Had they been available in, say, 1944, or shortly after D-Day, when the balance was uncertain and thousands of Allied troops were dying in events like the Battle of the Bulge, do you think nuclear weapons would have been dropped on Berlin?
Seems like a potentially similar situation/moral question that they faced against Japan - the death of thousands to speed up the end of the war, vs the inevitable death of thousands in a drawn out process.
Yet it somehow seems hard to imagine - despite the firebombing of Dresden - that they would have been okay with killing so many European civilians.
Thoughts?
Hopefully he'll chime in here, but I should point you to our own /u/restricteddata on the subject at his blog; he's an actual historian of science and nuclear tech. Basically, Germany was not completely off the menu but disfavored for technical reasons, although the bomb was a potential deterrent (a point Alperovitz also makes in his 1995 book The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb relative to constraining any future German tendency to aggression). The real, concrete discussions of targets however only came in spring 1945 (as others have pointed out) and by that time Germany was all but defeated and any target might not exist by the time an actual device was ready. /u/restricteddata provides interview excerpts in that blog entry, and it really is a very good read. (I hope he forgives me for giving the plug!)
I would say yes. The whole motivation behind the Manhattan Project was that the Germans could not have a monopoly on the atomic bomb. The clear fear was that the Germans would use it if they had it. http://www.ushistory.org/us/51f.asp Considering the belief in the ability of strategic bombing to bring the war to a close by those in charge of it and the damage they inflicted (250,000 dead, 20% of all German dwellings destroyed http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm#tgwe), the casualty figures can not be expected to deter them. With regards to destructiveness, damage done to a German target would hardly be unique. During the bombing campaign against Japan, relatively large percentages of urban areas were repeatedly destroyed (http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html). There is a sequence in Robert McNamara's "The Fog of War" which covers this nicely: Yokohama, 58% destroyed, Tokyo 51% destroyed, Nagoya 40% destroyed, Kobe 55.7%, Wakayama 50%, Okayama 68.9%, Kagoshima 63.4%, Imabari 63.9%, Fukui 86% and so on. Toyama was bombed August 1, 1945, 99% percent destroyed. By contrast, Hiroshima: 67% destroyed; Nagasaki 40% destroyed (http://fee.org/freeman/detail/the-ethics-of-war-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-after-50-years). Japanese cities, being constructed of wood and other flammable materials, were uniquely vulnerable to firebombing but German cities could and did suffer similar figures. Another point to take from the percentages of urban area destroyed is that the atomic bombs were not unparalleled in their destructiveness. Conventional raids could destroy as much or more and cause higher casulties (Tokyo Firebombing Raid of March 9-10 1945) but the atomic bomb was more efficient at doing so, which gave it immense psychological power.
With regards to fallout, they did not know about it. This photograph, taken September 9 1945, shows General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer at ground zero of the Trinity test site (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trinity_Test_-_Oppenheimer_and_Groves_at_Ground_Zero_001.jpg). They would likely have not gone had they known about residual radioactivity. When the Japanese began complaining of radiation sickness, the American Government denounced it as propaganda to create the impression that "we won the war unfairly (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2005-08-05/news/0508050019_1_atomic-bombings-bomb-on-hiroshima-george-weller)". The United State's first real confirmation of the hazards of fallout came from Operation Crossroads, the 1946 nuclear test series. The tests revealed that radioactivity from the detonation posed a severe threat to crew members. The test was terminated August 10 due to radiation safety concerns (http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/operation-crossroads).
As a final point, much US and NATO planning for a Warsaw Pact invasion involved usage of tactical nuclear weapons against the invading forces (http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1103.pdf). These forces would of course be in Germany, a country with a relatively high poulation density. If, even with knowledge of fallout, the United States was willing to use nuclear weapons in Germany, it seems very likely the US would have used the atomic bomb against German cities.
Piggy-back Q: I always assume atomic bombing of Japan is feasible because of Japan's complete lack of proper anti-air defense, thus enabling B-29s to penetrate deeply into Japanese mainland without escorting, which is not really possible in Germany's case, and taking the risk of a downed B-29 with an atomic bomb would obviously be too much, someone confirms/corrects me?
Categorically yes. The rational for the development of nuclear weapons in the first place was because the idea of the Nazis getting them first was terrifying.
We know that the US used these weapons on Japan and there is nothing about Germany which presented a less compelling case for their use there.
