If Nazi Germany Got the Bomb First: Which City Dies?

Picture this: a gray morning over London in 1944. The air raid sirens start up again, the sound everyone has learned to half-ignore. People expect V-1 buzz bombs or maybe a V-2. What no one expects is a single flash so bright it etches shadows into brick, followed by a rising column of fire that used to be the East End.

That is the nightmare at the core of a popular what-if: if Nazi Germany had developed an atomic bomb first, which city would they have hit? London, Moscow, somewhere in the United States, or even a target in the East that they did not plan to settle with Germans?

To answer that, you have to strip away Hollywood and look at what the Nazis actually had: their technology, their planes and rockets, their fuel shortages, their racial ideology, and their war aims in 1943–45. Once you do that, some options fall apart quickly, and a few disturbing candidates rise to the top.

In simple terms: if Nazi Germany had managed to build a usable atomic bomb, the most likely first target would have been London, with Moscow a serious but less practical alternative. An American city was technically possible only in very narrow, late-war scenarios.

How close were the Nazis to an atomic bomb, really?

Before picking targets, we need to deal with the first misconception: that Germany was “almost there” with the bomb. It was not. The German nuclear project was fragmented, underfunded, and technically behind the American Manhattan Project.

Germany’s nuclear work centered on physicists like Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. They knew about nuclear fission by 1939. They knew, in theory, that a bomb was possible. But they misjudged the engineering and industrial scale required. Heisenberg in particular seems to have badly overestimated the critical mass needed for a weapon, which made the whole project look less urgent to German planners.

The Manhattan Project, by contrast, consumed about 2 billion wartime dollars, hundreds of thousands of workers, and entire industrial cities like Oak Ridge and Hanford. Germany never came close to that kind of investment. By 1942, Albert Speer and the Armaments Ministry had basically decided nuclear power was a long-term project, not a war-winning weapon.

So any what-if where Germany gets a bomb has to assume a very different set of decisions in 1939–41. You would need:

• Early recognition that a bomb was feasible within a few years.
• Centralized control of the project, not scattered university labs.
• Massive diversion of resources into uranium enrichment or plutonium production.
• Protection of research from bombing and from the draft.

That is a tall order for a regime that could not even standardize tank models. But say they manage it. Say by late 1944 or early 1945, Germany has produced one or a handful of fission bombs, roughly in the Hiroshima class, 10–20 kilotons.

At that point, the question stops being “could they build it?” and becomes “how could they deliver it, and to where?” That shift from theory to logistics is what narrows the target list.

So what? Recognizing that Nazi Germany was far from a bomb in reality forces any counterfactual to be selective and disciplined, and it pushes us to think about delivery and strategy instead of magic superweapons.

Would the Nazis really avoid nuking the East because of settlement plans?

The Reddit prompt assumes something that sounds logical: the Nazis wanted to colonize Eastern Europe with Germans, so they would avoid contaminating it with radiation. That idea needs some reality-checking.

Nazi policy in the East was shaped by Generalplan Ost, a set of radical plans to depopulate and Germanize huge areas of Poland, Ukraine, and western Russia. Tens of millions of Slavs were to be killed, expelled, or reduced to near-slave status. The land would be turned into a German agrarian empire.

In that sense, yes, they saw the East as future German living space. But they were not careful stewards. They burned crops, starved cities, and wrecked infrastructure. They were happy to destroy what they could not immediately use, assuming they would rebuild later.

Radiation, in 1940s understanding, complicates the picture. Even the Americans, who studied it more seriously, did not fully grasp long-term fallout effects. Early wartime thinking often treated atomic bombs as very large conventional explosives with some lingering danger. The idea of “we cannot use this land for centuries” was not really in play.

For Nazi planners, the East was a place where millions could die to clear the way for Germans. If they believed an atomic strike on, say, Moscow or Leningrad would knock the Soviet Union out of the war, they would have accepted contamination as a temporary problem to be managed later. They were already planning mass expulsions and resettlement.

There is also a hard military fact: their most dangerous enemy on land by 1943 was the Soviet Union. If you are fighting a war of survival, you do not protect hypothetical future farms at the expense of your immediate front line.

So the “they would never nuke the East because of settlement” claim is too neat. Ideology pointed to conquest and colonization, not environmental caution. If the best strategic target was in the East, they would hit it.

So what? Once you strip away the idea of Nazi environmental concern, Soviet cities like Moscow and Leningrad become real candidates for a first strike, not automatic exclusions.

London: the most likely first target, and why

If you had to pick one city as the most probable first target, London wins on a mix of practicality, symbolism, and timing.

By 1944, London was already a familiar target. The Luftwaffe had bombed it heavily in 1940–41. Later, V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles hit the city. The Germans had range, experience, and a psychological narrative: London as the stubborn enemy capital that refused to be terrorized into submission.

Logistically, London was within reach of several possible delivery systems:

• Long-range bombers like the He 177 or Ju 290, if Germany could keep one plane intact long enough to reach the target.
• A modified V-2 rocket, launched from western Europe, though this would require solving serious weight and guidance problems for a nuclear warhead.
• A one-way suicide mission by a bomber crew, if the regime was desperate enough.

Of these, a bomber is the most realistic. The Hiroshima bomb weighed about 4.4 tons. German heavy bombers could, in theory, carry something in that range, though German aircraft design was plagued by reliability problems. A single bomber slipping through at night, perhaps with fighter escort for part of the way, is not impossible.

Why London and not, say, Liverpool or Glasgow? Because London was the political and psychological heart of British resistance. Destroying a large part of it with a single bomb would be meant to shock the British government into either suing for peace or at least pulling back from continental operations.

