Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't believe that it was a unfair race so to speak. In my knowledge it were the German scientists who moved to US and helped US develop the bomb. US may have had the resources but it definitely lacked the knowledge for building bomb which German surely possessed.
Even had Germany somehow kept the knowledge, it had, at best, a very brief period of time between the beginning of the war and the period when its industrial capacity was being seriously strained, if not bombed almost continuously, to work on the weapon. The Nazi nuclear bomb project was also underfunded for political reasons, not to mention the fact it would have been very difficult to justify working on a blue-sky…
The Manhattan project indeed had a brain trust working on it, the like of which existed nowhere else on the planet. (Maybe more Hungarian than German, though.) Germany could not have replicated that, but it seems likely to me that the brains they did have would have been plenty.
There could have been some other roadblock of course, like the total lack of some material. But I don't know of one. IIRC the Soviets mined about half their Uranium in E Germany, so that was available.
