What an interesting read. Also, is it just me or are there a surprising number of german related topics on the frontpage right now? "We only had one man working on it and they may have had ten thousand" This is why I always chuckle at the ww2 "documentaries" positing the possibility of german or japanese bomb. Nevermind that both parties were preoccupied fighting far stronger and larger opponents ( US, British Empire…
Germany spent about an equivalent amount of money in the V1 and V2 rocket programs that the US spent on the Manhattan project. Though Heisenburg later claimed he had sabotaged the German effort, the evidence seems to be a bit in favor of saying that he just miscalculated the amount of uranium needed so that it looked like it would be impractical as a weapon:
>...The largest piece of evidence was that Heisenberg had miscalculated the critical mass needed to achieve an atomic bomb, and thus still believed that tons of U-235 was necessary to create the bomb.
http://holbert.faculty.asu.edu/eee460/anv/Why%20the%20German...
>...Most military leaders saw it as serving no military purpose. So ultimately, hiroshima and nagasaki were the largest human experimentation in ww2.
They weren't chosen at random. For example, the original target for Nagasaki was supposed to be Kokura:
>...The American bomber was a B-29 named Bock's Car, and it was supposed to drop the world's first plutonium bomb on Kokura. Three times, Bock's Car passed over Kokura, bomb bays open, a hum in the cockpit signaling that the bomb was ready for release, the crew wearing the special goggles that were supposed to protect them from the flash of the atomic explosion.
>But although the radar scope was locked on to Kokura, the orders were to drop the bomb only on visual identification of the huge arms factory that was the target.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/07/world/kokura-japan-bypass...
The use of the atomic bomb was both a military and political statement.