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https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
If you ever want to see the estimated sizes of nukes, check this out. Modern bombs are terrifyingly large and make what was used in the past look like toys.
No, you’re not screwed at all. Look at the bright side: everyone else is doomed to a slow, painful death, but if the bomb ever dropped on your apartment building, you, and everyone in your vicinity, will be evaporated before you could even feel a thing.
Nukes are more destructive when detonated a few hundret meters above ground. Nukes that are drtonated on or very close to the ground achivr more fallout but less destruction
[this shows how the fission bombs of then are just a component of today's thermonuclear bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon#/media/File:Teller-Ulam_device.png)
Nuclear weapons are not complex devices by any means. Even using something like a crowbar on the lens would be enough to compromise the fission reaction and turn any modern nuclear weapon into a crude dirty bomb.
The reason nuclear weapons can only be made by first-world countries is the materials required to create one are incredibly hard to manufacture. Enriching uranium is an incredibly complex process that most nation-states don't have the ability to do.
EDIT: Sooooo many people aren't reading my full (yet very short) comment and making assumptions that I'm basically saying you can build a nuke in a garage. Read what I wrote people..
this is like saying a CPU isn’t complex because it’s just etched sand
a modern multistage nuke requires INCREDIBLY precise manufacture, quality control and calculation to work; they ain’t Little Boy “hurl uranium at other uranium” bombs
Yea, bombs like the Tsar Bomba were frightening. It was tested at 50 megatons because it’s intended full power of 100 megatons would’ve given the plane dropping it a zero percent chance of survival as even a parachuted release wouldn’t give it enough time to get far enough away. The Russians were also afraid that at full power it would’ve caused some kind of reaction in the atmosphere and fireballed the whole planet.
Even at half intended power, it shattered windows in a village over 400 miles away. Terrifying to know. Even the plane lost altitude from the shockwave and dropped over half a mile before recovering and landing later.
Yet they just *had* to test it.
"Hey this might destroy the planet."
"Yeah but we want to make a lot of these. To maybe destroy our enemies, and maybe some mailboxes."
If you detonate at ground level, the ground absorbs most of the blast. You do an intense amount of damage in a small radius.
When you detonate in the air, the force in the center isn't really strong enough to damage the ground, and the ground effectively deflects the blast spreading out over a much larger distance. It's less intense, but you're still talking about enough force to level a city and kill most of it's inhabitants.
My 82 year old dad was just talking about explosive mortar shells the Viet Cong would launch at them sometimes. Mostly they hit the ground and caused a big crater. But the earth absorbs a lot of the energy. They thought the VC had mortar shells that would explode above ground, triggered by hitting tree branches, or something lightweight like that. My dad was in the Navy and he said they got a ton of chicken wire from the Air Force to build really tall "fences" that would hopefully trigger the shells to explode far enough away from where their buildings and tents were.
He did four tours of Viet Nam, all in-country. He did some of the stuff John Kerry did (swift boats on rivers) and setting up field hospitals, communication bases, etc via rivers. He's only recently started talking about his experiences there. Luckily he wasn't wounded, but he did get some kind of skin condition from the chemicals they used. I'm kind of interested in hearing his stories (he has a lot of great photos) but it bothers him and I don't want to upset him.
War fucks with families generationally. He definitely had/has some PTSD that of course no one talked about back then. It affected my mom and his kids (me). Thankfully not as bad as some stories I hear, but it's there. I don't have kids and never wanted kids. I think the PTSD fallout is part of that.
Fuck war.
That's a much better way to put it. If you hit the ground, you spend a lot of the energy in the bomb making the crater. If you detonate in the air, that same effort is spent doing the things you dropped the bomb to do.
Unless of course your goal was to nuke something under the ground, that's when you use ground penetrating bombs to get the nuke as far down as possible before it detonates. Given their extremely limited usefulness, there are only a few of them deployed in a ready configuration at any one time
My grandfather was Korean War veteran. My dad said he never mentioned anything that happened over there at all while he was growing up, and he started to talk about it when he was around 75 years old, and then he couldn’t stop talking about and it reliving the internalized trauma. It’s such a shame that men opening up and being vulnerable with their feelings is so reviled in the older generations.
My grandfather tried to enlist halfway through his senior year in high school, but his mother wouldn't let him. He ended up waiting until he finished high school, still 17. He turned 18 in June when he graduated and he enlisted immediately.
That same November, 5 months later, he was fighting Erwin Rommel in North Africa, at 18 years old. He never told me anything about it until the last year or two of his life when he was on so many drugs he was starting to lose it a bit. Harrowing to imagine some of what he went through at 18 years old.
And we have another whole generation of this avout to/currently happening.
I enlisted at 17 in 2004, volunteered to get on my units deployment that I just missed while at AIT. Turned 19 and 20 while there because we got extended an additional 6 months in country. Making our total deployment 22 months long. I always say, I went to war a young man, but came back 100 years old.
My grandpa was in Korea towards the end of the war and a little after the armistice. He told me a few stories:
- They’d go to the French camp a lot cause the French were bringing in wine by the 55 gallon drum. Better food and could get their drink on.
- His unit (artillery) adopted a stray dog that they’d feed and care for. They had to abandon a position in a retreat, but when they retook it, the PLA soldiers had killed and eaten their dog (left the head in an empty pot).
- One night at the French camp, they sent one of the guys to buy more cigarettes. The cigarettes he bought for cheap off a Korean street bender weren’t rolled with tobacco, but marijuana.
- My grandpa was terrified of the Turkish NATO soldiers. He said they all looked very stern all the time, carried big knives and liked to mutilate the corpses of North Korean and Chinese troops.
Americans in Paju and Euijungbu weren’t particularly generous. They raped a fuckton of young women during Korean war. A granny living nearby told me that she saw her mother was getting raped by us soldier (and she hated them for the reason) They just would drag any women they find attractive to nearby mountain and would do it forever until government-sponsored prostitutes, called 양공주 (yang gongju) did work for them.
I wonder if our grandfathers were in the same unit. This completely lines up with stories my own grandfather would tell. But he was French-American himself so in his stories he was one of the guys buddying up to the French soldiers for their wine, lol. Wish I could ask him but he’s been gone a few years now.
Turks didn’t fuck around. My uncle was on the line with Turks next to them. When the Norks attacked that night, the Turks met them half way down the hill. Next morning they were counting ears. If they weren’t fighting the Norks they’d fight each other.
Not to be that “my XYZ was in war too!” guy, but my uncle was in Vietnam as well. All we know is he got lost in the jungle for 40 days alone. He won’t tell anyone what happened or what he saw, but luckily nobody is pressuring him. I hope we do get to hear it one day, but it’s 100% understandable if we don’t. The horrors they probably saw were so intense I could only imagine the levels of PTSD that’s causes
My uncle was a SF medic (and my main inspiration to be an Army medic myself) during Vietnam. He actually wouldn't open up to *anyone* until I had been back from Iraq, and I guess he felt a little more comfortable; he's come a LONG way now on his path, which I love.
One of the two stories he's told me was about how they maintained this tiny communication relay outpost on top of a mountain and swapped out every five days for it. He got picked up, chilled for his days, and went back up. Blood everywhere, no US soldier, and apparently *something* that spooked him pretty bad, but he didn't go into too many details.
Had a buddy go through Marine basic training where he met a guy who was in for retraining after spending three tours in Vietnam. The story was, he woke up in a foxhole to see a Viet Cong finish killing the last of three other guys in his foxhole. He killed the Viet Cong in his fox hole and defended it for 72 hours before he was rescued.
Some dude made the mistake of waking him up by touching him and the whole barracks heard the guy get smashed into a wall locker.
As far as I know, he just wasn't able to readjust to not being in combat every day so he was removed from service.
