SH!T WENT DOWN: Nuking the Nazis

America would have nuked Germany, except for one reason

Come on Klaus Barbie let’s go party.

I’ve seen many a delusional dipshit who doesn’t understand a simple thing called a calendar proclaim that the United States didn’t nuke Germany because it was full of white people. That is very not true. America would have loved to nuke some fucking Nazis. The reason they never did was simple: The first atomic weapon wasn’t even tested until ten weeks after Germany surrendered.

Klaus Barbie was a murderous Nazis cockwagon who escaped to Bolivia with the help of the U.S. But he finally got his, being extradited to France in 1982, only escaping a well-deserved meeting with a guillotine (for real—the last time it was used as a method of execution in France was 1977) because the nation had outlawed capital punishment only the year previous. I bring up Klaus Barbie specifically because if you’ve been living under a social media rock, there is a movie premier showdown coming on July 21 between Barbie and Oppenheimer.

And although I’ve written about the history of Barbie, as well as the decision to nuke Japan, for today I want to discuss the testing of the first ever atomic weapon and how America for sure would have made Klaus and friends glow in the fucking dark. And yes, it was today, July 16, 1945, that the first nuke was tested.

Code named Trinity, the test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert, which appropriately translates to “dead man’s journey.” It was the culmination of the Manhattan Project, conducted by the U.S. Army in the state of New Mexico at 5.29 a.m.

The device was nicknamed “Gadget,” and was a plutonium weapon of the same design as was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. And it was a pretty big kaboom: 25 kilotons. By comparison, the uranium device (called “Little Boy”) dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, and the “Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki had an explosive yield of 21 kilotons.

Despite the radioactive kaboom test taking place at ass-o’clock in the morning, there were civilians living nearby who said the fuck was that? General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan Project, had a press release all ready to explain away the top secret kerblooie. “Oh, uh. Yeah. It was an accident. There was a big-ass ammunition magazine that blew up at a time that we didn’t want it to blow up sorry about the noise nothing to see here.” And people were like yeah the army fucks shit up all the time that makes sense.

But what about the fucking Nazis?

During the war, the United States was certain they were in a race against the Germans to make the first atomic bomb. I mean, the whole fission thing was first discovered in Germany in 1938. It wasn’t until April of 1945, a month before the German surrender, that U.S. Intelligence operatives discovered that Germany wasn’t anywhere near developing their own nukes.

Prior to that, however, Germany was always the target. The reason why was simple: If Hitler had nukes, the world would go to absolute shit. Like, even more shit than it already was. They had to nuke Hitler before he nuked everyone else. The only reason Germany didn’t get nuked was because the project was “currently experiencing technical difficulties.” In other words, the bombs were more challenging to create than first imagined, and it fucked the timeline. Also, because Russians were willing to die by the millions to conquer Germany sooner rather than later, the war in Europe was over before the nukes were needed to send Hitler to radioactive hell instead of just regular hell.

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That doesn’t mean the United States wasn’t also thinking about Japan as a target. In fact, in the middle of 1943 American decision makers were imagining that the first nuke would be a Japanese target instead of a German one. At the time, things were not going well in the Pacific Theatre of the war for America, and they figured they could nuke the Japanese fleet as their first field test of an atomic weapon. If it worked, fuckin’ great! We took out a big chunk of their fleet and now we know the things work and can use them on Germany. If it didn’t, well, the bomb would sink and prevent the enemy from salvaging it. And even if they did salvage the device, Japan didn’t have much of an atomic weapon’s program so were unlikely to be able to reverse engineer it and start making their own fission explodey toys.

But as we know, the bombs were used on Japan because they were the only enemy left, and America really wanted to see what a dozen or so kilotons of kaboom going off all at once could do to an actual city. Nuking Japan had the added bonus of scaring the fuck out of Russia.

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