use them.
Maybe not with 1945 era fission weapons. 15 years later in 1960, if the USA had been the only country with tens of thousands of megaton class devices (say, because Europe and the USSR were in ruins already), it seems like it could.
It would maintain hundreds of military bases around the world and every country that doesn’t want to be destroyed would have to submit to inspections.
The industrial effort needed to make thousands of megaton class weapons and their delivery system can’t be hidden - one bomb, maybe. Not the hundreds or thousands it would take to threaten the USA with MAD, however.
So in this scenario, any country that develops a few primitive nukes, and doesn’t surrender and pay a penalty immediate, gets nuked in retaliation.
Hanford, not Hartford.
Thank God this didn’t happen. That doesn’t sound like the kind of world I’d want to live in. And I’m an American.
What you’re saying is, the United States destroys roughly half the Northern Hemisphere, builds thousands of nuclear weapons to defend itself against what you yourself said wouldn’t happen (the USSR would be a burning pit, after all)
And do we let the British build bombs? After all, they were actually in front of the U.S. with the Tube Alloys Project, and they’re our buddies. Or can we not trust any other nation with the Bomb because the government might become unfriendly in the future.
But as long as we’ve changed the equation from using two primitive nukes on the 500,000-700,00 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end a war to using nukes on literally hundreds of millions of people to prevent another one, why stop at just deterrence?
How about the civil war in China between the Kuomintang and the Communists? They both sided with us against Japan, but Commies are Commies, so let’s give Chiang Kai-Shek a hand and drop a few bombs in 1946. Remember the pesky Arabs who didn’t like the establishment of Israel in 1948? We could have taught them a lesson right then, and I bet they wouldn’t have acted up ever again. And our brave British and French allies had a few quarrels with their overseas territories in the 1950s and '60s. We could help a buddy out.
I’ll wait while the OP ponders the effects of his Pax Americana and the rest of pray for Klaatu and Gort to arrive.
We’ve barely touched on the other half of the premise: a cease fire between the U.S. and Japan. Shall we turn our attention to that?
As an RTS player, where the dots on the map are just numbers in a computer, this is a completely reasonable thing to do. I can imagine that planners in very high command - Pentagon level, etc - see the lives of both their own citizens and the citizens of other countries as being little more than dots on a map as well.
After all, every dot on your map is going to die eventually - they might as well accomplish something for you. Or people at that level can rationalize it other ways.
Are you asking these questions as a way to develop strategy for an RTS game? In that case, maybe you should ask the mods to move it over to the Game Room.
If you’re asking this as a human being, I suggest you delve into the work ofHerman Kahn, the real-life strategist for the Rand Corp., who was at least a partial inspiration for both Professor Groeteschele in Fail Safe, and Dr. Strangelove.
It seemed to be the former. Probably best to have this sent over to the Game Room Asia has nothing to do with real history.
True. ::o