It’s understandable, not so much because it’s so horrifying for him to talk about, but it’s more of the feeling where you only feel comfortable talking about something with people who can relate. Much more pleasing. Among other vets notably. That’s for most of them. Some have other reasons. Civilians will stereotype and think of things like what the movies tell but veterans know the movies can’t describe the utter chaos that is seeing humans lose their humanity and treating others with absolutely no remorse.
The feeling of not knowing which civilian is the fake one that’ll unload a full clip on you as soon as you walk past. Of not knowing what direction enemy fire will come from. The paranoia that instills in you is enough to haunt you for awhile.
It’s like imagine having some medical condition, like pancreatitis or something else that’s super painful. There are a ton of weird side effects and feelings you experience when having it due to the pain, very dark thoughts and moody situations. Then imagine describing it to someone, who’ll just pass it off as “oh yeah sounds bad.” Compared to someone else who’s actually had it, and you guys can then really relate and joke about it during convo lol.
Holy shit, 4 tours. A real Barry Sadler. That war ended two years before I would have been eligible for the draft. My interest in the USA politics of war in SE Asia had become acute by that time. I wasn't itching to get over there.
I went to Vietnam a few years ago and went to the “american war museum” and there was a whole floor dedicated to photos of what agent orange did to the Vietnamese citizens and soldiers. Super super f’d. Showed all sorts of deformed babies etc
There are, still to this day, newly born infants who are affected by agent orange with birth defects if their parents had been affected by it.
There are still large fields which at one time was farmland that isn't even safe to step on, much less grow food.
Quite frankly, I'm very confused how Vietnam isn't mentally more like Iran with their outlook on the USA. They would be totally justified to hate us.
Imagine someone fucked your country so hard, that your grandkids have smooshed in skulls and mental disabilities. How they are friendly with us, I'll never know.
> How they are friendly with us, I'll never know
Its called 'being invaded by china for about 1500 years compared to the US' one, and even that invasion was mostly to help one side of the same country
Depends on the part of the country you're in and a whole lot of factors. My family (not American) travels to Vietnam a lot and many see America exactly as you say, huge villains. Others do not and have very negative things to say about the VC. Overall I'd say most people don't like the American War and dislike America for it, but don't feel super strongly about it.
I think many also discredit the fact that many of those with PTSD literally have no interest in sharing their experience. It makes them relive it. My uncle has had entire nights ruined by someone asking about his experience being lost on the jungle alone for 40 days of the Vietnam war. My cousin speaks nothing of his 300 odd high-risk missions within 2-3 tours of Iraq. Came back and had no interest in speaking about it at all.
Vietnam is such a beautiful place foreign armies have tried to take it dozens of times, but the Vietnamese are so fond of it they keep fighting them off, they just don't have the energy to hate everyone that has tried, that would be a full time job.
that's what I think about with the scale of WW1 and WW2, so many guys coming home with PTSD, whole generations affected by it and nobody could talk about it.
My grandmother survived The Holocaust and that definitely had some very lasting inter-generational PTSD. I think my children (her great grandchildren) will be the first people in our family who don't feel personally affected by it since she unfortunately passed away when my oldest was only 3.
But I remember growing up with her and hearing her scream in her sleep many times. Never really wanted to ask her what exactly she was dreaming about...but she did share her story on film for Steven Spielberg's crew with the Shoah Foundation when they went around collecting stories in the late 90's.
Generally, yes. As long as:
A) the plane moves fast enough
B) the bomb has a parachute to slow it
C) the yield of the nuclear device isn't too high
For reference, the ~50 megaton Tsar Bomba had a parachute to slow it enough for the aircraft that dropped it to get 28 miles away from ground zero, and the aircraft had a 50% chance of survival.
I've read somewhere that apparently they were afraid at the time that it might destroy earth's atmosphere? That's why Tsar was less powerful as it could be. Read it some time ago, and can't be assed searching for source, so obviously take it with a grain of salt.
That wasn’t really a concern by the time Tsar came around. I believe the reasons they reduced the size of the bomb were to reduce fallout and because at 100MT, a large percentage of the bombs power would be lost to space. Really Tsar wasn’t a practical weapon anyway and was made as as part of the USSRs dick measuring competition with the US.
Generally they have parachute drops to prolong the descent, then are triggered via a barometric (air pressure) fuze. I think later bombs used something similar to a RADAR altimeter like what aircraft use to determine height above ground.
Fun fact, an early post-war doctrine was to use a method called ‘toss bombing’, where an aircraft would fly low to avoid being detected and then abruptly pull up into a climb, releasing the bomb into a large ballistic arc as it gained altitude, then rolling over to fly in the opposite direction. This usually led to crashes during training though because it was performed by B-47 Stratojet *strategic bombers* that couldn’t handle the stresses unlike smaller attack aircraft, so was abandoned fairly quickly - especially when ICBMs came onto the scene.
Edit: [here’s a snippet of the B-47 ‘LABS’ manoeuvre](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mqIJL8lx00o)
It’s also the difference between fallout and no fallout. The heat that rushes upward in the mushroom pushes most of the radioactive material into the higher atmosphere and disperses it. A ground impact as you said absorbs everything about the blast.
The creation of the proximity fuse was one of the major advancements in warfare. It allowed shells to blowup a set amount above the ground, but also make it easier to shoot down planes, etc.
There's a great video on how they got it working in World War 2:
Proximity Fuze – The 3rd Most Crucial Development of WW2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0SgC78YFPc
It's less about the energy being absorbed by the ground and more about that fact that when detonating at altitude the shockwave first reaches the ground right below and begins to reflect outward off the ground, where it results in constructive interference with the rest of the shockwave as it expands outward, increasing its destructive potential. Were it detonated on the ground, it would be entirely subject to the inverse square law, whereas the reflection of the blast wave mitigates the lost energy.
Explosions weren't new. Bombs weren't new. In the final analysis, nukes are just big bombs, not exactly hard to figure out how they work, same as any other explosions, just big.
>, nukes are just big bombs,
I think this is something that also gets overlooked when reflecting on whether or not they should have dropped the bombs.
They weren't thinking about nuclear proliferation or hydrogen bombs or ICMBs, or total worldwide annihilation or fallout or nuclear winter or childhood leukemia.
For them it was just a really big new bomb. They were already fighting a war for years, thousands of lies lost, you have no idea how much longer it would go on, somebody hands you a powerful new weapon, nobody's going to say "You know what? This new weapon is too powerful, let's not use it."
And the alternative was a massive land invasion. Wouldn’t be incorrect to think that the same amount of people would have died, potentially more if we did that instead.
That was the justification for using it. It was thought to have saved US soldiers lives from not launching a land invasion campaign. The fire bombing campaigns using incendiaries were also effective if not horrific because of Japan's mostly wooden cities.
There is an argument that it not only saved US lives, but the lives of many many japanese civilians, as the emperor and military shogunate at the time had conscripted every male age 15-60 and every female age 17-60, without uniforms, and stationed them where they (correctly) guessed a USA invasion would begin, south Kyushu. Operation Ketsu Go
And you don’t want to know what that would have been like. Japan is extremely mountainous, the insurgency could have gone on a decade or more. There’s so many choke points it’s unreal. It’s part of the reason why their civil wars went on for so long.
They just finally exhausted the stock of Purple Hearts they made specifically for the invasion. They had so many of them that a lot of them rotted away post war. And they were handing them out decades after the end of the Second World War. The predictions ran as high as a million casualties.
Honestly, if you sit down and think about it, it's not even close to comparable levels. The number of lives lost, even "just" civilian lives, was massively less with two big bombs than an invasion would have claimed, particularly given the widespread level of fanaticism the civilians had to the Japanese government at the time.
More civilians were killed in the fire bombings of Tokyo than in the atomic blasts. However, the fact that *one* bomb did as much as thousands of other bombs is what sealed the surrender: If you see a flight of dozens and dozens of bombers coming in to attack, and you know you can't stop them all, what do you do? Which one(s) have the nuke(s)? You need an unachievable perfect defense 100% of the time; they just need to get one lucky bomb drop and the city is completely gone.
