What were the plans to use the atomic bomb if it had been in time for the war in Europe?
score:6
According to this answer, it wasn't until very late that the Americans decided whether to bomb (in Japan) a military/industrial/transportation city, or a capital city.
They did decide it had to be a city (not a smaller target), because they had very few bombs and aiming was uncertain:
Minutes of the second meeting of the Target Committee Los Alamos, May 10-11, 1945
It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.
Also, "Psychological Factors in Target Selection" says it was intended as a strategic weapon i.e. to affect morale, not just supplies and matériel.
I guess people didn't start to think about (or, at least, making plans for using) "tactical" nuclear weapons until they had a lot of them (maybe starting in the early 1950s).
Upvote:-1
The answer could be divided betweeen different countries fighting and researching on nuclear bomb by that time:
USA: They had the plan of a weapon that woul enhance the effects of strategic bombing. So the target could have been any strategic objectif, like a city, a big training center, airbase, or an industrial center. Note that, despite hopes put into heavy bombers attacking a fleet, there was no certaintity of the effect of an atomic bomb against a fleet before the Bikini atomic test, after the war
United Kingdom: basically...same strategic situation as the US. If we look at both countries' strategic bombing doctrines, the British would have been more encline to strike a city
Germany: the most achieved plan for atomic bombs was to destroy big Russian or American cities, in order to strike an ennemy that was otherwise unreachable. British cities were less a target because they could be stroke by conventionnal (airplanes) or special (V1, V2) means
Upvote:0
@ChrisW's answer is good and I upvoted it. I suspect that the people who might have made those plans either didn't know about the bomb or were too busy on more important things. (The people working in the Manhattan Project certainly had no expertise.)
Further, the situation was changing continuously -- "the fog of war" is not just a clever phrase! -- and even the US leadership had pretty much exhausted its strategic planning when we arrived off the coast of Japan. At that point it looked like the alternatives were (a) Invade or (b) flatten more of Japan and then, if they don't surrender, Invade.
By the time a bomb looked like it might arrive before the war ended, the thinking was probably that a big bomb has got to be useful. Anything to end the war without an invasion of Japan with its millions of casualties.
"If the Axis Powers have all surrendered, great! If not, there'll be plenty of targets. Now get back to work figuring out where to drop the bombs we do have."
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