Considering that the United States used nuclear weapons on Japan in August 1945, and didn't plan to deploy them against Germany because they were deemed unnecessary for Victory in Europe, it seems like there's a strong argument to be made that once Germany gave up on seriously pursuing atomic weapons research, and the US dedicated itself to producing usable nuclear weapons at any cost, that Nazi Germany was pretty much always living on borrowed time. If anything, it dodged a nuclear bullet by capitulating when it did.
Am I off base here? I'll try to steer clear of alternate history scenarios by asking more specifically - have any historians made arguments for or against this line of thinking?
I've thought about how to answer this, and it's a tricky question.
The main assumption is that having the atomic bomb would guarantee victory. This is a tricky thing to assume. It's not clear that the atomic bomb ended the war (there were several other factors involved in that), just as a point of contention.
It also requires us to imagine a world in which the Germans were otherwise winning or at least in stalemate by the summer of 1945, which is obviously a very different timeline. If we imagined they had played their cards MUCH better — e.g., actually substantially beat the Soviets and the British — it changes things to such a degree that it's hard to know exactly where things would end up. In such a situation, would the US still seek war or aim for some kind of ceasefire? I don't know, nobody knows.
If the question is just, would the US have used the war on Germany had the war dragged out that long — even then the answer requires some changes to the "timeline" since that would have raised several important (but not insurmountable) logistical issues (e.g., in delivering the weapon). But it seems likely the US would have wanted to use the weapon on Germany in such a situation.
Separately, it is hard to imagine the Allies losing a long-term fight against the Germans, with or without the bomb, if the Soviets and British aren't destroyed early on. This is just a matter of production and launch-pads, which gave the Allies a huge advantage over Germany. So another way to phrase this is that Allied victory in Europe of some sort became inevitable when the Germans gave up on the UK and their Eastern offensive stalled. But this gets far from your question.
Anyway. The value of counterfactual reasoning is that it highlights things we might otherwise not look at. The tricky thing with this question is that it doesn't have very many ways to approach. It's main value, perhaps, is to question how important the value of the bomb was to the end of the war, though it's a round-about way to do that.