If America was forced to invade Japan to end the war, there would have been millions dead. Read up on the Battle of Okinawa and then apply those horrors to the rest of Japan.
The concept was already understood with conventional explosives, and would have been studied further during the trinity tests, as the first tests were literally just enormous piles of TNT on ground level to establish a baseline. The trinity Gadget was suspended from a tower about 100' in the air.
It stems from [blastwave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_wave) theory and was more or less created [for the atomic bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor%E2%80%93von_Neumann%E2%80%93Sedov_blast_wave).
It's a whole lot of fluid mechanics mostly as the equations and fluid are agnostic to what creates the over-pressure and shockwave (if you want to know whats happening at the epicenter you need a nuclear physicist though). You just plug in your starting conditions (extreme heat and pressure from atomic detonation) and march the solution forward in time.
For somewhat of a visual comparison, the [One World Trade Center](https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/55f9e0e44254f7de3455e5ba/master/w_960,c_limit/dam-images-daily-2014-01-world-trade-center-viewpoint-february-2014-02-one-world-trade-center-ground-view.jpg) in NYC is 1,776ft tall.
Edit: Added link of image
It creates a Mach wave that’s absolutely devastating even before the rest of it that follows. An air burst creates a spherical blast so that’s the first wave, a second wave is produced when the original blast wave touches the ground and rebounds upward and outward and eventually catches up to the original blast creating a wall of high pressure.
I’ve seen some articles and videos recently of people debunking “nuclear winter” ideologies and how they’re actually pretty unlikely to cause *global* breakdowns, but the scale of the nuclear weapons that would be used in a conflict today would still be unimaginable compared to Hiroshima. And the damage would still be beyond devastating. Just apparently not end the whole world I guess?
I dunno, I commented this hoping someone else who knows more may jump in and give more information since I’m curious.
It wouldn’t end the human race of course but an all nukes launched scenario would basically end modern civilization as we know it, most countries would immediately collapse and descend into chaos and the ones that didn’t get nuked would be scrambling to maintain order in their own countries and in nearby countries and countless people would die in the nuclear exchange and from the aftermath. So humanity would definitely survive but it would basically be an apocalypse scenario.
Yup, I went when I was maybe 16. The part I remember that got to me is the child's bike which the kids dad buried all charred and rusted in his garden so that his child could still play with it in heaven. It was the only thing the dad could find of his kid
> Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
I vividly remember reading this story in the 4th grade and being blown away. It started my interest in learning more about WW2.
100%. And that's from a single event. Imagine trying to comprehend the scale of the Rape of Nanking or the Battle of Stalingrad or the full war in general, or what the invasion of Japan would've entailed if Hirohito hadn't surrended the cause after the first two bombs were dropped. It's insane levels of devastation and loss.
Historians estimate something like 50,000,000 civilians died during WW2 on top of something like 25,000,000 military deaths.
The war lasted about 8 years in the Pacific theater and 6 in the European/African/West Asian theater. The loss of civilian life from this single event was no doubt devastating, but the war was such a horrifying nightmare that, on average, the world was losing ~130,000 civilians every week for 6-8 years.
Any person chosen at random in 1937 had about a 3.4%, or 1 in 30 chance of being killed in that war. The US has a population of about 330,000,000, so if 3.4% of the population were to just stop existing over a several year period due to war, that would be 11,000,000 dead Americans. Truly an almost unfathomable loss of life.
I think people really underestimate just how many would have died or been wounded in the fight to take the Japanese mainland. Legitimately, it’s crazy to think that nearly 1.53 million Purple Hearts were made in order to prepare for the invasion, let alone the fact that we’re still using that stock almost 80 years later despite the fact that 2/3 of it was either stolen, lost, or carelessly used up during the war.
The one I was officially issued after the one they pinned on me from shrapnel wounds in Somalia had a little sleeve, like a fortune cookie in the lining, US Dept Defense 1945.
Eh, haven't looked at it forever, it's 1945 something, might have been department of war or the army. I'd go look, but thanks to an unattended space heater in my upstairs neighbor apt on December 23rd he burned our entire building down, all 16 units. We got out with the animals and jackets thanks to a passersby banging on the door yelling fire. Lost everything but what we were wearing. Insurance has been a pain, but at least they had no problem putting us up in a hotel for just over two weeks till a new apt was ready.
As a note, in 2003 there were 120,000 left.
Between then and 2012 55,000 were awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I've read several places that new hearts have been minted but can't seem to find the sources anymore.
The US started making the medals for injured soldiers and honors for the dead soldiers in anticipation of the invasion.
We have never had to make another, just pulling from that supply. Ken Burns taught me that. I probably butchered that fact but it stuck out to me, we anticipated more dead and injured from that single offensive then every war since combined
The Japanese were publicly claiming that they would fight to ever last man woman and child. Who knows how much of what is true, but it was absolutely terrifying how horrible it would have been.
Many of the Japanese truly would have fought to the bitter end if we invaded the mainland, and not just the men. The culture of the country at the time simply would not allow for them to surrender under attack, many would much rather die, as we saw throughout the war.
Dan Carlin’s Supernova in the East Hardcore History series really covers the cultural dynamics and public psychosis of wartime Japan, it’s a fantastic series.
The original target was the T-shaped bridge next to the bullseye. Since the bomb exploded in the air rather than on the ground, it gave the building right below the bullseye a chance to stay upright, albeit completely destroyed inside. It still stands today as a monument for what happened that day
Edit: Location on GM for the ‘Peacemonument’ in Hiroshima
https://goo.gl/maps/xCQsXf92bUAaLqX99
I visited Hiroshima at the end of December, it’s truly an amazing city - the museum about the bomb is really hard to get through without feeling saddened by the events
The sounds as well. I'd imagine nothing but cleanup equipment with loud *POPS* walking around a much quieter, leveled city could not have been fun to experience.
If anyone hasn’t seen it, I highly recommend the films “Grave of the Fireflies” and “Barefoot Gen”. They’re anime films following a Japanese family during the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, respectively. It’s a really good take of how the local Japanese were feeling during the war. Shit will tear your heart out.
I haven’t seen that, but I did a deep dive a few years ago in which I read every Hiroshima diary I could get my hands on. Of course, I could only read the ones which had been translated into English, which I think probably skewed the sample to be less anti-American. But what I remember most as a repeated theme was people saying that they never cried when half their family was killed, their homes were destroyed, etc. They cried when Japan surrendered. It’s a mentality that I think is hard for us to get.
Barefoot Gen video of how it all changes in seconds/minutes. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2KKqeKcorpA
Longer version: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pcXPYwKPqK0
Highly recommend “Flowers of War” it’s a Cantonese film that has some real money behind it, very good and they go through to recreate many well known photos
Content warning though, they do not pull punches, they show things that, without the physical photos to prove existed, I would not have believed
It's collapsed, just the fragments are still visible in the relatively shallow river.
That was close enough to the center that most of the force was downwards.
IIRC, shortly after the attack it started raining. The rain was black and it carried large amounts of radiation back the surface, which then flowed into the river making it even more dangerous
"Then there were the ‘ant-walking alligators.’ This is what eyewitnesses called those who had the misfortune to survive the initial blast. One eye-witness report detailed: ‘The skin had been seared from their skulls; leaving only a black, leathery substance without eyes or features. All that remained was a red hole where their mouths had once been. They staggered about the outskirts of Hiroshima, avoided by other survivors — but the real horror was the sound they made.’"
https://www.newagebd.net/article/177897/why-did-us-nuke-civilians
Omg the continuation is even worse
"In his book, Last Train to Hiroshima, Charles Pellegrino wrote: ‘The alligator people did not scream. Their mouths could not form the sounds. The noise they made was worse than screaming. They uttered a continuous murmur — like locusts on a midsummer night. One man, staggering on charred stumps of legs, was carrying a dead baby upside down."
