this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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Explanation: In WW2, Nazi Germany, near the end of the war, was constantly searching for wunderwaffen - 'wonder weapons' - that would FINALLY TURN THE TIDE OF THE WAR for them. They made all sorts of experiments - from early jet fighters, to piloted missiles (lethal to the pilot), to bigger and deadlier tanks, to ultra-optimized guns that could be stamped out of scrap.
None of this was enough to change the course of the war, of course. It was grasping at straws from a brutal regime that had lodged itself in an unwinnable fight with no way out.
Meanwhile, the US was working on fucking nuclear weapons, which, if the Allies were not already winning the war, sure as hell would've changed the balance of power. Germany surrendered before the atomic bomb was finished, but Japan held out for several months after Germany's surrender - unfortunately for Hiroshima and Nagasaki - until the bombs were ready.
Er, well, there actually was a German nuclear project during WWII (nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin in 1938), which is why the Einstein-Szilard letter was written to FDR. Germany was actually ahead in nuclear physics research, but fascism destroyed the scientific community.
Oh, so that's where we are now.
Actually, the OSS (The CIA's precursor) did set a spy upon Werner Heisenberg, the head of Nazi Germany's nuclear research programme, with the mission to assassinate him if there was any indication the Nazis were close to building a nuclear weapon.
He found out that the Nazis were nowhere close, so Heisenberg got to live.
For a while there his survival was uncertain.
Sure, their position was nowhere close, but how fast were they moving?
Probably… uncertain.
Not very fast, and they ran into some issues.
But don't you see? It'd have compromised the Reich's German character to continue doing such dangerous Jewish science!
Btw Wunderwaffen is the plural, wonder weapon would be Wunderwaffe
I see! I'll edit the comment!
And the US nuclear program, both the initial Manhattan project and the fusion bomb project was headed by Hungarian scientists who fled nazism in Europe.
Not so fun fact: the reason they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was because there was nothing left to bomb
Where did you get that from?
Hiroshima was at that point still completely unharmed, had no prisons for captured American soldiers and was roughly the same size as German cities that were previously bombed, so they had an easy way to compare the effectiveness of the bombs to classic bombing campaigns. Nagasaki was just a fallback target because Kokura was too cloudy (which Nagasaki was then as well, but they didn't have enough fuel to return with the bomb on board, so they decided to drop it anyway).
Actually, the intended target cities had been deliberately spared conventional bombing raids in order to better assess and evaluate the then yet unknown (or, just vaguely known, after the Trinity test) damage potential of nuclear weapons.