How many atom bombs would be needed to take out the United States in WW2?

[DerGiLLster]

Okay so please before balking at me for my implausible scenario, just please, for the love of pete, just read carefully.

Again, read carefully, here is the point. I would like to know how many atom bombs it would take to defeat the United States.

Why, it is to understand the industrial capacity of the US and to see what kind of beating their economy could take. No, I am not asking how many before civilians or military could take before surrendering. Hold on.

As I understand, it took two nukes to defeat Japan. Albert Speer(although he is a questionable source) said it take 12 hiroshima style nukes to ruin Germany industrial capacity.

The US had plans to knock out the USSR between 1946-48, with 30-34 bombs on 24 cities.

So how many nukes would it take to destroy the United states? 5? 20? 50? 100? 200?

Please no sarcastic answers. No "more than it would take for them to produce it" I would admire if you could calculate the damage made upon each nuke done to whichever American city, oil refinery, field and steel plant.

[T. A. Gardner]

Probably hundreds. US industry is far more spread out than European or Japanese was. Most US workers had access to an automobile even during the war, so they could live further from work in more dispersed cities. Add to that that the US war production effort was deliberately spread out "just in case." For example, Boeing opened a new plant for their B-29 outside Wichita Kansas. The site was selected because it was about as far as you could get from any border of the country.

The result would be the need to use many bombs to take out cities that have much lower urban densities than in Europe or Japan. Then you need more to take out factories and other critical infrastructure that is often not located in the middle of these urban areas.

Russia was more vulnerable because their industry was concentrated more in fewer locations. Their power grid was more dependent on very large power plants and more centralized than the US one. Cities were far more dense to with most workers living in high rise apartments rather than single family homes like in the US.

For example, 1940's Los Angeles was about 35 - 40 miles wide and deep. Hamburg Germany on the other hand, was about 8 to 10 miles wide and deep. Thus, one Hiroshima sized bomb would have taken out most of Hamburg, just as it did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Los Angeles would require about 3 to 5 to get the same overall level of devastation.

Here's a photo of the Willow Run bomber plant as it appears today.



Note how little urbanization is anywhere close to it. Nuking the plant would destroy it, but it wouldn't get much else. So, you'd need multiple bombs to take out the population and subsidiary companies supplying it.



That's Boeing Wichita plant. Notice that the nearest civilian homes are miles distant from the plant and how low their density is. It would take numerous bombs to get not just the plant but the workers and subcontractors.

So, hundreds.

[maltesefalcon]

Saying that it took two nukes to defeat Japan is a vast oversimplification of tbe immense efforts and sacrifice of the Allied forces.

By July 1945 Japans navy was a shadow of the 1941 version, as was its merchant fleet. Many of Japans cities had been flattened by conventional bombing by then. The army and air forces had suffered huge losses and the nation was slowly being strangled by an Allied naval/air blockade. In this situation the nuclear strikes were a coup de grace, which allowed the nation to find an excuse to surrender with honour.

In the unlikely event that Japan or Germany managed to produce dozens of nukes before the US could, there remains the problem of how to get them there. In 1945 there was not an aircraft in the world that could lift a payload comparable to a Gen I nuclear weapon the distance required. Likewise for any foreseeable rocket technology. The only alternative was a sort of kamikaze mission using a nuclear weapon on a ship. Thus you could attack coastal regions, but only so long as it took for the USN to react. Eventually they would stop and search suspect vessels in international waters.

[T. A. Gardner]

One note on first generation nuclear weapons...

The US ones weighed what they did because of over caution on the part of the military. Just over half the weight of an atom bomb in 1945 was armor plating. Removing this changed nothing about how the device worked. The only reason it was there was the military wanted it just in case the plane was attacked and the bomb hit by fire. The armor would protect the device.

So, you could easily get a 3,000 to 4,000 lbs nuclear bomb in 1945, you just had to forego the extras like armor plating it.

On the other hand, getting one to the US was going to be an issue for Germany or Japan. Neither possessed an aircraft capable of carrying a 4,000 lbs payload at over 300 mph and at 35,000 feet that could fly several thousand miles to a target and return. You'd need all of that to get it to work. You need the speed and altitude to escape the bomb. The US "Silver plate" B-29's were stripped of armor, weapons, and other weight and the air crew trained to fly a specific mission profile to attack a target and escape the blast afterwards.

[maltesefalcon]

Thanks for clarifying the weight issue. I didn't know that until now.

We are on the same page for a/c requirements except one issue. The aircraft would only have to survive detection and interception long enough to deploy the device.

There was no need to think about surviving the blast itself. There would never be enough fuel to get home. Even in this day and age I'm not sure there is a suitable aircraft that could fly both legs of the trip nonstop without air to air refueling. So it would be a suicide mission. Based on history there would be no shortage of volunteers.

That being said, even with the reduced weight requirement no one had an aircraft capable of doing even the one way trip at the time.

[T. A. Gardner]

Thanks for clarifying the weight issue. I didn't know that until now.

We are on the same page for a/c requirements except one issue. The aircraft would only have to survive detection and interception long enough to deploy the device.

There was no need to think about surviving the blast itself. There would never be enough fuel to get home. Even in this day and age I'm not sure there is a suitable aircraft that could fly both legs of the trip nonstop without air to air refueling. So it would be a suicide mission. Based on history there would be no shortage of volunteers.

