California continues their rapid decline

[Scooter]

Nuclear weapons technology was nowhere near the point where bombs were small enough to deliver by rocket, they would have had to have been carried by planes. And the Germans had all but abandoned hope that they would be able to use nuclear fission towards the war effort by 1942, precisely because they had hounded so many of their most brilliant physicists out of the country and into the arms of the U.K. and the U.S.

[dales]

Indeed.

Back to the original topic: "California continues their rapid decline"

Having been born here in 1952, I concur wholeheartedly with the premise of the topic.

Sad, really.

[Lord Jim]

Once the US was in the war, given the US industrial capacity and manpower strength, allied victory was inevitable eventually; so long as the country maintained the political will to continue the fight.

What if the Third Reich had developed the capacity to manufacture and deploy atomic bombs before the US did and dropped a couple of them on, say, London and Paris in, say, December of 1944? Would the Allies' victory still have been inevitable?

Yes...would have been messier, might well have taken longer, but it would have happened.

(Also, I suspect that, if they had an atomic bomb in 1944, it would have been used on the Eastern Front.)

In order for Nazi Germany to have developed the atomic bomb before the US did, both Hitler and the US would have had to have made a whole series of decisions different from the ones that they actually did....

For starters, Hitler would have had to devote considerably more resources towards developing The Bomb after German scientists discovered fission in 1938... and delayed by at least one or two years the military attacks he began in September of 1939...

Nuclear weapons technology was nowhere near the point where bombs were small enough to deliver by rocket, they would have had to have been carried by planes.

That's certainly true...

The V-2s had nowhere near the payload capacity to carry an atomic bomb designed with the technology that existed at the time...they could have carried uranium-235 "dirty bomb" radioactive material, and by the end of the war the Germans had a stockpile of that, (they tried to send some to Japan by submarine) but not an atomic "blast" bomb...

the Germans had all but abandoned hope that they would be able to use nuclear fission towards the war effort by 1942, precisely because they had hounded so many of their most brilliant physicists out of the country and into the arms of the U.K. and the U.S.

Well, yes and no...

The Nazis never fully embraced an atomic project for a lot of reasons, (including ideology; at one point they labeled nuclear physics "Jewish science") but even after having driven out some of the finest minds in their country in this area, they still had enough theoretical and engineering talent to develop a Bomb. (Most notably Werner Heisenberg; though his level of dedication to the Nazis is ambiguous..in June of 1942 he told then German Armaments Minister Albert Speer that with maximum effort it would be 1945 by the earliest before Germany could development an atomic bomb)

What they lacked most after the onset of the war were the energy resources to do it....

At it's height, with the technology available at the time, to produce the weapons grade material needed for a bomb the Manahattan Project was consuming 1/7th of the entire electrical power output of the United States...

The Germans were in no position to provide those kinds of resources.