Nuclear research continues without Manhattan-scale urgency

How would three more years of peace affect early atomic research and reactor development?

National programmes would keep working, but peacetime research would not match the concentrated resources and urgency of the Manhattan Project.

British, French, German, and other nuclear programmes were already exploring different parts of the problem. Continued peace gives those projects more time, yet it leaves them dispersed among separate institutions and countries. Three years of ordinary development cannot be treated as equivalent to the combined wartime programme that later brought expertise and funding together. Practical reactors or weapons therefore remain uncertain rather than automatic results of the delay.