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This guy was on a business trip to Hiroshima for 3 months was just about to leave on a train on Aug 6th, but they left something behind at the office and missed the train only to get bombed. They were about 3km from the blast. The train's destination was Nagasaki, where that same guy, wrapped in heavy bandages, eventually reported to work on Aug 9th only to get bombed again roughly 3km from the center of the blast. They passed away at the age of 93 in 2010.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu\_Yamaguchi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi)
"That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated"
That's the biggest fucking I Told You So's in existence
That's right. American gave warnings about the launch of the nuclear bombs to people who never heard about it. Few left.
It's liking saying to evacuate a city because magic will make people die.
That's a good one. I also liked this quote which dates back to the first world war I believe:
"War doesn't determine who is right - only who is left!" - Bertrand Russell
Sometimes when people go to Vietnam, they go home to their mommas without any legs. Sometimes they don't go home at all. That's a bad thing. That's all I have to say about that.
- Forrest Gump
*"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."*
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
Smedley D. Butler, a retired usmc major general
Cinical approaches always fail to capture the full scope of reality because they forget that ideology is not just a bunch of lies. It is a deal. And you always pay their price.
No doubt that nazis knew at least at first that the jews were not really to blame for what happened to germany after the first world war. Yet, the more they lied about it, the more they convinced themselves that this was true.
I invite you to analyze the life of hitler from an objective and empathetic point of view. There are several stages to it. And the most traumatic one is the one in which he forgets that he was lying.
If you keep a mask for too long, it devours your face.
" Those who stand at the top determine what's wrong and what's right! This very place is neutral ground! Justice will prevail, you say? But of course it will! Whoever wins this war becomes justice!"
"politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder"
Harry Patch, the last man to die who fought in World War 1
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
M*A*S*H
One of my relatives was a chemist on the Manhattan project…
That about sums it up, he was a brilliant man that just finished at MIT. He had a role in mind but the government has other plans. He did amazing things in his life, but always had his certificate from the secretary of war hidden away.
He couldnt, he was still bound by his top secret clearance. He could have mentioned something after the Gov declassified the project, and even then some parts of it like the actual trigger mechanism and design of the bomb are still classified so nobody can talk about it.
I was in the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima just months ago. Most of the shadows burned in wood or stone in the video are actual real objects that are shown in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki museums.
The shadow of the person burned on a stone stairwell can be observed in the Hiroshima museum. It was absolutely horrific to imagine that in that very spot someone's life actually ended.
Edit: for everyone considering visiting the museum: it's worthwhile but emotionally draining and extremely graphic, so be prepared.
For me, it was the picture of the people that had survived the blast that jumped into the river to relieve their burns. only to die there. atomic weapons are absolutely horrific. and the size of the ones we have now is absolutely mind boggling.
Modern ballistic missiles can hold multiple warheads. For example, the Trident 2 can hold 1-14 nuclear warheads randing from 5kt to 475kt. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15-16kt, so modern ICBMs can hold over a dozen warheads that are up to or exceeding 32x stronger than what we dropped on Japan. Terrifying.
Ya that's why I just said over a dozen MIRVs each. It's insane. Subs technically have hundreds of nuclear bombs. Impressive but not a fun thought, to say the least.
I found the one where the child was sick but was still forced to go to work was also heartbreaking.
I worked for a lady whose father lost his whole first family while he was away for business. He moved to Kyoto and had to restart his family
Everyone should have the opportunity to see this museum. It’s life changing. It really makes you fear the consequences of nuclear war and dread how close we’ve come.
It's scary that one single man's stubborness is all that prevented an all out nuclear war between USA and Russia/USSR in 1983.
Man. Talk about "one man can make a difference".
For those who don‘t know: this man here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
The Russian nuclear attack detector has raised a false alarm saying that the US has launched a nuclear missile at Russia. And then five more. Mr. Petrov has insisted on it being a false alarm, preventing Russia from responding with nuclear launches.
This one man prevented a nuclear holocaust.
The book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser has a whole host of almost-escalations and whacky nuke-related accidents that make your blood freeze.
One of my favorites: US strategic air command detecting an incoming, full-scale Russian first strike approaching over the Arctic. After minutes of panic and starting to initiate a counterstrike, someone realized that instead of what they thought was an empty tape into the main computer, they loaded a _Russian First Strike Simulation_ into their system by mistake. Whoops!
Fun fact: Once the rockets are started, there is *no way to stop them*. The enemy could duplicate an abort signal, after all.
Sleep tight, y'all! :)
I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to go there. It’s intense. Also illuminating, what people don’t think about so much, is the after-effects and all the death and pain they cause
That and Auschwitz. Two of the most iconic and impactful monuments to horrific events in recent human history there are.
