If my high school history serves me correctly, Germany surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945. I also believe that the first atomic weapon was dropped on Japan on August 6, 1945, which led to Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945 (yes, I am aware that two weapons were dropped on Japan).
So my first question is when did the US first have the capability to drop an atomic weapon during WWII?
And second, assuming that the US had the capability sometime in early 1945 was there any thought of targeting Germany, or was the war winding down enough so that it was never a consideration?
The US was capable of dropping the bomb on Germany by late July, 1945, at which time Germany had already surrendered. During the bomb’s development, dropping it on Germany was absolutely considered, and probably would have happened had Germany not surrendered before the weapon was available for use.
The Trinity test (the first test of nuclear weapon) was conducted on July 16, 1945. The same type of device (a plutonium implosion device) was used on Nagasaki, on August 9, 1945 (about 3 weeks later).
The gun-type uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima was not tested before use because its design was very simple, and because the supply of enriched uranium was extremely limited at the time.
So basically, the time that elapsed between the U.S. becoming nuclear-capable to deploying atomic bombs in war was just a few weeks.
If the bombs had been ready earlier, they most certainly would have been used on Germany. However, by early 1945 Germany was collapsing. IIRC, Germany’s last major counter-offensive was in late 1944.
The atomic bomb was originally intended to be dropped on Germany first. By the time they got to the point where it looked like they could actually make the bomb work, the war in Europe had already progressed to the point where Germany’s defeat was almost inevitable. At that point some of the scientists questioned whether development of the bomb should even continue, but the folks in charge had already shifted their sights to Japan.
So they wanted to drop a bomb on Germany before they had a bomb to drop, but once they had a bomb to drop they no longer needed to drop it on Germany.
In hindsight, the earliest date at which the US had a usable weapon was a couple of days before July 16th, but it was used in the Trinity test. If it’s been deployed in combat instead, add about a week or so to that for a delivery date.
A slightly murky issue. Early on during the Manhattan project there was some discussion of how such a weapon could be used and the suggestion proposed was bombing the Japanese fleet, not a target in Germany. Some have suggested that this reveals different US attitudes towards the two enemies. On the other hand, if you have to envisage a large, purely military target that the weapon could be used against, then the Japanese fleet was the obvious one at the time. (The German navy spent most of the war bottled up in port, so it wasn’t an equivalent “clean” target.) By the time the weapon was available in 1945, several years of strategic bombing had led attitudes to harden and so the planners were more ready to use it against a city.
There’s then surprising little explicit discussion of what the bomb will be used against until the spring of 1945, when Germany has already obviously lost. Roosevelt and Churchill did agree in their meeting at Hyde Park on 19th Sept 1944 that “it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese”, but they were probably already not expecting it to be available for another year. During the Battle of the Bulge, as the Germans counterattacted in the west, Roosevelt did make a frustrated comment to Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan project, that he wished the bomb was ready so he could show the Germans. But, in practice, there was never any groundwork laid for deploying it in Europe.
Of course, most of those working on it who knew what the weapon was had always assumed that beating Germany to it was the purpose of the programme. Once it became obvious that Germany was defeated, some of them did question whether the weapon was needed. They were over-ruled.
Another point to consider is that the 509th Composite Group, the B-29 unit that dropped the bombs, was only activated in December 1944. It then took a further six months for the group to complete their training for the missions and for their aircraft to be modified to carry the bombs. This was a normal length of time for a specialist unit to come on-line, so it would have been known that the aircraft would not be ready until mid 1945.
I need to call the cite card on this. At least by 1943 it was obvious that Germany would lose, on the one hand, and to drop such a bomb in western Europe would be politically insane, on the other, aside of being strategically pointless. Also, Soviet Union was part of the Allies, and why on earth would they agree on dropping a bomb in the same Third Reich the Red Army was about to invade?
I might be wrong, but I would need some serious cites to be convinced. It just seems so totally unbelievable that “they wanted to drop a bomb on Germany”, to me.
After killing a quarter of a million people in Dresden, what’s one more bomb? It was only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki (long after them, in some cases) that people started thinking of nukes as something other than “really powerful explosives.”
I’m probably closer in age to WW I than many Dopers are to WW II !
