Thanks for the informative post. You prompted me to do a little reading. At least according to what I just read, you are correct: a dirty bomb does not have a more powerful explosion than a conventional bomb. That reading contradicts the impression made by a documentary I watched; in which the explosion from a dirty bomb was portrayed as more powerful than a conventional weapon, less powerful than a nuclear blast.
There were some reports of what appeared to be nuclear weapons tests in Germany toward the end of the war. The documentaries in question treated those reports as evidence of dirty bombs being tested. But given that the explosions themselves were very powerful and produced a lot of light, the reports in question were either false (which is most likely) or else may have represented testing of actual nuclear weapons (less likely).
But not necessarily impossible, given the fact that a Nazi nuclear weapons complex has recently been discovered in Austria.
This brings me back to the aforementioned statement by Goering that Germany would have a nuclear bomb by 1946. If a dirty bomb was as unimpressive as your post and my recent reading leads me to believe, it’s quite possible that by “nuclear bomb” he meant an actual nuclear bomb.
However, it’s worth mentioning that Goering is the same guy who promised that the British Expeditionary Force near Dunkirk could be wiped out by the air, with no need for a German land offensive. Goering was also the one who promised that the German pocket at Stalingrad could be adequately supplied by air; and that there was no need for it to attempt to retreat westward. Goering had a track record of over-promising and under-delivering; so his promises of a nuclear weapon in 1946 should be taken with a grain of salt.
On the other hand, Germany was easily ten years ahead of the Allies in chemical weapons research. Perhaps more. If the German nuclear program did not result in a usable weapon until, say, 1947, Germany could in the meantime have retaliated against Allied nuclear attacks with chemical weapons attacks against Allied cities. Imagine this scenario: the United States has just dropped a nuclear bomb on Berlin. Germany has chosen to retaliate by sending a group of Horten H. XVIII planes to deliver a chemical payload to New York City. Allied leaders recognize that even though Germany has not yet developed nuclear weapons, it still has the capacity to respond tit-for-tat to the Allied destruction of German cities.
