@Bolt-Action:
Japan didn’t conquer China, first off there’s no need for sarcasm this is a friendly thread man, second off the USA gave it aid obviously.
He would give them nuclear weapons to minimize controversy in Germany, he’s running a superpower now after all.
There is a cold, brutal logic involved with nuclear weapons–a logic which is largely independent of ideology. Communist and capitalist nations had very different ideologies from each other, yet the nuclear weapons logic both sides used was very similar.
Back in the '80s, the Reagan administration was concerned about a possible Soviet invasion of Iran. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had not yet been proven a failure. Were the Soviets to grab Iran as well, they would gain a large quantity of oil, and warm water ports in the Indian Ocean. In part as a result of this concern, the Reagan administration decided to sell arms to the Iranians. But they did not consider the possibility of giving the Iranians nuclear weapons; in large part because Iran was so ideologically different from the U.S. Nor am I aware of any instance of the U.S. having provided nuclear weapons to any nation not fundamentally committed to secular democratic capitalism, or the Soviet Union to any nation not fundamentally committed to communism. It’s hard for me to imagine Nazi Germany providing nuclear weapons to any nation not committed to Nazism.
It’s been noted that the Japanese Zero was a good plane by the standards of late '41, but had become hopelessly obsolete by '44. More generally, Japan’s piston-driven aircraft were vastly qualitatively inferior to their American counterparts by '44. But German piston-driven aircraft were not. Japan was Germany’s ally, both nations were fighting for their very existence against an overlapping group of enemies, and every American plane sent to the Pacific to deal with Japan was one less which could be sent to Germany. Further, Japan was committed to fascism, and to the notion that the Japanese were racially superior to their Chinese and Korean neighbors. Despite all this, Germany did not initiate large-scale technology transfers to Japan until the war in Europe was nearly over. And this was with piston aircraft technology! You seem like a good guy, but the idea that Hitler would have transferred nuclear technology to non-white, non-Nazi nations, in hope those nations would blow each other up, may not be the absolute best idea you’ve ever had! :wink:
That said, I think you brought up a good point by saying that Hitler would have been loath to himself use nuclear weapons. (For the same reason that, other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had refrained from using such weapons.) Hitler had been willing to take risks to achieve victory in Europe. In large part this was because of his belief that Germany would be at great risk until it had considerably strengthened its military position with respect to its (typically hostile) communist and pro-communist European neighbors. But after he had achieved that European victory, he would want a more cautious approach for Germany.
Part of that cautious approach would have involved the expansion of Germany’s population. Plans had been made to forcibly relocate 30 - 50 million Poles eastward after the war was over. The lands thus vacated would be resettled by Germans. If Germany had still been in the midst of a British food blockade, the deaths of some of those people during the migration would have been seen as an acceptable way of alleviating the famine conditions that blockade had imposed. To the best of my knowledge, there was no plan in place to exterminate large numbers of people during the postwar period except as necessitated by Germany’s food situation.