” ‘It was intended for Germany’
It was never intended at Germany. Trinity wasn’t until July of that year. Until Trinity they had no clue that the bomb would actually work - they had tested and failed.”
JCBreckenridge is in error. At more than one point.
The bomb development program was initiated specifically to counter the Third Reich: Dr Leo Szilard badgered Dr Albert Einstein into signing the letter (”We might be able to build a big bomb”) to President Roosevelt in 1939, just as the Nazis were attacking Poland.
While it is baldly true that no one was perfectly certain any fission bomb would work, the Manhattan Project physicists, engineers, and techs were so confident in the design of the bomb used on Hiroshima that they deliberately did not bother with a test. The ground test of 16 July 1945 (Trinity device) at Alamogordo was of a design far more ambitious and uncertain. A bomb of the Trinity configuration was used on Nagasaki.
Isn’t that what I said? That the development was originally intended to be a deterrent for the Nazis?