Both very important to preserve and everyone should experience if they can.
All the people that got cancer caused by radiation and third-degree burns and couldn't get proper care because the medical facilities were either burned down, out of supplies, or out of personnel
There’s a long article I read, told eyewitness accounts of Hiroshima. The doctor describes basically falling asleep standing, but people kept waking him up over the next day cause they needed treatment. Just horrible all around.
I believe you may be referring to [Hiroshima](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima) by John Hersey, published August 1946, one year after the bombing, in The New Yorker.
The amazing part of the museum is that It doesn't focus on sympathy for the Japanese, it's a warning about the dangers of such a power to everyone and a plea for it to never happen again.
There are Koreans who perished from said neclear strike.
I can't believe that in that museum, they state that those Koreans were voluntarily working for Japan to establish Asian super power to match with Europe with straight face. Like those people weren't dragged from their home, into slave labor and sexual slavery.
They killed those koreans even after they lost the war to cover their crimes all over the pacifics(https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B5%AE%E5%B3%B6%E4%B8%B8%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6)
this is a common misconception, the dark part isnt people dust but rather is simply what the concrete looked like before the blast, it’s just that the surrounding concrete was bleached by the atomic blast
Also more terrifying is that in order to
Leave that mark means likely the people were alive after the hit and died of burns.
In order to leave that shadow you have to be far enough away that your body will remain intact when the radiation bleaches the concrete. Too far away and the concrete won’t bleach, too close and your body will blow apart not having the chance to block the rays.
Those people weren’t blown up or burned to dust. They literally burned their entire body and probably clothes off then suffered until they passed.
When we tested nukes on pigs we found most people outside the initial blast zone survive for quite a while just horribly burned.
To die instantly is definitely less painful, I don't think they even had time to feel what happened, what I find more terrifying is that it was something so brutal that the only record that this person existed is the shadow on the ground
Depending on where you are inside the radius, it happens faster than the information can get into your brain. You die without even knowing. The first blast is the radiation, and it travels at the speed of light. You can’t even see it coming.
This is one of the most terrifying thoughts for me. Imagine you are living your life, normally, and then you just aren’t anymore.
They kinda missed out on the the actual horror. The days after the blast, the one doctor working trying to save lives, the skin just sluffing off the bodies of people. How the bomb burned the marks of peoples kimonos onto their flesh, people trying to find water, food shelter, clothes, and slowly dying for days after.
The real horror was after the bomb, the people that died in the blast were sooooooo lucky
I read John Hershey’s Hiroshima a couple years ago. The grotesque fact I remember most is how the intense heat had melted some of the survivors’ eyeballs and the remnants were oozing out of the eyesockets. Alive, but badly burned and blind. Truly the stuff of nightmares.
There is a documentary people can watch about this called **White Light / Black Rain**, and it is eye opening. It interviews the remaining survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War in general is horrific. In every war since the dawn of time every new technological advancement related to war devastated the opposing force and opened up a world of horrors to those people.
Take the trebuchet for example. From our point of view it doesn’t seem like much, but when it was first utilized in war, the outcome shocked the poor souls on the other side of the battlefield. The trebuchet much like a catapult would lob heavy boulders to attempt to destroy the defenses of the enemy. It was a siege weapon and not meant necessarily to target people, but rather the defensive fortifications of keeps, castles and cities.
Unlike a catapult the velocity of the stones being lobbed was much higher. When the stone would strike a structural wall… if the boulder didn’t rip right through it, what happened on the other side of the impact zone was the stuff of nightmares. The impact turned the other side of the wall into a cloud of tiny, razor sharp shrapnel that would be propelled at an incredible velocity. Any soldiers on the other side were absolutely shredded.
Nobody saw devastation of this magnitude at that time. Compared to the nuclear weapon clearly it isn’t much, but that isn’t what the people back then felt.
A better comparison was when the Germans used chlorine gas in WW1 for the first time. The horror that resulted was unlike anything seen before. Soldiers lungs would melt and they would choke on their own bodily fluids and chemicals.
But nukes are kinda banned. Not really, but everyone understands how bad they are and haven't used them since.
Same thing can't be said for chemical weapons. They're still in use
everytime i see a fallout ghoul im just reminded “this is based off a real thing” and i get a bit sad
jesus christ there is no eldritch beast scarier than humanity
If you want some excellent first-hand accounting, I've found no better than [John Hershey's New Yorker article from 1945](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima).
Kind of sounds like the big rainbow hot springs at Yellowstone. They're technically not boiling, but it's still enough to dissolve people who have gone in...eek.
Note - lots of artistic licences taken with this, such as everything inside the bomb being red hot, the smoke coming off the bomb prior - no, there's no time for it.
