On Feb 9, 2:18*pm, "David Looser" wrote:
"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" wrote in ...

Arny Krueger wrote:

Right. It wasn't jet powered, either. The jet engines of the day had
service
lives measured in integer hours, which means that a flight from Europe to
the US would be pretty much guaranteed to fail. Fuel economy was
miserable
as well.

According to the wikipedia entry (quoted in an earlier post), it had the
speed to make it from Paris to New York in about 6-7 hours.

The jet engines would not of gotten you to New York and back, but it would
of gotten an atomic bomb to New York, which is what was intended.

All this is pure speculation. The "flying wing" jet fighter flew test
flights, but crashed killing it's pilot. It was a second copy (that never
flew) that was "liberated" to the USA after the war. None of the other
designs for an "Amerika Bomber" made it off the drawing board. How long
would it have taken to develop any design to the point that it could make
the trans-Atlantic flight? How long would it have taken the Nazis to develop
an atomic bomb, bearing in mind that Germany had ceased all work leading to
one back in '42?

David.

The Germans had the intellectual capacity to build nuclear weapons but
not the industrial capacity to do so.

The United States had more manufacturing capacity in 1944 than the
rest of the world combined. It had real estate to spare on which to
build plants, population to work at them, and none of it was subject
to bombardment as were most other combatants. And the Manhattan
Project was above all else a manufacturing project. It was the
equivalent of a modest sovereign nation unto itself, and like later
efforts like the Skunk Works, it was shielded from external
kibbitzing.

The "Amerika-Bomber" was no more a realistic project than the Ford
Nucleon car or the Starship Enterprise of Star Trek. The Hortens had
had some success with flying wing aircraft, but there are a lot of
reasons why no one builds them today, aside from a few stealth designs
that will be obsolete with future radar developments which are
inevitable. But the engines were not the issue. They'd have taken a
Luftwaffe crew there and back if they had enough fuel.

The Germans pretty well gave up nuclear work when they themselves
realized this. Most of the General Staff and the smarter commanders
knew by 1943 loss was inevitable: a negotiated peace was the best they
were going to do, and for that to happen Hitler had to die. Hitler was
quite insane by then, and the General Staff never trusted or respected
him anyway.