Wow, you don't know anything about nuclear bombs
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing.
The bomb is most effective dropped from the air ... the optimal altitude for mass casualties.
I've read comparisons of how effective ground burst, air bursts and harbor bursts are at causing casualties -- and infrastructure damage. It has been a long time, and I don't recall the details. I recall however that all three kinds of explosion cause unbelievably shocking casualties and damage.
That, of course, assumes that the Germans could have even gotten the bomb to the US. Your first idea assumes that the Germans had a merchant capable of doing such a thing. That's a dubious claim. Between the American and British navies the surface of the navy was dominated by the Allies. How a German vessel is supposed to travel 3000 miles without being detected only you know.
If you are as informed about Germany's capabilities prior to and during the actual World War 2, then surely you are aware that the German Navy took some of the best, most modern freighters out of the German Merchant Marine, and re-adapted them to serve as stealth merchant raiders. Many of these were banana boats, fast freighter that had powerful electrical systems for their refrigerated holds for shipping perishable food from the tropics back to Europe. They were 19 of these ships.
I had a paperback book that devoted a chapter to the voyage of each vessel. The ships carried naval sized crews, with workshops, paint stores, and other props, to let them masquerade as a vast range of genuine merchant vessels from other nations. The ships were large enough to carry the same kind of spotter planes as cruisers and battleships carried. (Launched by catapult, land on the ocean, on pontoons, so there is your airburst.)
Don't forget, since this is fiction, we can talk about Germany's capabilities if the allies let Germany swallow half of Poland, and delay its attacks for a year, or two, or several.
The u-boat possibility is more plausible, but it is limited by the fact that a nuclear bomb is awfully big. Whatever weapon it could have carried would not have been as large as the ones dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The USA's first A-bombs were very large, several thousand tons -- still they were dwarfed, in size at least, by the RAF's Grandslam conventional bombs.
The large size of the Fatman and Littleboy designs was not a requirement of conventional A-bombs. Within a decade or so the USA was able to make tactical nuclear weapons that could be fired from an 8 inch cannon.
Hey! That would be another way of delivering your air-burst... Stealth freighter with a big old cannon gets close enough, unmasks it cannon, drops its ruse de guerre flag, and raises a German flag --fires its cannon -- goodbye Manhattan, Goodbye Boston.
Yes, the USA has inland cities, out of range of large caliber cannons, or short range aircraft. But, on the other hand, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan were totalitarian states. As such the fearless leader could try to force citizens to fight to the last man. Who is to say that if the USA lost Manhattan, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, to A bombs, and believed the Germans had more A-bombs in stock, that the US resolve to continue the war wouldn't erode as thoroughly as France's resolve eroded in May 1940?
WRT U-boats, don't forget that some very large prototype submarines were built prior to WW2. Somebody, the French maybe, built one that was large enough to have an armored turret, with a pair of six inch guns. The Japanes developed a double hulled sub capable of launching three large fighter-bombers.
If the USA could shrink a Hiroshima sized bomb into an eight inch artillery shell, surely Germany could build a disposable sub around a one-use large calibre cannon. Send a pair of subs to a coastline, a skeleton crew mans the sub built around the disposable cannon. Another skeleton crew mans the rescue sub. Since the cannon will only be used once you can dispense with a complicated breach. When the sub is in the right location play with the ballast tanks so it points out of the water, at a 45 degree angle. The skeleton crew hops in their rubber rafts, and climbs aboard the return craft. Fire the cannon, dive the return craft, and get away.
What was the range of a big cannon, in World War 1 and World War 2? I dunno. 10, 15, 20 miles? But the Germans did build a couple of super-large cannons, so large they were moved around on special railway flatcars. I recall they were supposed to be able to fire all the way across the English Channel.
If the goal was to propel a shell more or less the size of the old tactical nuke 8 inch shell, as far as possible -- as opposed to firing a much heavier conventional explosive shell a lesser distance, maybe the range could have been one hundred miles, or more.
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