Did the US consider a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1949 when the USSR finished its first nuclear bomb?

by Aqwis
restricteddata

If by "consider" you mean, "did they map out what that would look like" — yes. Even in September 1945 they considered how many nuclear weapons they would need to take out the USSR completely with nuclear weapons (123 minimum, 466 optimum). They had other plans developed during that the monopoly period with lovely names like TOTALITY, BROILER, and HALFMOON.

The problem is, between 1945 and 1949, the US had very, very few nuclear weapons. In 1948, they had a total of 50 Nagasaki-style weapons in the stockpile. They had gotten the number to somewhat twice that by the Soviet bomb test, but that still isn't a huge stockpile, and the weapons they had were only in the 20 kiloton range, and of WWII-style complexity. The updated MK-4 nuclear bomb (which was a more standardized Nagasaki-style weapon that had a somewhat larger yield) entered into the stockpile only in 1949. And they would have to be delivered still by B-29s (the longer-range B-36 went into production only in 1949).

So the idea of a full-on atomic blitz is not quite feasible during the period in which the US only had the bomb. It might offset a conventional force, but the Soviets would still be able to mobilize quite a lot of conventional troops. It would not have been an easy war to fight, even while using the bomb.