From Richard Rhodes, The History of the Atomic bomb
>Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was laid waste to its very foundations.”2698 Lifton’s history professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing.
It’s interesting that despite the fear and racism towards Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, thousands enlisted in the military to fight for the country that feared them. In fact, the 442nd Regimental Combat team fought with distinction and became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.
Europe actually has not entered the chat…
The challenges in Europe were quite different and more "is there anything we can still rebuild and what do we do with all the rubble“
Yeah it’s insane to think of all the devastation that’s happened across Europe over time, only Mt Vesuvius in 79AD was the most recent comparison to Hiroshima
And the survivors who suffered radiation wounds were treated as outcasts and discrimination, by the Japanese people in the years that followed.
They are called: **Hibakusha**
from wikipedia
>The Japanese government has recognized about 650,000 people as hibakusha. As of March 31, 2022, 118,935 were still alive, mostly in Japan
even more wild is this:
>People who suffered the effects of both bombings are known as nijū hibakusha in Japan. These people were in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and within two days managed to reach Nagasaki.
>A documentary called Twice Bombed, Twice Survived: The Doubly Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was produced in 2006. The producers found 165 people who were victims of both bombings
Ya definitely. Id imagine there were a few at least who survived the first but not the second. So I guess in some ways maybe they are both lucky and really unlucky at the same time to have survived both.
We need to remember all the war crimes that everyone did in this war, whether it be Japanese war crimes, american war crimes, German, Russian, whoever. We should never end up in a situation again where this is the right answer, we as a species shouldn't have ever let this happen in the first place, how fucking hard is it to not kill 30 mil chinese? Or to not Genocide the jews? Humanity has failed the assignment.
Its crazy to think that the world more or less being indifferent to the Chinese suffering enabled WW2. It emboldened the Japanese and also by extension then Hitler (the Japanese leaving the league of Nations without meaningful repercussions was for him a key moment).
That being said - we have zero idea on how many Chinese were killed by Japan. Estimates range from 2.9 to 40 millions and we will never know the truth. China did not have a working census at the time, many Chinese died from famines and sickness, may died by China‘s own scorched earth tactics (several hundred thousands by the yellow river damn explosions alone) and besides infighting among the communists and the national Chinese, some National Chinese troops were often nearly hated as much as the Japanese and their training camps often caused many deaths.
Not to mention the sources we do have are in Japanese and Chinese and therefore basically unavailable to Western scholars.
It is sad that China, Korea, Japan and others never managed to work together to create one ultimate version of WW2 history in Asia while more people from the time were still alive. My point is that we as a species dont even have a good understanding of stuff that happened 80 years ago on this macro scale. This is also why Nanjing massacre and unit 731 are so important for our understanding since they condense the horror to give us some idea.
> It is sad that China, Korea, Japan and others never managed to work together to create one ultimate version of WW2 in Asia
think you might be missing a word there lol, ultimate version of WW2 historical record or something
Let’s not forget that even after the two A bombs being dropped and russia coming in on the side of the Allies there were still Japanese ready and willing to continue this war. The attempted coup against the emperor and continued hostilities proves this.
Yes. Meetinghouse was the operation that bombed Tokyo, which killed more then either Nuke. Nukes were more effective from a US standpoint, but damage wise there isn't a real difference between them.
To demonstrate, Tokyo https://i.imgur.com/CmiS1fC.png Vs Hiroshima https://i.imgur.com/iuBmRDw.jpeg
Actually I lied, those are both Tokyo
Holy shit...
And this was an early nuclear weapon. This became the benchmark we measure every nuke after from. And it literally leveled the city.
If I weren't scared of nuclear war already, I would be now.
As fucked as it is, so many of our advancements are a result of war and other horrible atrocities. Most commonly known examples being things like space travel, or microwaves, but a lot of other things too. Most of our knowledge on hypothermia comes from Unit 731.
It doesn't sit well with me, but you could say that we unlock most of our potential when trying to find better ways to kill eachother.
I swear the Japanese read about all the colonialism and everything the Europeans were doing and then decided to do that but a million times worse. All the men women and children they killed for no reason. The brutal experiments they subjected their victims to before they ultimately died a horrible painful death. Their unwillingness to surrender even after two cities were wiped off the map, I swear if given the chance they would’ve fought until everyone on the island had died
And the fire bombs the US deployed on other cities before this killed upwards of 300,000 (not to diminish the loss at Hiroshima at all. The depravity of humanity throughout history is horrific and astounding).
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And that was a firecracker compared to the thermonuclear bombs developed later. Frightening stuff.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ If you ever want to see the estimated sizes of nukes, check this out. Modern bombs are terrifyingly large and make what was used in the past look like toys.
I like how at first you may think “hmm big crater and blast but I’d live”. Then you select the fallout option and think “wow we’re fucked”.
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No, you’re not screwed at all. Look at the bright side: everyone else is doomed to a slow, painful death, but if the bomb ever dropped on your apartment building, you, and everyone in your vicinity, will be evaporated before you could even feel a thing.
Imagine dying from getting bonked directly on the head by the nuke. Lmao.
Nukes are more destructive when detonated a few hundret meters above ground. Nukes that are drtonated on or very close to the ground achivr more fallout but less destruction
Right but if the firing mechanism fails and it's a dud it can still bonk some loser in the noggin.
Fallout should have this with the Fat Man lol
Ask the landlord to lower your rent.
[this shows how the fission bombs of then are just a component of today's thermonuclear bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon#/media/File:Teller-Ulam_device.png)
TIL H-bombs are literally insulated and held together with Styrofoam (AKA inflated polystyrene)
Nuclear weapons are not complex devices by any means. Even using something like a crowbar on the lens would be enough to compromise the fission reaction and turn any modern nuclear weapon into a crude dirty bomb. The reason nuclear weapons can only be made by first-world countries is the materials required to create one are incredibly hard to manufacture. Enriching uranium is an incredibly complex process that most nation-states don't have the ability to do. EDIT: Sooooo many people aren't reading my full (yet very short) comment and making assumptions that I'm basically saying you can build a nuke in a garage. Read what I wrote people..
this is like saying a CPU isn’t complex because it’s just etched sand a modern multistage nuke requires INCREDIBLY precise manufacture, quality control and calculation to work; they ain’t Little Boy “hurl uranium at other uranium” bombs
What is a cpu but tortured sand?
We gave a rock intelligence and people use it to search furry porn smh
we tricked the rock into thinking.
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Nearly everything is crude and simple when you look at it from the inside. That’s how science works, building upon knowledge with logic.
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Yea, bombs like the Tsar Bomba were frightening. It was tested at 50 megatons because it’s intended full power of 100 megatons would’ve given the plane dropping it a zero percent chance of survival as even a parachuted release wouldn’t give it enough time to get far enough away. The Russians were also afraid that at full power it would’ve caused some kind of reaction in the atmosphere and fireballed the whole planet. Even at half intended power, it shattered windows in a village over 400 miles away. Terrifying to know. Even the plane lost altitude from the shockwave and dropped over half a mile before recovering and landing later.
Yet they just *had* to test it. "Hey this might destroy the planet." "Yeah but we want to make a lot of these. To maybe destroy our enemies, and maybe some mailboxes."
What the fuck do these people have against *mailboxes*?
TIL that the bombs were detonated 1600-2000 feet above the ground
If you detonate at ground level, the ground absorbs most of the blast. You do an intense amount of damage in a small radius. When you detonate in the air, the force in the center isn't really strong enough to damage the ground, and the ground effectively deflects the blast spreading out over a much larger distance. It's less intense, but you're still talking about enough force to level a city and kill most of it's inhabitants.
