What if Hitler had the bomb??

alright, kind of a spin-off of the "Atomic Decision" thread but.....

How do you think the war would have changed had Hitler and the Nazis completed their work on the Atomic Bomb before Hitler died?

Obviously it would have changed, but how much? Do you think he would have used it? Where would be his first target(s)?

DUCE

 

Difficult question. Falls under same topic as having biological weapons but not using them. If he had used it, it would have been the only one and I think one of the American A bombs would have been used on Berlin. It would not have changed the course of the war.

 

I think if he had the A bomb he would have used it on the Russians since they were the biggest threat to Germany and causing them the most losses.
A V-2 rocket and a small A bomb would have finished the war in Europe and it would have to be continued from North America or far eastern Russia.

 

Indeed TA152.

The Germans would use it against the Russian troops, but it is also very important to know about what year we talk here.

 

I think whatever the year he would have aimed it at the Russians first-the "subhumans". Then maybe London. The V-2 as the carrier. 1-2 bombs would not have been enough to win the war but , say 5-8 bombs, and he would have had a possibility for negotiations, I think.

Then again would the allied trust Hitler? They might carry on fighting against him and accept the few huge losses because otherwise Hitler would be unstoppable soon with his atomic bombs.

 

An A-bomb? Or a A-missile? Bare in mind that germans would have little chance of dropping the payload.

If he could, he'll prolly drop on Moscow without a doubt, then Russian troop concreations - then he'll move over to the western front.

Just be grateful Hitler didn't have the bomb. He'd of brought the world down with him if he could.

 

The V-2 was a stop gap, and the prototype for a 3 stage rocket was being developed in 1945. True, we need to know in this 'what-if' what year we are talking about. One of the 4 engine creations such as the Ju 390 if further developed could easily have dropped an A-bomb......but again this is a what-if

~E

 

With a record that a weapon like the V-2 had I would have preferred to be many miles away from it upon launch had it been the delivery platform for an "A" weapon.

 

It all depends on which year we are speaking here.

In the first 5 years of the war ('39 - '43), maybe they would have done with airplanes. After that they lost the supperiority above the skies, so then a V1 or V2 would have been possible to carry the nucliair weapon towards its target.

 

Erwin, try early spring of 44......

 

I have to agree with Kai, I think Hitler would have used ahwt A-bombs he had against the hated Untermensch--as he called the Russians.

Also, Hitler is wellknown to have liked the British--at least in the beginning.

 

I think that the year should be by half 1944. I think that the German nuclear programme (without the bombings and commando raids to the Norway heavy-water factories, therefore, an undisturbed programme) would have been completed and tested by March, April 1944 as minimum. But a bomb small enough to fit in a V-2 rocket should have been ready until 1946 at least, as well as another rocket with larger capacity. So, I think a German heavy bomber with one of this bomb could have succeded in, let's say, June 1944 in dropping a bomb on Moscow, beheading the goverment and destroying Russia's nerve centre. Then the huge Red Army on the field would have been busy in reaching power or dealing with political chaos. Besides, Herr Goebbels and his propaganda would have terrified the Russians, who in case they didn't accept they would receive another bomb. The Hitler would have finished with the Eastern Front and menaces to the Western powers should come, because I don't see Hitler destroying London. Maybe a smaller city if the British refused to surrender to what had happened in Russia and Goebbel's propaganda.

 

Inteligence would know where its going, but I think if he used it, Churchill would gas every German city in 2 weeks and make sure fighter command was taking care of ANY strikes.

 

http://education.guardian.co.uk/obituary/story/0,12212,880612,00.html

Nunn May became familiar with the Peierls-Frisch report, on whether a uranium U-235 bomb was feasible, in April 1940. In early 1942 he was recruited by James Chadwick to the Cambridge team working on the possible use of heavy water as the basis for a reactor. It had recently been shown that plutonium, generated in such a reactor, would be as effective as U-235 for making a bomb and that it might be easier to prepare. It was vital to know whether German work on heavy water was likely to have a successful outcome. Nunn May's previous CP membership was known, say his family, but was not seen as a bar to recruitment because the Soviet Union was an ally.

Then came the "dirty bomb" incident. Nunn May was assigned to analyse an American report that proposed that fission products could be used as poisons and delivered against an enemy . The report considered it likely that the Germans did have a working reactor and could use such a weapon either in the west or against the Soviet Union. According to Nunn May, he and others initially accepted this report as accurate in its evaluation of how far the Germans had progressed (it was later shown not to be accurate). Thus, according to him, came the fateful initial contact.


