say an early nuke fails to detonate and just lands like a really

If Hiroshima or Nagasaki was a dud, the bomb would've been smashed to the point it would be near impossible to reverse engineer.
Even if the japs were given full plans for a bomb, they wouldn't be able to get enough uranium needed to build it and they wouldn't be able to fly a bomber anywhere near a strategic US target.

The best they could do is threaten to give other nations any intel they got on the dud, which probably wouldn't have convinced the US to stop. More nukes would be dropped ubntil the Emperor took action and surrendered. Worst case scenario it speeds up the nuclear programs of other nations by a couple years.

>>3044800
If it was a dud then not much, because it didn't work.

There wasn't some special scientific secret that was discovered as part of Project Manhatten, the science was open knowledge and a number of countries were at work to create nukes. The issue was finding the right materials, specifications etc to make a bomb i.e. one that actually went boom when dropped. The Russians had nukes by 1946 and basically every country that's ever wanted to build them seems to have managed.

>>3044800
Nothing really, you need the right radioactive stuff.

- Physics guy who could build a nuke (IF I had the right stuff which is the point.)

>>3045038
This. In the 60s the Army hired two college professors to see if they could build a working nuclear weapon blueprint with only publicly available knowledge. It took them like 30 months.

>>3044800
>nips
enough with the racist remarks yankee, this is /his/

>>3044800
Not much, they could get the design specs and maybe repair the bomb and detonate it, but thats it. to build nukes you need to process Uranium ore into weapons grade product or plutonium, in both cases this requires a gigantic industrial effort to produce even minute quantities.

the hardest part of building a nuke is getting the uranium and not accidentally killing yourself with a plutonium sphere