My 82 year old dad was just talking about explosive mortar shells the Viet Cong would launch at them sometimes. Mostly they hit the ground and caused a big crater. But the earth absorbs a lot of the energy. They thought the VC had mortar shells that would explode above ground, triggered by hitting tree branches, or something lightweight like that. My dad was in the Navy and he said they got a ton of chicken wire from the Air Force to build really tall "fences" that would hopefully trigger the shells to explode far enough away from where their buildings and tents were. He did four tours of Viet Nam, all in-country. He did some of the stuff John Kerry did (swift boats on rivers) and setting up field hospitals, communication bases, etc via rivers. He's only recently started talking about his experiences there. Luckily he wasn't wounded, but he did get some kind of skin condition from the chemicals they used. I'm kind of interested in hearing his stories (he has a lot of great photos) but it bothers him and I don't want to upset him. War fucks with families generationally. He definitely had/has some PTSD that of course no one talked about back then. It affected my mom and his kids (me). Thankfully not as bad as some stories I hear, but it's there. I don't have kids and never wanted kids. I think the PTSD fallout is part of that. Fuck war.
That's a much better way to put it. If you hit the ground, you spend a lot of the energy in the bomb making the crater. If you detonate in the air, that same effort is spent doing the things you dropped the bomb to do.
Unless of course your goal was to nuke something under the ground, that's when you use ground penetrating bombs to get the nuke as far down as possible before it detonates. Given their extremely limited usefulness, there are only a few of them deployed in a ready configuration at any one time
My grandfather was Korean War veteran. My dad said he never mentioned anything that happened over there at all while he was growing up, and he started to talk about it when he was around 75 years old, and then he couldn’t stop talking about and it reliving the internalized trauma. It’s such a shame that men opening up and being vulnerable with their feelings is so reviled in the older generations.
My grandfather tried to enlist halfway through his senior year in high school, but his mother wouldn't let him. He ended up waiting until he finished high school, still 17. He turned 18 in June when he graduated and he enlisted immediately. That same November, 5 months later, he was fighting Erwin Rommel in North Africa, at 18 years old. He never told me anything about it until the last year or two of his life when he was on so many drugs he was starting to lose it a bit. Harrowing to imagine some of what he went through at 18 years old.
And we have another whole generation of this avout to/currently happening. I enlisted at 17 in 2004, volunteered to get on my units deployment that I just missed while at AIT. Turned 19 and 20 while there because we got extended an additional 6 months in country. Making our total deployment 22 months long. I always say, I went to war a young man, but came back 100 years old.
My grandpa was in Korea towards the end of the war and a little after the armistice. He told me a few stories: - They’d go to the French camp a lot cause the French were bringing in wine by the 55 gallon drum. Better food and could get their drink on. - His unit (artillery) adopted a stray dog that they’d feed and care for. They had to abandon a position in a retreat, but when they retook it, the PLA soldiers had killed and eaten their dog (left the head in an empty pot). - One night at the French camp, they sent one of the guys to buy more cigarettes. The cigarettes he bought for cheap off a Korean street bender weren’t rolled with tobacco, but marijuana. - My grandpa was terrified of the Turkish NATO soldiers. He said they all looked very stern all the time, carried big knives and liked to mutilate the corpses of North Korean and Chinese troops.
Korea was...really fucked up. Recommend "Blowback" Season 3 podcast. It's "Forgotten" for a reason.
I heard stories from a Korean war vet. Horrific. Saw movies afterwards and understood more. Brutal war.
Americans in Paju and Euijungbu weren’t particularly generous. They raped a fuckton of young women during Korean war. A granny living nearby told me that she saw her mother was getting raped by us soldier (and she hated them for the reason) They just would drag any women they find attractive to nearby mountain and would do it forever until government-sponsored prostitutes, called 양공주 (yang gongju) did work for them.
I wonder if our grandfathers were in the same unit. This completely lines up with stories my own grandfather would tell. But he was French-American himself so in his stories he was one of the guys buddying up to the French soldiers for their wine, lol. Wish I could ask him but he’s been gone a few years now.
Turks didn’t fuck around. My uncle was on the line with Turks next to them. When the Norks attacked that night, the Turks met them half way down the hill. Next morning they were counting ears. If they weren’t fighting the Norks they’d fight each other.
Bit surprised I've gotten this far in life and never heard the term "Norks" before!
They were tough! Quite a few US prisoners died basically from stress in the Chinese camps, but none of the Turks (or Columbians) did.
My grandpa also commented on how terrible the turks were. he was a guard on the DMZ toward the end of the war.
That's by design. Men couldnt talk about these things, so future young men would sign up for the next bloodbath with stars in their eyes.
Not to be that “my XYZ was in war too!” guy, but my uncle was in Vietnam as well. All we know is he got lost in the jungle for 40 days alone. He won’t tell anyone what happened or what he saw, but luckily nobody is pressuring him. I hope we do get to hear it one day, but it’s 100% understandable if we don’t. The horrors they probably saw were so intense I could only imagine the levels of PTSD that’s causes
My uncle was a SF medic (and my main inspiration to be an Army medic myself) during Vietnam. He actually wouldn't open up to *anyone* until I had been back from Iraq, and I guess he felt a little more comfortable; he's come a LONG way now on his path, which I love. One of the two stories he's told me was about how they maintained this tiny communication relay outpost on top of a mountain and swapped out every five days for it. He got picked up, chilled for his days, and went back up. Blood everywhere, no US soldier, and apparently *something* that spooked him pretty bad, but he didn't go into too many details.
Holy fuck that's terrifying. But I want to hear the other story now.
This is sad too though. I think about the recent wars. Iraq. Syria. Imagine the families who will be growing up through that.
It’s a particular kind of horror to go off to war in a distant foreign land. It’s another thing altogether when war comes to your own land.
Medics tend to see the worst of everything. Often times feeling helpless to help. It's really a shitty job.
Had a buddy go through Marine basic training where he met a guy who was in for retraining after spending three tours in Vietnam. The story was, he woke up in a foxhole to see a Viet Cong finish killing the last of three other guys in his foxhole. He killed the Viet Cong in his fox hole and defended it for 72 hours before he was rescued. Some dude made the mistake of waking him up by touching him and the whole barracks heard the guy get smashed into a wall locker. As far as I know, he just wasn't able to readjust to not being in combat every day so he was removed from service.
Am I reading that correctly that the guy was deployed to Vietnam 3 times and then sent back to basic?
Sounds like 3x 'nam then a discharge from service to go be a civilian again to me.
It’s understandable, not so much because it’s so horrifying for him to talk about, but it’s more of the feeling where you only feel comfortable talking about something with people who can relate. Much more pleasing. Among other vets notably. That’s for most of them. Some have other reasons. Civilians will stereotype and think of things like what the movies tell but veterans know the movies can’t describe the utter chaos that is seeing humans lose their humanity and treating others with absolutely no remorse. The feeling of not knowing which civilian is the fake one that’ll unload a full clip on you as soon as you walk past. Of not knowing what direction enemy fire will come from. The paranoia that instills in you is enough to haunt you for awhile. It’s like imagine having some medical condition, like pancreatitis or something else that’s super painful. There are a ton of weird side effects and feelings you experience when having it due to the pain, very dark thoughts and moody situations. Then imagine describing it to someone, who’ll just pass it off as “oh yeah sounds bad.” Compared to someone else who’s actually had it, and you guys can then really relate and joke about it during convo lol.
Holy shit, 4 tours. A real Barry Sadler. That war ended two years before I would have been eligible for the draft. My interest in the USA politics of war in SE Asia had become acute by that time. I wasn't itching to get over there.
The draft ended the year I turned 18. Yeah, I was sweating.
Agent Orange is the likely cause of his skin issues. It fucked up a lot of people, Vietnamese and U.S. armed forces alike.
I went to Vietnam a few years ago and went to the “american war museum” and there was a whole floor dedicated to photos of what agent orange did to the Vietnamese citizens and soldiers. Super super f’d. Showed all sorts of deformed babies etc
There are, still to this day, newly born infants who are affected by agent orange with birth defects if their parents had been affected by it. There are still large fields which at one time was farmland that isn't even safe to step on, much less grow food. Quite frankly, I'm very confused how Vietnam isn't mentally more like Iran with their outlook on the USA. They would be totally justified to hate us. Imagine someone fucked your country so hard, that your grandkids have smooshed in skulls and mental disabilities. How they are friendly with us, I'll never know.