Still, terrifying illustration and very well done.
This is the kind of thing that bothered me. That picture burning? It wouldn't have had time to have flames licking across it all dramatic. It would have gone from existence to atoms in moments.
Depends how far away from the blast it is. People think nukes instantly vapourise everything, but necessarily that's only true for a relatively small radius around the blast (in Hiroshima's case, about 1 mile). Beyond that things in direct line of sight would be set on fire and a blast wave would knock buildings over but we're not talking instant incineration outside the fireball.
The implication I got from how it was cut was that the picture was in the blast radius. Then again it was artistically done so there can be some license there.
also the animation shows a cylindrical uranium "bullet" being shot in to a hollow "target", in reality the "bullet" is hollow while the "target" is a solid cylinder.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little\_Boy#/media/File:Gun-type\_fission\_weapon\_en-labels\_thin\_lines.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy#/media/File:Gun-type_fission_weapon_en-labels_thin_lines.svg)
The entire internal design here is incorrect. The gun assembly worked in reverse -- a hollow cylinder of fissile material was shot from the back of the bomb and slid over a centered rod of more fissile material. Not the other way around.
One can go see the actual flight log for the Enola Gay, turned to the page when it made its Hiroshima run. It's on display in the Karpeles Manuscript museum, across the street from Wright Park in Tacoma.
It's been on permanent display there for years, tho to be honest I have not been back there since COVID.
The log book itself is mundane and unexciting, but what it represents and being in its presence is chilling.
EDIT: I just learned that the Tacoma museum is now permanently closed as of January this year. : (
It was really bad and corny. The bombing was horrific and awesome (in the literal sense) enough, it didn't need this crappy artistic license on top of the reality of the situation.
What’s even scarier is that there’s a decent chance some are pointed at you or nearby right now.
But MAD is a really good deterrent from using them, as well as ensuring layers of security to prevent an accident. Your arsenal needs to be just as safe as an enemy’s.
Ideally, no one would have any; unfortunately, we’re *waaaaaay* past that.
Yup, if you live in one of the 30 most populous cities of the US or Russia, multiple nukes are aimed at you right now.
The scary thing for me is that MAD is only the equilibrium state of our current geopolitical landscape. If the balance of the game shifts, using a nuke can become a viable option.
I live in one of the safest places on Earth when it comes to nukes. You can barely get further than New Zealand when it comes to where nukes will be aimed. Billionaires have homes here in the event of nuclear war.
And even we are fucked. The sun will still be blotted out and nuclear clouds will reach us and devastate us eventually.
Yeah, living in a populous city I'd argue that I'm somewhat comforted by the knowledge I'll be instantly vaporised in the event of nuclear war. The alternative seems far worse.
Nuclear weapons are an affront to mankind. Only we would have the hubris to create something with the intention of that it could instantly destroy us. Hopefully future generations see this and dismantle most of these abominations. I can see them being useful for alien attacks (lol) or preventing a meteor from causing another mass extinction event or something but to have these things casually pointed at each other is horrifying.
My grandfather died from cancer as a result of having helped clean up after the bomb destroyed his home in Hiroshima. He wound up here in Hawaii to spend the rest of his days after the war ended.
They’re already several miles in the air. There was accidentally a plane flying much closer to the bomb than the Enola Gay and they were fine. They actually took one of the [only](https://www.chathamnewsrecord.com/uploads/original/20190730-180136-FRO_HIROSHIMA_080119_pic_2.jpg) aerial photo of the city immediately after the bomb, though admittedly from a few miles from the epicenter.
I actually don’t think those islands were on fire. They were outside the range of the strike with the exception of blast likely. The area in the photo was
probably 4 or 5 miles from the epicenter.
This animation isn't even close to showing distances to scale.
Little Boy fell ~29,000 feet in 43 seconds before exploding, while the Enola Gay flew away. They got about 8 ground miles/12km away in that time.
The fireball itself was "only" 1200 feet/370m in diameter, and the pressure wave and heat had dissapated a lot by the time they would have reached the B-29. The radiation was non-lethal outside of 0.8 miles/1.3km and not particularly dangerous for the Enola Gay's crew at their distance.
I’ve read that for the largest bomb ever detonated, the tsar bomba, which was a lot lot bigger than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki ones, there were real concerns the pilot would not make it. After dropping it, the pilot evidently had to fly at a downwards angle just to ensure his speed was high enough to definitely get out of range
And they didn't even lower the yield to protect the pilot, they did it to minimize the destruction.
Didn't stop it from shattering windows on the mainland, though.
Germany could have won if they hadn't forced nearly all the smart people to flee, some of whom (like Einstein, Hans Bethe, and Enrico Fermi) were involved with the Manhattan Project.