That may be the reason why many questions about the A-bomb seem surprising to me. (For example, in the Presidential Elimination Game, one Doper voted out Truman because of the bomb, then corrected that to “bombing of civilians.” Uh … Dresden and Tokyo were bombed under FDR not HST. )
Some oversimplifications are useful but “WW II == when America dropped The Bomb” is too silly of an over-simplification for words.
According to Wikipedia, that quarter million figure is a gross exaggeration. However it is true that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively “drops in the bucket” amid the WW II slaughter.
I don’t belive that anything in this is true. Not the figures, not the assumption that a A bomb over Germany would be just another bomb, politically, and certainly not the notion that a nuke was perceived as nothing but a really powerful explosive at the time.
Again, why do you think Stalin would have a problem with the U.S. killing Germans? Considering the amount of Germans the Russians were killing at the time, he probably would have considered an A-bomb too soft.
The Germans had killed over 10 million Russians. Do you really think they would have offered anything other than a round of applause?
As to whether nukes were not considered just “big bombs” - what other frame of reference did they have?
What do you think the bomb was being developed for? Japan was always second fiddle.
You’re applying modern attitude towards nuclear weapons incorrectly to the time period. Nuking someone today carries a far greater implication than it did then - we were wiping out cities with conventional bombing and millions of people were getting killed. We also didn’t really know much about the radiation and longer term effects of nuclear weapons. If the first nuke was ready to go in 1943, it would’ve been dropped right on Berlin.
As late as the 50’s, the U.S. military was exposing thousands of its own troops to lethal levels of radiation as part of training exercises. People really had no idea how dangerous radiation really was.
The Russians would have had no problem storming a nuked Berlin. Can’t be worse than a Russian winter, right?
In wasn’t that certain in 1943 that Germany would lose. They had suffered a reverse on the Eastern Front in the summer but the German Army had recovered before and come back stronger. The invasion of Sicily was only in July and that was an awful long way from Berlin. Despite the sustained air attack German industry was producing more tanks, planes, and guns than ever. But the real clincher was not whether Germany would lose but how many Allied - and especially American - lives would be lost in the process. That was the equation with Japan and there is no reason to think the logic would have been any different if the bomb had been available in late 1944 when the Western Allies were stalled at the German frontier.
There was absolutely no question of the Soviets “agreeing” to the bomb being dropped. The bomb would be used where and when the American President decided - with some input from the British Prime Minister, but not much! In fact many senior figures were already thinking about the post-war period when the alliance broke down and the Red Army were sitting on half of Europe. Ending the war swiftly before the Red Army reached far into central Europe would have looked an excellent option.
Others have made the point already but at the end of WW2 the atom bomb was not seen as qualitatively different to other weapons. I think it was Curtis Lemay who, when told of the bomb in July 1945, shrugged and indicated it didn’t matter to him whether Japanese cities were destroyed by one bomber with an atom bomb or hundereds with incendiaries.
A much stronger explosive and a “secret weapon”, yes. But Alessan is right in essence – we see any use of nuclear weapons as, well, the “nuclear option” in its most literal sense, the crossing of a Rubicon. They did not regard it in that way for years after World War II . (That amorphous “they” would be the average citizen and the typical political leader, not the handful that were intensely focused on the ethics and long-range effects of the use of nukes.
If the allies had the bomb in time and had knowledge that much of the German high command, especially Adolph, were in one place… I really bet none of the allies would have any compunction about destroying, say, most of downtown Berlin or what was left of it, to take out his bunker.
Even during the war some people foresaw that the invasion of Sicily put the Allies farther from victory. Invading the toe of Italy places probably the longest stretch of easily-defended mountains and rivers between an attacker and Berlin that the geography of Western Europe allows; it’s probably the worst possible choice, and if you’re the Germans, it’s certainly the one place you’d be happiest to see the enemy invade, if they’re going to invade at all.
It was Einstein’s 1939 letter to FDR, at the behest of Leo Szilard, that really got the ball rolling for the Manhattan Project. See here: Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt, August 2, 1939. Einstein and Szilard were alarmed by Hitler’s research progress. Had an American or British A-bomb been ready in time, and had there been an appropriate target, it would surely have been dropped on a German and not a Japanese target.
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