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Germany did put U-boats off of the US East Coast. It would probably be a one way trip to put one off of the Brooklyn docks. If they had two and used the first to clear a path for the second, it could have worked.

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Yes but that would be wildly inefficient. A nuke on the ground ("lay-down" delivery) is already maybe 40% as powerful as one in the air. Put it under even a few feet of water and that becomes only 20% as most of the energy goes sideways/down through water/dirt rather than directly at the target buildings. Water is shockingly dense at scale.

I'm not sure, water is very good at conducting shockwaves. If you had an aquarium the size of an olympic swimming pool you could kill all of them by dropping a hand grenade in it.

Inefficient compared to a B-29 dropping a bomb over a city but not inefficient compared to whatever other means (if any) Germany had of attacking an east cost city like New York.

Rest assured that if this alternate history scenario had occurred historians would not be talking about the inefficiency of the attack, they would be talking about the most devastating attack that Germany was able to conduct against Americans on their own soil during the war. It would have completely changed the American mindset and culture forever.

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