Nazi Germany did use the Atomic bomb from July 1942 on the Russian Front. This was a tactical nuclear weapon known as the Z-pinch hollow charge warhead.
At the heart of the Z-pinch warhead was a 5kg marble of slightly enriched uranium (LEU) within a spherical cavity. Some reports suggest the cavity was a vacuum and others suggest a sphere filled with Deuterium. Germans experimented with different variations on this theme and applied for various patents along the same theme. One had a Uranium marble at the centre said to be coated with Lithium Deuteride. Other descriptions suggest a Conical Lithium Liner was imploded at a sphere filled with Deuterium at the heart of which was a fissile mass.
21D + 63Li → 2 42He + 22.4 MeV
The resulting collision of Lithium with Deuterium released fast Neutrons with 22.4 MeV energy. With just 1 MeV energy even natural unenriched Uranium 238 can be caused to fission.
It is a little known fact that Hitler was threatened with the Atomic bombing of Dresden in October 1944 (via Lisbon) followed by a discreet threat to use Anthrax against Germany made directly by Churchill to Hitler (via the political opposition in Romania) which caused the Nazis to abandon their nuclear aspirations. Hitler concluded a secret peace deal in which he was allowed to fly out of Berlin for Spain on the night of 27 April 1945. Hitler died of a massive coronary at General Franco’s Presidential Palace in the early hours of 2 November 1947.
Western Allies maintained a charade about Hitler’s fate and to conceal Germany’s nuclear achievements in order to prevent the Soviet Union gaining legal access to captured nuclear material & scientists. The mistrust which this spawned caused the ensuing Cold War.
In Germany Franz Thomanek from the Aviation Research Centre at Braunschweig made a breakthrough discovery in 1935 which led to use of Hollow charge explosives with conical Lithium liners and Deuterium to create nuclear fusion. From this research in 1938 by the Physics Institute at the University of Heidelberg led to development of tactical nuclear weapons by Dr Otto Haxel, Dr Trinks and Dr Kurt Diebner.
An excerpt from several pages of the Stockholm signal kindly provided to me by expert nuclear historian William Pellas. This mentions the Uranium Atom smashing bomb used by Germany in 1942. If William Pellas permits me, I can publish the rest of the signal here.
The results of this weapon’s use was witnessed in 1942 and described by a Japanese military liason consular official. It was described in diplomatic signals decrypted by the United States. The Stockholm signal between Tokyo and the Japanese embassy in Sweden dated 9 December 1944 described this warhead as a 5 kilogram Uranium Atom smashing warhead. It was decrypted in WW2 and not opened again until 1978.
Below is another extract from a June 1945 US Navy Intelligence report on German technical transfer to Japan during WW2:
The title page of the US Navy Intelligence report:
Links to the above are found here:
This tactical nuclear warhead is often referred to as the Schumann/Trinks warhead for those who developed it. The Zinsser affidavit refers to a witnessed nuclear test explosion in October 1944
Today it would be referred to as a Fusion boosted Fission warhead
From October 1944 the SS took over Atomic bomb research from the German Army and Navy.
Furthermore in correspondence with German researcher & lawyer Dirk Finkemeier and his friend Major Keith Sanders (retd) I learned of the capture in April 1945 of an underground nuclear facility at Espelkamp where Sanders’ father father Corporal Llyewellyn Sanders RAOC entered an underground factory to discover 100 Uranium centrifuges and a working “I.G.Farben” nuclear reactor in April 1945. The centrifuges were manufactured by Anschutz & Co., Hamburg, Dr Konrad Beyerle later taught the British how to use them postwar.
After WW2 a number of Nazi scientists (plus Dr Konrad Beyerle) were taken to Farm Hall for internment in a camp at Alswede, next to Espelkamp. Here the UK secretly maintained the German facility in operation until 1948 to serve Britain’s own Atomic weapons program. When USA discovered this in 1947, Britain was expelled from the Manhattan Project.
The Nazis were far more advanced than was ever credited to them. Reports on the Nazi nuclear effort were usually narrowly focused on one aspect in isolation and Allied intelligence report authors were often not privy to an overview of all the facts.
As an example of this was the 1946 report by Jessie Beams (G-344) which downplayed the effectiveness of German centrifuges despite the fact the Manahattan project had tried and failed to develop uranium centrifuges. The Beams report tried to imply that the Germans had copied American work on centrifuges from 1936–38 and ignored the fact that German centrifuges were 30 times more efficient at enrichment than the American porous barrier method.
Allied retelling of Germany’s nuclear effort portrayed Werner Heisenberg as the leader of Germany’s wartime efforts to develop nuclear weapons when in fact he was just a peripheral researcher in development of nuclear reactors, not nuclear weapons development.
Declaration by United Nations - Wikipedia
The 1942 Declaration of the United Nations formally obliged the US & Britain to share with China and Soviet Russia access to all captured scientist and technology. By distorting historic accounts Western Allies were able to refuse to share technology with Russia by denial that anything viable existed.
Try researching the Anthrax threat against germany and you will find very few sources. One however was letters by the Nazi nuclear scientist Dr Paul Harteck to Joseph Borkin after the was which corroborate what I am saying.
The US Government in particular refused to allow nuclear weapons technology to fall into Soviet hands. What these western Allies did not count upon was that many German & Japanese Nuclear scientists preferred to work for the Soviets By distorting the historical account. Another thing was that the Soviet advances in manchuria and at Hungnam Korea captured Japan’s nuclear laboratories.
So in answer to the original Question what would have happened if Germany got the Atomic Bomb first, the result is exactly what did happen. USA used bluf and threats, whilst Churchill intimidated Hitler with use of Anthrax. By late 1944 Germany lacked air superiority over Britain and could no longer deliver warheads to the UK
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