1. How close were the Germans and Japaneese and Russians to building an atomic bomb, were they even working on it?
2. When did the US conceive of an atomic bomb? When did the US start trying to build one? Did we start first, or did Germany start first?
3. How long after the war ended did it take for the Russians to make their first atomic bomb?
You are asking for what happened in the real world and not this series, I assume?
1. All major powers worked on atomic bombs. Mostly were too far behind to matter by war's end. The Germans had experiments going on in Norway which were sabotaged by British commandos & Norwegian resistance. That was a big set back to their program although Hitler thought little of the idea as it was "Jewish science."
2. The US & UK benefited from German & other European scientists who fled the Nazis. The US program got a working bomb tested in 1945 and of course used 2 bombs against Japan later that year. I forget exact dates but the Manhattan Project was under way for years, perhaps even prior to the war starting. Einstein wrote FDR a letter saying the US needed to work on such a device as the Germans would make one first if we hesitated. The Germans were probably on the wrong track but the sabotage perhaps saved us from an atomic Germany.
3. Russian spies in the US stole the atomic secrets and had a bomb ready by 1949. The Soviets were quite good at stealing and imitating.
In the world of this show, apparently the US doesn't work on a bomb and Germany gets there first. Washington DC is destroyed by a German bomb which takes the fight out of the US.
if man is 5
then the devil is 6
if the devil is 6
then God is 7
and if God is 7...
Adamwarlock you are 100% correct about the Manhatten Project. But what I think happened is that somehow Hitler saw this in the films early on and changed the course of history by keeping the scientist from fleeing to America. This allowed Germany to build the weapon first and bomb Washington DC, thus causing America to surrender. "The future belongs to those who change It".
shareThanks for the replies.
shareIf this were a real science fiction story then the Bomb and the breakdown in the walls between different realities would be somehow connected. The schematic of the Heisenberg Device that we see in the first episode of season 2 doesn't look at all like either a gun or an implosion type fission bomb. I've yet to see the entire second season but I still hope there will be a connection.
shareThis may be an odd question, but why didn't Japan or Germany attack the US mainland? I know we thought they might, but why didn't they? We attacked both Japan and Germany especially from the air, so why didn't either of them even try? Were they really just undermanned and under equipped? Were we that much more powerful?
shareThere were minor attempts - a Japanese I boat shelled the California coast a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
And German U-boats operated so closely to the US coast that people at an amusement park in Miami Florida were able to watch a tanker being torpedoed by a surfaced U boat.
But, Germany didn't have the long range air or bases close enough to the US to launch attacks on the US mainland. And, no surface navy and aircraft carriers capable of operating in a sustained way off the Atlantic coast.
And, Japan didn't have any bases or long range aircraft capable of reaching the West Coast and they didn't want to risk their aircraft carriers so close to the US.
Landing large numbers of troops by either Japan or Germany on US coasts was never a serious concern. Because neither country (especially Germany) could project the kind of naval power that would be required to land and support a large invasion force.
Both countries, in any case, assumed wrongly that the US would be deterred by early setbacks and not have to be invaded and occupied directly.
Unlike today, planes couldn't reach across an ocean without refueling. The Allies could bomb Germany from Britain and later from Africa and Italy. We couldn't bomb Japan until 1944 when we had air bases in the Marianas Islands which were close enough.
Japan & Germany thought about an attack on the Panama Canal which would have messed up our navies but the costs were too high as it would be a suicide mission. Japan had subs that had folded airplanes inside and could launch from the surface but would have to ditch on return if there would be one.
Also, Japan did send thousands of balloon bombs to the US with the hope of huge forest fires in the western US but most were found and never exploded.
if man is 5
then the devil is 6
if the devil is 6
then God is 7
and if God is 7...
The schematic of the Heisenberg Device that we see in the first episode of season 2 doesn't look at all like either a gun or an implosion type fission bomb.
The show often talks about the A-bomb as the "Heisenberg Device" this is based on German scientist Werner Heisenberg who was the head of the real world German atomic project. He was a genius and did work on an experimental nuclear reactor during the war but the project was never funded like the Manhattan project and they were years away from anything. They actually had not even worked out the possibility of making an atomic bomb and most of the scientists thought to get to critical mass you would need a huge device (that would never fit in a plane or a rocket). Many even expressed skepticism at first after the first reports from the bombing of Hiroshima.
The Japanese focused more on chemical and biological research for their version of WMDs. The Russians had nothing going on during the war but did quickly ramp up after, mostly with using tech stolen via spies from the Manhattan project.
they were very close
Nazis were atleast 18 months ahead of the allies in 1941
http://www.nww2m.com/2011/09/the-mysterious-meeting-between-niels-bohr-and-werner-heisenberg/
"Heisenberg apparently assumed that Bohr was not convinced of the feasibility of building a bomb, but this was mistaken. By handing over the drawing to Bohr, Heisenberg had committed a treasonous act. Heisenberg appears to have thought that this would indicate to Bohr that the Germans had not produced great progress in building an actual bomb. He claimed that he hoped to initiate, through Bohr, a conversation to the physicists in America to resist building a bomb. If physicists on both sides tacitly refused to work on nuclear fission, the world would be spared of the future reality of the bomb and its destruction. But Bohr suspected Heisenberg was trying to gain intelligence information for Germany on the Allied efforts by convincing him that Germany would soon have an atomic bomb. He did not fully understand that the drawing was of a reactor until he handed it over to the physicists at Los Alamos in late 1943, who identified it as a reactor, not a bomb."
I think they were farther away than we were. We got to it in part because we started winning the war in 42-43 and they had to scramble to stay afloat.
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