That being said, even with the reduced weight requirement no one had an aircraft capable of doing even the one way trip at the time.

The one plane I figured out a way to do it with was the Bv 222. This six engine flying boat had the capacity to carry the load and it could land at sea. The way you do it is use a couple of U-boats to refuel the plane, say in a bay off Greenland. That would give you the means to attack the US flying in over Canada and routes that are totally unprotected by air defenses. You could strike as far West as at least Chicago. Hitting Detroit or that area gets you a lot of bang for your bomb in terms of potential industrial targets.

Escaping the blast would be the issue. Maybe a very high altitude approach say 20,000 feet + and you use a parachute to slow the bomb's decent. After all, if it misses by a thousand yards it's still a direct hit... That would give even a BV 222 time to go into a shallow dive and run like hell to get away before the bomb went off.

A bigger version of a V-1 launched from a submarine might be possible too. That would be adequate to attack a major coastal city I'd think. A miss by a mile is still a hit.

[ljadw]

I would say : between 1 and 500.

One could suffice if one bomb could destroy Washington,Capitol Hill and the White House and no one was left in the chain of succession ;afaics, there was no SURVIVOR in WWII .

If this would not happen , countless bombs would be needed .


BTW : Japan was NOT defeated by the use of the A Bomb : it was already defeated by conventio nal warfare :the 2 A Bombs forced Japan to surrender .

[maltesefalcon]

The BV-222 could certainly do the job in theory. But there were only 13 made and by the last year of the war I think only half remained, so they might get used up pretty quick on a mission this difficult.

However, I was making a basic assumption that the premise was a nuclear confrontation between USA and Japan. There was no timeline given but assuming it is late 1944/early 1945, a German strike against cities in UK and Russia would be both easier and more productive in the short term than a campaign vs USA. Germany did have some large bombers that conceivably could be configured for the ETO.


In the same time frame an attack by Japan would almost certainly have to originate in the home islands. That is 5000 miles one way just to reach the coast and there are no intermediate stops Japan could use. And Japan had nothing even close to developing a rocket that could lift a payload this heavy. However they still could use the shipboard tactic. The results on the ports of the western coast at least would cause havoc.

I imagine the damage would be comparable to the Halifax explosion of 1917.

[Tomg44]

Why not just THREE?

One to vaporise the President, Politicians, Pentagon and Treasury officials.
One to vaporise Wall Street and the big banks which were head quartered close by.
One to vaporise the gold stocks at Fort Knox. - An air burst bomb would probably not work there. A nuclear version of a British Tallboy or Grand Slam, exploding underground should do so. I am assuming that the gold would be vaporised, carried up to 30000 + feet, blown away by the wind, and be unrecoverable.

Without these, what sort of economy would the country have the day after?

[maltesefalcon]

One to vaporise the gold stocks at Fort Knox. - An air burst bomb would probably not work there. A nuclear version of a British Tallboy or Grand Slam, exploding underground should do so. I am assuming that the gold would be vaporised, carried up to 30000 + feet, blown away by the wind, and be unrecoverable.

Without these, what sort of economy would the country have the day after?

Goldfinger? Is that you?

I guess if you can build a laser to try to kill James Bond, you can build a plane to fly your ten-ton Grand Slam sized nuclear device as far inland as Kentucky. I assume it would then be child's play to incorporate a guidance system to ensure a direct hit on the inner vault.

[T. A. Gardner]

Why not just THREE?

One to vaporise the President, Politicians, Pentagon and Treasury officials.

In the US, the public would rejoice. It'd be a national holiday...

One to vaporise Wall Street and the big banks which were head quartered close by.

That doesn't take out the actual wealth, nor would it really affect the banking system

One to vaporise the gold stocks at Fort Knox. - An air burst bomb would probably not work there. A nuclear version of a British Tallboy or Grand Slam, exploding underground should do so. I am assuming that the gold would be vaporised, carried up to 30000 + feet, blown away by the wind, and be unrecoverable.

I doubt that any nuclear weapon of the period could do that, but even if it did it doesn't eliminate the economic or banking system.

Without these, what sort of economy would the country have the day after?

Pretty much the same one it had the day before.

[Kingfish]

Everyone is thinking air dropped weapon, but no one would suspect the Germans to tunnel underneath the Atlantic...

[T. A. Gardner]

Everyone is thinking air dropped weapon, but no one would suspect the Germans to tunnel underneath the Atlantic...

They'll get on that just as soon as their secret U-boat bases in Antarctica and the redoubt for Nazi diehards in Argentina are completed...

[maltesefalcon]

Back on topic a bit...

There's a pretty good article on potential blast damage here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_o ... explosions

Contemporary weapons would be in the 20-50 kton range IMHO. That being said, I am still not seeing a German attack in the Western hemisphere at all for the reasons I posted previously. It's Japan or nothing.

As for numbers of weapons available/used? Re-thinking this I would have to say no more than 2 or 3 would reach the finish line and be deployed. The reason? Japan cannot wait until they can amass 10 to 20. This would take considerable time perhaps a year or two. They needed to deploy what they had and hope for the best.

That outcome would depend on how well the US could retaliate and if they would be willing to accept high losses to prevail.

[maltesefalcon]

Everyone is thinking air dropped weapon, but no one would suspect the Germans to tunnel underneath the Atlantic...

Actually there have already been several posts indicating that air delivery would be problematic...