[dfgert]

I don't believe that it was a unfair race so to speak. In my knowledge it were the German scientists who moved to US and helped US develop the bomb. US may have had the resources but it definitely lacked the knowledge for building bomb which German surely possessed.

[msla]

Even had Germany somehow kept the knowledge, it had, at best, a very brief period of time between the beginning of the war and the period when its industrial capacity was being seriously strained, if not bombed almost continuously, to work on the weapon. The Nazi nuclear bomb project was also underfunded for political reasons, not to mention the fact it would have been very difficult to justify working on a blue-sky wonder-weapon instead of building more tanks and planes and rifles for the three-front war practically at their doorstep.

You can try to posit a Nazi regime without such constraints, but a Nazi regime which isn't lead by Hitler is fundamentally different from the regime we're talking about. A well-run Nazi Germany, one which didn't pick unwinnable fights, is a Nazi Germany contrary to Hitler's vision.

[iguy]

According to Wikipedia, "The German V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) cost the equivalent of around USD $40 billion (2015 dollars), which was 50 percent more than the Manhattan Project". That was super high-tech, blue-sky research, which in the end had almost zero military impact. It was not stopped by Allied bombing. It was done at the expense of more practical things, like tanks and planes, despite serious shortages of some of the ingredients (like fuel).

The Manhattan project indeed had a brain trust working on it, the like of which existed nowhere else on the planet. (Maybe more Hungarian than German, though.) Germany could not have replicated that, but it seems likely to me that the brains they did have would have been plenty.

There could have been some other roadblock of course, like the total lack of some material. But I don't know of one. IIRC the Soviets mined about half their Uranium in E Germany, so that was available.

[roywiggins]

The Nazis loved blue-sky wonder weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikabomber