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but you would trust a nazi or soviet defense guarantee? Sometimes there just aren't any winning options.
A neighboring state can at least conceivably provide military assistance. Britain cannot.
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Also, correct me if in wrong but was it really resistance to the Nazis/Soviets that caused the deaths or that they ended up being a battleground between the soviets and Nazis as well as having a disproportionate number of Jews? Their disproportionate suffering was due to geography and demographics, not diplomacy.
It seems to me that much of the destruction would have happened either way, but there being a small outside chance that the soviets/Nazis would leave them alone and route around them if they got deterred by the British security guarantees.
Either of the parties routing around them seems like an unrealistic prospect considering their location. In hindsight, the strategy that would probably have preserved the most Polish lives (if perhaps not other things that the Poles valued) would have been to immediately and enthusiastically join one of the two warring parties, preferably the Nazis as they had the initial momentum behind them. The extra ~30m population and industrial base would have probably made enough of a difference to turn the Battle of Moscow into an Axis victory, rapidly putting us in an alternative history timeline where it does not seem so likely that Poland is turned into a primary battleground again anytime soon.
...and then American nukes hitting German cities, not touching Poland?
Nuke availability was nowhere near the point where you could just throw them out of spite without having an invasion army lined up to follow up, and a German victory in Russia surely would have put any Normandy plans at least a few years behind schedule - long enough for the German atomic bomb programme to catch up, at which point there would just be MAD.
Within a year we had seven more nukes, despite massive demobilization of the Manhattan Project after Japan's surrender. The original plan was to shoot for seven bombs per month by then, a rate which we passed in 1948 despite the peace-time.
Even if for some reason plutonium production during an active nuclear war was still limited to only 7 bombs per year, a target turning into a mushroom cloud every couple months with no end in sight is shocking enough that you'd expect spite to be the resource in too-limited supply first.
"The point in 1942 when the army relinquished control of the project was its zenith in terms of the number of personnel devoted to the effort, and this was no more than about seventy scientists, with about forty devoting more than half their time to nuclear fission research. After this the number diminished dramatically"
A tenth of a Manhattan Project (at most? I'd bet the ratio of engineers was even worse), under active attack, and ideologically determined to disparage that idiot Einstein's "Jewish physics", is not going to be producing counter-nukes by 1946.
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Doubtful.
Even with a clean win on the eastern front Germany would be resource limited relative the US and without any real means of delivering the nukes, assuming they were built. German bombers and V-weapons were stretching thier legs just to hit London with an 1000 kg payload. Carrying 5 times that to US industrial centers like philidelphia Pittsburgh and Detroit would've been a non-starter. Meanwhile almost all of germany but most importantly Berlin would've been well within the range of nuclear-equipped B29s flying out of Reykjavik. The distances involved would actually be a couple hundred miles shorter (roughly 1,475 miles one-way vs 1,600) and with more favorable winds for most of the year than the historical strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Meanwhile the US and UK also enjoy a substantial advantage in the form of a meaningful surface Navies and an integrated air defence network where as the Germans were still dependent on visual spotting and individual radar equipped aircraft. In short individual allied raiders have a far greater chance of penetrating German terretory than induvidual german raiders do the US or UK. This disparity was the practical justification for the shift towards V weapons in the first place.
It'll be at least the late 40s maybe 1950 before Von Braun can build the Nazis an effective R-7 clone and thats assuming he doesn't drag his feet or the German industrial heartland isn't already sprouting mushroom clouds.
That's assuming the Germans don't seize Iceland (I think they had a plan to do so, which may only have been scrapped after things started to go south on the Eastern Front). A lot of things could have gone differently if the Germans had been under less pressure at that stage - consider also that in a "Nazi Poland" scenario, the British are denied crucial intelligence that probably was necessary for them to break the Enigma cipher.
MAD doesn't require the Germans to be able to destroy US industrial capacity - a simple "leave us alone in our European possessions or we ride a suicide U-boat with a nuke into Manhattan" may have been enough to give the Americans pause at least for a while. (The Germans did manage to land some guys on US soil unseen!) Consider also that the Pacific War is probably made more painful for the US, since a defeated Soviet Union means that the Nazis get an overland connection to the Japanese empire. If the Soviets could use that link to overrun Japan's continental possessions in two weeks, the Germans can use it to send them significant backup.
Yes, i am assuming that because the Germans would've been hard pressed to cross the English Channel nevermind the Straights of Denmark. Operation Sealion is a meme in alternate history forums for a reason.
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