When the Man­hat­tan Engi­neer­ing Dis­trict, also known as the Man­hat­tan Project, was first con­ceived in 1941 out of the fear that the Allies were in a race with Ger­many to cre­ate the world’s first atomic fis­sion bomb. It went down in his­tory that the efforts of the Amer­i­can team beat out the Ger­man team and, in an effort to end the war early with­out hav­ing to enact Oper­a­tion Down­fall [1. Oper­a­tion Down­fall con­sisted of 2 planned inva­sions ; Oper­a­tion Olympic, sched­uled for Novem­ber 1, 1945, was the planned inva­sion of Kyushu, and Oper­a­tion Coro­net, sched­uled for March 1, 1946, would have put Allied forces on the Kanto plain near Tokyo.], Pres­i­dent Harry S. Tru­man autho­rized the drop­ping of two atomic bombs on the Japan­ese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By this point, of course, the Nazis had been defeated by the Allied forces in Europe, negat­ing the need for the Allies to bomb Berlin, much else any Ger­man city. But that hadn’t stopped Nazi physi­cists from pon­der­ing how a nuclear device might be deliv­ered to either New York or Lon­don. The dia­gram at right shows an idea for this.

While far away from the ideal nuclear bomb even­tu­ally deliv­ered by the Man­hat­tan Project, Nazi physi­cists believed that if they could con­struct a small low-level nuclear device and com­bine it with a rocket (prob­a­bly a V-2) that the Axis pow­ers could deliver their nuclear pay­load to Lon­don. Nat­u­rally a larger rocket would have to be con­structed if this type of sce­nario were to befall New York, but the war ended before the pos­si­bil­ity could even be envi­sioned. [2. A large por­tion of info for this piece came from the BBC.]