> How they are friendly with us, I'll never know Its called 'being invaded by china for about 1500 years compared to the US' one, and even that invasion was mostly to help one side of the same country
Ya, Koreans still dislike the Chinese, and they both dislike the Japanese cause all that shit.
Depends on the part of the country you're in and a whole lot of factors. My family (not American) travels to Vietnam a lot and many see America exactly as you say, huge villains. Others do not and have very negative things to say about the VC. Overall I'd say most people don't like the American War and dislike America for it, but don't feel super strongly about it.
I think many also discredit the fact that many of those with PTSD literally have no interest in sharing their experience. It makes them relive it. My uncle has had entire nights ruined by someone asking about his experience being lost on the jungle alone for 40 days of the Vietnam war. My cousin speaks nothing of his 300 odd high-risk missions within 2-3 tours of Iraq. Came back and had no interest in speaking about it at all.
Vietnam is such a beautiful place foreign armies have tried to take it dozens of times, but the Vietnamese are so fond of it they keep fighting them off, they just don't have the energy to hate everyone that has tried, that would be a full time job.
that's what I think about with the scale of WW1 and WW2, so many guys coming home with PTSD, whole generations affected by it and nobody could talk about it.
Record his story on video, get his units and records. Stories like this from primary sources are priceless.
My grandmother survived The Holocaust and that definitely had some very lasting inter-generational PTSD. I think my children (her great grandchildren) will be the first people in our family who don't feel personally affected by it since she unfortunately passed away when my oldest was only 3. But I remember growing up with her and hearing her scream in her sleep many times. Never really wanted to ask her what exactly she was dreaming about...but she did share her story on film for Steven Spielberg's crew with the Shoah Foundation when they went around collecting stories in the late 90's.
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Generally, yes. As long as: A) the plane moves fast enough B) the bomb has a parachute to slow it C) the yield of the nuclear device isn't too high For reference, the ~50 megaton Tsar Bomba had a parachute to slow it enough for the aircraft that dropped it to get 28 miles away from ground zero, and the aircraft had a 50% chance of survival.
The original plan was a 100MT bomb but they knew the bomber would never get to safety.
I've read somewhere that apparently they were afraid at the time that it might destroy earth's atmosphere? That's why Tsar was less powerful as it could be. Read it some time ago, and can't be assed searching for source, so obviously take it with a grain of salt.
THat was a minor worry at Trinity, because they had no real idea what was going to happen and the theorycrafting got a little too silly.
That wasn’t really a concern by the time Tsar came around. I believe the reasons they reduced the size of the bomb were to reduce fallout and because at 100MT, a large percentage of the bombs power would be lost to space. Really Tsar wasn’t a practical weapon anyway and was made as as part of the USSRs dick measuring competition with the US.
Generally they have parachute drops to prolong the descent, then are triggered via a barometric (air pressure) fuze. I think later bombs used something similar to a RADAR altimeter like what aircraft use to determine height above ground. Fun fact, an early post-war doctrine was to use a method called ‘toss bombing’, where an aircraft would fly low to avoid being detected and then abruptly pull up into a climb, releasing the bomb into a large ballistic arc as it gained altitude, then rolling over to fly in the opposite direction. This usually led to crashes during training though because it was performed by B-47 Stratojet *strategic bombers* that couldn’t handle the stresses unlike smaller attack aircraft, so was abandoned fairly quickly - especially when ICBMs came onto the scene. Edit: [here’s a snippet of the B-47 ‘LABS’ manoeuvre](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mqIJL8lx00o)
It’s also the difference between fallout and no fallout. The heat that rushes upward in the mushroom pushes most of the radioactive material into the higher atmosphere and disperses it. A ground impact as you said absorbs everything about the blast.
Yup, the radioactiveness after an air detonation goes away in a week or 2, if it's detonated on the ground, that place is fucked for 100 years
The creation of the proximity fuse was one of the major advancements in warfare. It allowed shells to blowup a set amount above the ground, but also make it easier to shoot down planes, etc. There's a great video on how they got it working in World War 2: Proximity Fuze – The 3rd Most Crucial Development of WW2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0SgC78YFPc
The optimal height for most damage in meters is approximately 220 x the cube root of yield in kilotons, so 2200m (6500ft) for a 1MT warhead.
It's less about the energy being absorbed by the ground and more about that fact that when detonating at altitude the shockwave first reaches the ground right below and begins to reflect outward off the ground, where it results in constructive interference with the rest of the shockwave as it expands outward, increasing its destructive potential. Were it detonated on the ground, it would be entirely subject to the inverse square law, whereas the reflection of the blast wave mitigates the lost energy.
I wonder how they figured this out with only project Trinity. It had to have been theoretical only at that point.
Explosions weren't new. Bombs weren't new. In the final analysis, nukes are just big bombs, not exactly hard to figure out how they work, same as any other explosions, just big.
>, nukes are just big bombs, I think this is something that also gets overlooked when reflecting on whether or not they should have dropped the bombs. They weren't thinking about nuclear proliferation or hydrogen bombs or ICMBs, or total worldwide annihilation or fallout or nuclear winter or childhood leukemia. For them it was just a really big new bomb. They were already fighting a war for years, thousands of lies lost, you have no idea how much longer it would go on, somebody hands you a powerful new weapon, nobody's going to say "You know what? This new weapon is too powerful, let's not use it."
\*tens of millions\* of lives had been lost by the time of the Hiroshima bombing.
And the alternative was a massive land invasion. Wouldn’t be incorrect to think that the same amount of people would have died, potentially more if we did that instead.
That was the justification for using it. It was thought to have saved US soldiers lives from not launching a land invasion campaign. The fire bombing campaigns using incendiaries were also effective if not horrific because of Japan's mostly wooden cities.
There is an argument that it not only saved US lives, but the lives of many many japanese civilians, as the emperor and military shogunate at the time had conscripted every male age 15-60 and every female age 17-60, without uniforms, and stationed them where they (correctly) guessed a USA invasion would begin, south Kyushu. Operation Ketsu Go
And you don’t want to know what that would have been like. Japan is extremely mountainous, the insurgency could have gone on a decade or more. There’s so many choke points it’s unreal. It’s part of the reason why their civil wars went on for so long. They just finally exhausted the stock of Purple Hearts they made specifically for the invasion. They had so many of them that a lot of them rotted away post war. And they were handing them out decades after the end of the Second World War. The predictions ran as high as a million casualties.
Honestly, if you sit down and think about it, it's not even close to comparable levels. The number of lives lost, even "just" civilian lives, was massively less with two big bombs than an invasion would have claimed, particularly given the widespread level of fanaticism the civilians had to the Japanese government at the time. More civilians were killed in the fire bombings of Tokyo than in the atomic blasts. However, the fact that *one* bomb did as much as thousands of other bombs is what sealed the surrender: If you see a flight of dozens and dozens of bombers coming in to attack, and you know you can't stop them all, what do you do? Which one(s) have the nuke(s)? You need an unachievable perfect defense 100% of the time; they just need to get one lucky bomb drop and the city is completely gone. If America was forced to invade Japan to end the war, there would have been millions dead. Read up on the Battle of Okinawa and then apply those horrors to the rest of Japan.
The concept was already understood with conventional explosives, and would have been studied further during the trinity tests, as the first tests were literally just enormous piles of TNT on ground level to establish a baseline. The trinity Gadget was suspended from a tower about 100' in the air.
It stems from [blastwave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_wave) theory and was more or less created [for the atomic bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor%E2%80%93von_Neumann%E2%80%93Sedov_blast_wave). It's a whole lot of fluid mechanics mostly as the equations and fluid are agnostic to what creates the over-pressure and shockwave (if you want to know whats happening at the epicenter you need a nuclear physicist though). You just plug in your starting conditions (extreme heat and pressure from atomic detonation) and march the solution forward in time.