Would it work? Probably not. By 1944–45, British and American leaders were committed to unconditional surrender. They had already endured the Blitz and V-weapon attacks. An atomic strike would cause horrific casualties, but it would also harden Allied resolve and justify even harsher retaliation.

Still, from Hitler’s perspective, London had several advantages:

• It was close enough to hit with existing or slightly modified delivery systems.
• It was already a declared target, so escalation felt natural.
• It offered a chance, however slim, to fracture the Anglo-American alliance.

So what? London fits the pattern of Nazi air war, their available technology, and their desire to break British morale, which makes it the most plausible first target in a world where Germany has a bomb by late war.

Moscow or Leningrad: the brutal logic of the Eastern Front

If you shift the clock back to 1941–43, before the Western Allies have fully massed their strength, the Soviet Union is the main enemy. In that window, Moscow and Leningrad become very tempting targets.

Moscow was the Soviet capital, the communications hub, and a symbol of the regime. Leningrad, under siege from 1941 to 1944, was already cut off and starving. An atomic bomb on either city could, in theory, have killed hundreds of thousands in an instant and perhaps broken Soviet resistance in that sector.

There are three big constraints.

First, range. German bombers could reach Moscow from forward airfields in occupied territory, but this required air superiority and secure bases. By late 1941 the Luftwaffe was stretched thin. By 1943 Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft defenses were stronger.

Second, timing. For Germany to have a bomb early enough to use it at the height of Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, their nuclear program would have needed a massive head start in 1939–40. That is an even bigger stretch than a 1944 bomb.

Third, Nazi thinking about the East. Here, the Reddit assumption cuts the other way. Because the Nazis saw Slavic populations as expendable, they might be more willing to use an untested or poorly understood weapon on Soviet cities first. An atomic strike on Moscow could be framed as a way to decapitate the regime and terrorize the population into collapse.

There is a grim strategic logic: if Germany knocks the Soviet Union out of the war in 1942 with one or two atomic strikes, it can then turn its full attention to Britain and the United States. That is the scenario where the bomb actually changes the war’s outcome.

But it depends on an early bomb that Germany was nowhere close to building. The later in the war the weapon appears, the more likely Germany is already on the defensive in the East and losing airfields, fuel, and trained crews. At that point, even if Moscow remains a juicy target, getting a bomber there and back becomes harder than hitting London.

So what? Moscow and Leningrad are the targets that could have altered the Eastern Front most dramatically, but they require an unrealistically early German bomb, which makes them less likely in a constrained what-if.

Could Nazi Germany have nuked the United States?

People love the image of a German atomic bomb falling on New York. It is cinematic. It is also the least realistic of the three main options.

Germany had no operational bomber with the range to hit the American east coast from Europe and return. There were paper projects, like the Junkers Ju 390 or the so-called “Amerika Bomber” concepts, but they never reached mass production or reliable service.

To hit the United States, Germany would have needed one of the following:

• A very long-range bomber operating from western France, Norway, or possibly the Azores (which Germany never controlled).
• A submarine-launched aircraft or missile, a technology far beyond their wartime capabilities.
• A one-way suicide flight, perhaps with a crew ditching near a waiting U-boat, which is heroic fiction more than sound planning.

Even if you hand-wave some of that, the question becomes: why spend your one or two precious bombs on a distant target that does not immediately change the front lines? Destroying part of New York would be horrific, but it would not stop American industry, which was spread across a continent. It would guarantee a furious American response.

There is also the intelligence problem. The Manhattan Project was secret. The Germans did not know when or if the Americans would get a bomb. They did know that American factories were already outproducing them in tanks, planes, and ships. From a cold military standpoint, the urgent threats were in Europe, not across the Atlantic.

So while a German nuclear strike on the United States makes for dramatic alternate history, it is the least grounded in actual German capabilities and strategic logic.

So what? The Atlantic and German technical limits made American cities very unlikely first targets, which keeps the focus on Europe when we talk about realistic Nazi nuclear scenarios.

So which target is most plausible, and how much would it change history?

Putting all of this together, you can rank the likely first targets in a constrained, realistic what-if like this:

1. London, if the bomb appears in 1944–45.
2. Moscow or Leningrad, if the bomb appears improbably early, around 1942–43.
3. An American city, only in very late, very speculative scenarios with exotic delivery systems.

London wins because it sits at the intersection of what Germany could realistically reach and what Hitler most wanted to punish. A nuclear attack on London would fit into an existing pattern of terror bombing and V-weapon strikes, just taken to a horrifying new scale.

Would it change the war’s outcome? Probably not, if it happens late. By 1944–45, the Allies were already planning or executing the invasion of France. American industry was in full swing. The Red Army was rolling west. A single bomb on London would cause immense suffering, but it would not remove the Soviet Union or the United States from the war. It would likely accelerate Allied plans to crush Germany and, if they had their own bombs, to consider using them.

The only scenario where a Nazi bomb truly bends history is an early strike on the Soviet Union that helps collapse Soviet resistance. That would require a Germany that recognized the bomb’s potential in 1939, poured resources into it, and solved huge technical problems years faster than the United States did. That Germany is almost a different country, not the one that spent its early war years on prestige battleships and overcomplicated tanks.

So the answer to the Reddit instinct is: yes, London is the most likely first target, but not because the Nazis were carefully preserving their future colonies in the East. It is because London sat at the crossroads of ideology, reach, and timing, while the bomb itself would have arrived too late to save the regime that built it.

So what? Thinking through which city would die first in this nightmare scenario forces us to confront what actually wins wars: logistics, production, and timing, not just terrifying new weapons.