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How long do you think it would have taken them to develop an sub-born aircraft powerful enough for a one-way trip with a bomb? More than a few months?

• dragonwriter 11y ago
  > How long do you think it would have taken them to develop an sub-born aircraft powerful enough for a one-way trip with a bomb? The time consuming and expensive part of that would be developing and building the sub that could carry an aircraft capable of delivering a nuclear weapon, not developing the aircraft. (OTOH, its all kind of a silly discussion; Japan certainly would have used the bomb if it had it, but in its late-war strategic position, it would have likely used it, at least first, on military targets closer to the immediate theater of war. The US dropped the bomb on Japan because at that point in the war, bombing Japan was the key focus of US military efforts anyway, and the US was in a position from which it could regularly and effectively bomb Japan.)
• mikeash 11y ago
  Much more. A first-generation bomb would have been huge. The B-29 was barely adequate for the American bombs, and it was a gigantic plane for its time. Building something capable of both carrying an early atomic bomb and fitting in a submarine was probably entirely beyond the technology of the day.