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Actually the "dirty bomb", which is explosives and nuclear waste packed together, makes one nasty bomb. No mushroom cloud but the area is totally unusable for living for a couple of hundreds of years as the waste is spread around with the explosion.

 

Captives of Their Fantasies: The German Atomic Bomb Scientists
Irving M. Klotz
Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-3113

When the Nazi government collapsed in May, 1945, an Allied intelligence mission took into custody nine of the German scientists who played key roles in the German atomic bomb project. Under great secrecy these men were confined in a large country house, Farm Hall, near Cambridge (England), and their conversations were recorded surreptitiously by hidden microphones in every room. The transcripts were kept TOP SECRET for 47 years and were finally released recently. They give fascinating insights into the personalities of the guests and invaluable information on what the Germans really understood about the physics and chemistry of a nuclear reactor and an atomic bomb.

The Farm Hall transcripts clearly establish that (a) the Germans on August 6, 1945 did not believe that the Allies had exploded an atomic bomb over Hiroshima that day; (b) they never succeeded in constructing a self-sustaining nuclear reactor; (c) they were confused about the differences between an atomic bomb and a reactor; (d) they did not know how to correctly calculate the critical mass of a bomb; (e) they thought that "plutonium" was probably element 91. The Farm Hall transcripts contradict the self-serving and sensationalist writings about German efforts that have appeared during the past fifty years.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Citation: Klotz, Irving M. Captives of Their Fantasies: The German Atomic Bomb Scientists J. Chem. Educ. 1997 74 204.
http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/Journal/issues/1997/feb/abs204.html

 

A few problems:

1) A V2 had a maximum load of a little under a ton. The Germans tried various means to increase the payload, all failed. The VI had a smaller payload.

Little Boy had a weight of about 4050 kg, Fat man was 4700 kg. There is no way a V1 or V2 could have carried an atomic weapon. Furthermore, considering the incredible inacuracy and ease of distruction of the V1, and the inacuracy and failure rate of the V2, they would not have wanted to.

2) The German bomb program was destined for total disaster. The german scientists completely overestimated the amunt of fissile materiel required for a sustained reactor, and underestimated the violence of the reaction. Their plan to control the reaction was to throw pieces of coal into the mixture if it became unstable.

This would have led to a complete meltdown, irradiating the entire team and anyone downwind for about 15 miles or so. There were simply too many complete basic mistakes for the German bomb program to have any kind of success. Further, by 1944, Germany had nowhere near the resources required to build an atomic weapon. Consider the enormous finances, time and resouirces that went into the V2 project, including the construction and firin off all the missiles: The manhattan project cost 5 times as much. It is unclear wheither, even at their Peak, the German industry could have produced an atomic weapon with any speed.

If by some miracle they did devop a bomb, the best delivery method would be the Arado 222 jet bomber, with its paylod of 4.5 tons, it could just have managed. It did not have the altitude of the B-29 mind you, so it would have to really move to get out of the blast radius...

In late 1944, it is hard to imagine a place where the bomb could be delivered which would be possible (Moscow too far away) safe for the bomber (Maybe London, maybe not...) and would actually make adifference in the war. The best thing to do would be to drop it on the Russian Army centre, but who knows.

Deployment of any kind of Nuke would have meant that B-29s wuld be deployed in Europe instantly (which the Luftwaffe had no effective way of shooting down) and the dropping of nukes on berlin as soon as possible. the war would have been much messier, but the end would have been the same.

And that all assumes the impossible, that Germany managed to build a bomb at all.

 

Vermillion,

this should interest you: Sarin and Tabun.

http://www.ww2forums.com/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=000355

Maybe no nukes but how about some nerve gas?

 

I have read that book, and the subsequent rebuttals in various peer-reviewed journals. There is no hard evidence at all for the German use of Nerve gas during the war, except for tests conducted on Russian pows.

Speer in his memoirs describes almost pouring an ampoule of Sarin into the Fuhrerbunker at one point, but the veracity of this claim is highly contested.

Hitler had no desire at all to use chemical wepons against the allies for three reasons:
1) He assumed that the United States also had nerve agents, given their advances pesticide and pharmacological industries
2) He knew the allies had vast stockpiles of first generation chemical weapons, which while nowhere near as lethal as Sarin, could still be crippling if delivered in volume.
3) Hitler once declared chemical warfare an abberation of man, and he hated it with a passion. This is likely due to his being gassed in WWI himself. Notably, he did not mind chemical asphyxiation against the Jews, but they were (in his mind) not really human.

 

This posting of Vermillion answers my objection about Hitler's motivation not to use gas - thx.