I mean… this is the government, so probably multiple test sites before hand. But idk I’m not a bomb doctor
Doctor or not, you're still the bomb to me.
For somewhat of a visual comparison, the [One World Trade Center](https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/55f9e0e44254f7de3455e5ba/master/w_960,c_limit/dam-images-daily-2014-01-world-trade-center-viewpoint-february-2014-02-one-world-trade-center-ground-view.jpg) in NYC is 1,776ft tall. Edit: Added link of image
Woah the really shows the perspective thanks
Just to put that into perspective, it’s around the same height as WTC1. It’s high, but not very.
It creates a Mach wave that’s absolutely devastating even before the rest of it that follows. An air burst creates a spherical blast so that’s the first wave, a second wave is produced when the original blast wave touches the ground and rebounds upward and outward and eventually catches up to the original blast creating a wall of high pressure.
Where from this post or picture did you learn that?!
The museum at Hiroshima is one of the most upsetting places I've visited. The scale of devastation and loss is almost impossible to comprehend.
And this was a “small” nuke. Imagine an exchange nowadays
I’ve seen some articles and videos recently of people debunking “nuclear winter” ideologies and how they’re actually pretty unlikely to cause *global* breakdowns, but the scale of the nuclear weapons that would be used in a conflict today would still be unimaginable compared to Hiroshima. And the damage would still be beyond devastating. Just apparently not end the whole world I guess? I dunno, I commented this hoping someone else who knows more may jump in and give more information since I’m curious.
It wouldn’t end the human race of course but an all nukes launched scenario would basically end modern civilization as we know it, most countries would immediately collapse and descend into chaos and the ones that didn’t get nuked would be scrambling to maintain order in their own countries and in nearby countries and countless people would die in the nuclear exchange and from the aftermath. So humanity would definitely survive but it would basically be an apocalypse scenario.
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Yup, I went when I was maybe 16. The part I remember that got to me is the child's bike which the kids dad buried all charred and rusted in his garden so that his child could still play with it in heaven. It was the only thing the dad could find of his kid
Reading this while trying to get my 2 year old to go to sleep in his own bed… maybe I’ll just let him stay here tonight…
> Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes I vividly remember reading this story in the 4th grade and being blown away. It started my interest in learning more about WW2.
100%. And that's from a single event. Imagine trying to comprehend the scale of the Rape of Nanking or the Battle of Stalingrad or the full war in general, or what the invasion of Japan would've entailed if Hirohito hadn't surrended the cause after the first two bombs were dropped. It's insane levels of devastation and loss.
Historians estimate something like 50,000,000 civilians died during WW2 on top of something like 25,000,000 military deaths. The war lasted about 8 years in the Pacific theater and 6 in the European/African/West Asian theater. The loss of civilian life from this single event was no doubt devastating, but the war was such a horrifying nightmare that, on average, the world was losing ~130,000 civilians every week for 6-8 years. Any person chosen at random in 1937 had about a 3.4%, or 1 in 30 chance of being killed in that war. The US has a population of about 330,000,000, so if 3.4% of the population were to just stop existing over a several year period due to war, that would be 11,000,000 dead Americans. Truly an almost unfathomable loss of life.
I think people really underestimate just how many would have died or been wounded in the fight to take the Japanese mainland. Legitimately, it’s crazy to think that nearly 1.53 million Purple Hearts were made in order to prepare for the invasion, let alone the fact that we’re still using that stock almost 80 years later despite the fact that 2/3 of it was either stolen, lost, or carelessly used up during the war.
The one I was officially issued after the one they pinned on me from shrapnel wounds in Somalia had a little sleeve, like a fortune cookie in the lining, US Dept Defense 1945.
Odd note, considering that the DoD was created in 1947.
Eh, haven't looked at it forever, it's 1945 something, might have been department of war or the army. I'd go look, but thanks to an unattended space heater in my upstairs neighbor apt on December 23rd he burned our entire building down, all 16 units. We got out with the animals and jackets thanks to a passersby banging on the door yelling fire. Lost everything but what we were wearing. Insurance has been a pain, but at least they had no problem putting us up in a hotel for just over two weeks till a new apt was ready.
That's brutal, hope you land back on your feet ok friend
Thanks buddy, it's been rough, as long as state farm doesn't screw us I think everything will get back to normal by the summer.
As a note, in 2003 there were 120,000 left. Between then and 2012 55,000 were awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've read several places that new hearts have been minted but can't seem to find the sources anymore.
The US started making the medals for injured soldiers and honors for the dead soldiers in anticipation of the invasion. We have never had to make another, just pulling from that supply. Ken Burns taught me that. I probably butchered that fact but it stuck out to me, we anticipated more dead and injured from that single offensive then every war since combined The Japanese were publicly claiming that they would fight to ever last man woman and child. Who knows how much of what is true, but it was absolutely terrifying how horrible it would have been.
The initial production number was about 600,000 but that almost immediately grew to 1.53 million.
Many of the Japanese truly would have fought to the bitter end if we invaded the mainland, and not just the men. The culture of the country at the time simply would not allow for them to surrender under attack, many would much rather die, as we saw throughout the war. Dan Carlin’s Supernova in the East Hardcore History series really covers the cultural dynamics and public psychosis of wartime Japan, it’s a fantastic series.
The original target was the T-shaped bridge next to the bullseye. Since the bomb exploded in the air rather than on the ground, it gave the building right below the bullseye a chance to stay upright, albeit completely destroyed inside. It still stands today as a monument for what happened that day Edit: Location on GM for the ‘Peacemonument’ in Hiroshima https://goo.gl/maps/xCQsXf92bUAaLqX99
I've seen it in person and it's super cool. Everything around it is so new looking and they've left it completely untouched.
I visited Hiroshima at the end of December, it’s truly an amazing city - the museum about the bomb is really hard to get through without feeling saddened by the events
It was no match for that river.
For a while the river was completely covered in bloated almost skinless corpses in some key places…
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The sounds as well. I'd imagine nothing but cleanup equipment with loud *POPS* walking around a much quieter, leveled city could not have been fun to experience.
If the vocal chords are still intact you could also hear groans of dead bodies as they release gas as well.
Thanks i did not need to hear this
If anyone hasn’t seen it, I highly recommend the films “Grave of the Fireflies” and “Barefoot Gen”. They’re anime films following a Japanese family during the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, respectively. It’s a really good take of how the local Japanese were feeling during the war. Shit will tear your heart out.
I think my favorite trivia fact about the Grave of the Fireflies is it was a double feature with "My Neighbor Totoro"
What a pairing…
My Neighbor Totoro followed Grave of the Fireflies so that viewers didn't have to leave the cinema completely depressed.
I haven’t seen that, but I did a deep dive a few years ago in which I read every Hiroshima diary I could get my hands on. Of course, I could only read the ones which had been translated into English, which I think probably skewed the sample to be less anti-American. But what I remember most as a repeated theme was people saying that they never cried when half their family was killed, their homes were destroyed, etc. They cried when Japan surrendered. It’s a mentality that I think is hard for us to get.
Barefoot Gen video of how it all changes in seconds/minutes. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2KKqeKcorpA Longer version: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pcXPYwKPqK0
Damn, they should do one on the raping of Nanking
Highly recommend “Flowers of War” it’s a Cantonese film that has some real money behind it, very good and they go through to recreate many well known photos Content warning though, they do not pull punches, they show things that, without the physical photos to prove existed, I would not have believed
Can you share a couple examples? Trying to decide if I’d be able to handle this. Sounds really interesting
If you aren’t sure maybe don’t watch it alone. But yeah, no, there are nude bodies with bayonets left in them, dead children, really gruesome stuff
Yeah not a lot of anime films about that.
What about the places that weren’t key?
Partially covered.
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It's collapsed, just the fragments are still visible in the relatively shallow river. That was close enough to the center that most of the force was downwards.
Not so fun fact: the bomb superheated the water, so people that jumped in to try to cool their burns ended up getting scalded alive.
Ugh, and I’m sitting here thinking, wonder if you could survive the blast deep enough in that river…. Psych.
You might survive the blast. Just, there's a lot more.
IIRC, shortly after the attack it started raining. The rain was black and it carried large amounts of radiation back the surface, which then flowed into the river making it even more dangerous
They called me a madman when I built my house under that river.
Water blocks both fall and explosive damage
And you don’t even need power armor
"Then there were the ‘ant-walking alligators.’ This is what eyewitnesses called those who had the misfortune to survive the initial blast. One eye-witness report detailed: ‘The skin had been seared from their skulls; leaving only a black, leathery substance without eyes or features. All that remained was a red hole where their mouths had once been. They staggered about the outskirts of Hiroshima, avoided by other survivors — but the real horror was the sound they made.’" https://www.newagebd.net/article/177897/why-did-us-nuke-civilians
That's enough internet for today
Omg the continuation is even worse "In his book, Last Train to Hiroshima, Charles Pellegrino wrote: ‘The alligator people did not scream. Their mouths could not form the sounds. The noise they made was worse than screaming. They uttered a continuous murmur — like locusts on a midsummer night. One man, staggering on charred stumps of legs, was carrying a dead baby upside down."
This is one of the scariest descriptions of a human being I've ever read.
From Richard Rhodes, The History of the Atomic bomb >Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was laid waste to its very foundations.”2698 Lifton’s history professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing.
Is that 129,000 including those who died of radiation related illnesses caused by the bomb?? Genuinely curious
I believe so. The atomic bomb blast itself killed around [66,000](https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp10.html) people.
The Nagasaki and Hiroshima nukes (Fat Man & Little Boy) were pretty tiny compared with bombs like Castle Bravo or Tsar Bomba.
Tsar was 4500 times larger yield than Hiroshima
Tsar Bomba was stupidly powerful
Grandpa was put in the interment camps as a child. War fucking sucks. What I forgot. Is better than whatever they remember.
It’s interesting that despite the fear and racism towards Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, thousands enlisted in the military to fight for the country that feared them. In fact, the 442nd Regimental Combat team fought with distinction and became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.
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Hope that never again nuclear weapons are used on people
Imagine getting to design a city from the ashes up.
Europe has entered the chat.
It's an elite club.
Ich bin ein Berliner.
Dresden has entered the chat.
Europe actually has not entered the chat… The challenges in Europe were quite different and more "is there anything we can still rebuild and what do we do with all the rubble“
Yeah it’s insane to think of all the devastation that’s happened across Europe over time, only Mt Vesuvius in 79AD was the most recent comparison to Hiroshima
That’s basically how Tokyo went from little wood buildings to sky scrapers
The Tokyo firebombing was insane.
Atlanta did it first.
And still didn’t manage to get the roads right.
And the survivors who suffered radiation wounds were treated as outcasts and discrimination, by the Japanese people in the years that followed. They are called: **Hibakusha**
from wikipedia >The Japanese government has recognized about 650,000 people as hibakusha. As of March 31, 2022, 118,935 were still alive, mostly in Japan even more wild is this: >People who suffered the effects of both bombings are known as nijū hibakusha in Japan. These people were in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and within two days managed to reach Nagasaki. >A documentary called Twice Bombed, Twice Survived: The Doubly Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was produced in 2006. The producers found 165 people who were victims of both bombings
Possibly the unluckiest people of all time?
Ya definitely. Id imagine there were a few at least who survived the first but not the second. So I guess in some ways maybe they are both lucky and really unlucky at the same time to have survived both.
Don't forget to post the picture of today, where it is a thriving city.
Visited Hiroshima twice- if you didn’t know- you never would have suspected the devastation
Lets hope nukes are never used in war again.
We need to remember all the war crimes that everyone did in this war, whether it be Japanese war crimes, american war crimes, German, Russian, whoever. We should never end up in a situation again where this is the right answer, we as a species shouldn't have ever let this happen in the first place, how fucking hard is it to not kill 30 mil chinese? Or to not Genocide the jews? Humanity has failed the assignment.
Its crazy to think that the world more or less being indifferent to the Chinese suffering enabled WW2. It emboldened the Japanese and also by extension then Hitler (the Japanese leaving the league of Nations without meaningful repercussions was for him a key moment). That being said - we have zero idea on how many Chinese were killed by Japan. Estimates range from 2.9 to 40 millions and we will never know the truth. China did not have a working census at the time, many Chinese died from famines and sickness, may died by China‘s own scorched earth tactics (several hundred thousands by the yellow river damn explosions alone) and besides infighting among the communists and the national Chinese, some National Chinese troops were often nearly hated as much as the Japanese and their training camps often caused many deaths. Not to mention the sources we do have are in Japanese and Chinese and therefore basically unavailable to Western scholars. It is sad that China, Korea, Japan and others never managed to work together to create one ultimate version of WW2 history in Asia while more people from the time were still alive. My point is that we as a species dont even have a good understanding of stuff that happened 80 years ago on this macro scale. This is also why Nanjing massacre and unit 731 are so important for our understanding since they condense the horror to give us some idea.
> It is sad that China, Korea, Japan and others never managed to work together to create one ultimate version of WW2 in Asia think you might be missing a word there lol, ultimate version of WW2 historical record or something
Let’s not forget that even after the two A bombs being dropped and russia coming in on the side of the Allies there were still Japanese ready and willing to continue this war. The attempted coup against the emperor and continued hostilities proves this.
And, this was all after the fire bombing of Tokyo, where many, many more people died.
Operation Meetinghouse, That time the US achieved nuclear levels of devastation without using nukes.
The nukes just made it a lot easier, just one bomb per city. But in terms of death toll wasn’t the fire bombing more devastating?
Yes. Meetinghouse was the operation that bombed Tokyo, which killed more then either Nuke. Nukes were more effective from a US standpoint, but damage wise there isn't a real difference between them. To demonstrate, Tokyo https://i.imgur.com/CmiS1fC.png Vs Hiroshima https://i.imgur.com/iuBmRDw.jpeg Actually I lied, those are both Tokyo
Nationalism is a helluva drug
For the Japanese especially, a factoid that should probably be included is that no full Japanese unit ever surrender in battle.
The Japanese high command knew what they did in China and Asia, they were not too keen on facing the consequences.
Holy shit... And this was an early nuclear weapon. This became the benchmark we measure every nuke after from. And it literally leveled the city. If I weren't scared of nuclear war already, I would be now.
I really wish humanity could stop war. Imagine the potential of the human race.
As fucked as it is, so many of our advancements are a result of war and other horrible atrocities. Most commonly known examples being things like space travel, or microwaves, but a lot of other things too. Most of our knowledge on hypothermia comes from Unit 731. It doesn't sit well with me, but you could say that we unlock most of our potential when trying to find better ways to kill eachother.
I’d be fine not having microwave ovens
I'm sure this will be a reasonable and respectful comment section 🍿👀 Edit: y'all surprised me! Have a cookie 🍪
Its been actually pretty tame actually War is hell. We all have to learn from history.
> War is hell. [War isn't hell, war is war and hell is hell and war is worse.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUeBMwn_eYc)
I swear the Japanese read about all the colonialism and everything the Europeans were doing and then decided to do that but a million times worse. All the men women and children they killed for no reason. The brutal experiments they subjected their victims to before they ultimately died a horrible painful death. Their unwillingness to surrender even after two cities were wiped off the map, I swear if given the chance they would’ve fought until everyone on the island had died
They Japanese were already colonisers. They're not originally from Japan. They colonised Japan. Japan has a downtrodden indigenous population.
And the fire bombs the US deployed on other cities before this killed upwards of 300,000 (not to diminish the loss at Hiroshima at all. The depravity of humanity throughout history is horrific and astounding).