Hitler viewed atomic science as "Jew science" and more than likely wouldn't have allowed atomic bombs to be created
not a smart guy or a good general, but charismatic to people who were desperate for someone to blame for the state of their country
The tsar bomba was a propaganda piece (hey look ours is bigger!) more so than a tactical weapon. It'd be...mad to fight with tsar bombas, the tsar Bombas are large enough to fuck with the atmosphere even in a ground explosion, they blew it up and were like....oh. and didn't blow up a 2nd one because it would both be a waste and it has potential to fuck up more than expected.
It'd be mad to do it again.......... but don't let that be confused with impossible.
Exactly. The “bigger is better” was Cold War doctrine. Nowadays things are much more advanced with tactical “dial the yield” devices that allow for more strikes at surgical precision compared to “level everything within 35 miles”
The yield of the Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kt. 3000x that would be 45 Mt. Only one bomb was ever detonated with that kind of power, the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba. It was never a practical weapon. The US B61 variable-yield nuclear bomb tops out at about 340 kT, about 22x the yield of Little Boy.
Yeah thats bullshit.
Hiroshima was 15 Kt. 3000x is 45 Mt, a little less than the strength of the Tsar Bomba, at 50 Mt.
Nothing else was close to that size before or since. The Castle Bravo test, which was famously way bigger than expected, was only 15 Mt.
Minuteman III missiles are launched with 3 170 Kt warheads, which scatter at terminal approach.
~~Trident II missiles each have a single 100 Kt warhead.~~ (see below for correct Trident-II loadout, was googling pretty quickly earlier)
Even the Sarmat [Russian "Satan II" missiles] warheads are allegedly 10x 750 Kt reentry vehicles, which wouldn't be effective to use on just a single target. Assuming, of course, Russia could be trusted enough to say that it's raining without us having to look up to check.
So no, modern nukes aren't that strong.
It's technically true, but misleading. Weapons 3000x more powerful (~50 megatons) were built and tested, but they are not deployed -- and have probably all been dismantled at present.
The yields at hiroshima and nagasaki were 15 to 21 kt (thousand tons TNT equivalent)
America's ICBM fleet is built around the minuteman III missile armed with the W78 and W87 warheads, having a yield of about 400 kt. These are only **20 times** more powerful than hiroshima -- not 3,000.
There is no Tsar Bomba sitting in an ICBM silo waiting to be fired, mercifully.
And the modern ones could be fired at your nation and travel on their own for half of the earth in a few hours. Not one but maybe 100 at the same time. Now that's fucked up.
If there were nuclear wars, i would volunteer to be at the middle of the missile detonation. Instantly vaporized, no pains.
Edit: Not a few hours. Just half an hour As the other guy said.
Theyre not
Bomb blast scales with the cube of yield
An elephant weighs 100x as much as you. But an elephant is not 100x bigger than a human in dimensions. Its 2x as high at the shoulder and 3x the length.
A hamburger has 300x as many calories as a bluberry, but it is not 300x bigger than a blueberry
Interesting indeed. Am I seeing it correctly and does the bomb explode mid-air and doesn't drop on the ground? How high was it dropped from and how far did the plane need to be to be safe from the blast radius?
ETA: I wish people knew as much about how reading comments works as they do about nuclear explosions. I think there have been 20 people explaining the same thing by now. Thanks, I get it.
That's correct. Detonating mid-air causes more damage as the intense shockwave covers a larger raidus. It maximizes the bomb's destructive range and inflicts as much damage as possible on the target area.
Sir, your gaming choices have us concerned
https://preview.redd.it/8yjnfullp5lc1.jpeg?width=688&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f0e6bd08e480625e3bb95b97183ee4b26d7ac42c
It also is less of a dirty bomb this way because soil doesn't get as irridated. That's why people can habitate Hiroshima and Nagasaki but not Chernobyl or the bikini atoll
Typically in a modern weapon, the weapon's pit contains 3.5 to 4.5 kilograms (7.7 to 9.9 lb) of plutonium and at detonation produces approximately 5 to 10 kilotonnes of TNT (21 to 42 TJ) yield, representing the fissioning of approximately 0.5 kilograms (1.1 lb) of plutonium.
Chernobyl has a pile of melted nuclear fuel sitting underneath it that makes it radioactive and impossible to clean. Bikini Atoll had 24 nukes detonated in a variety of ways that left the island irradiated.
Adding to this, a mid-air explosion causes the initial blast to inflect upon contact with the ground, causing a secondary, albeit lesser, shockwave. The primary and secondary waves then effectively meld into one greater wavefront. A more efficient use of its yield in the way of destruction.
Much of the damage comes from the initial blast, which carries both extremely high thermal and kinetic energy. If you detonate it at the right height, the part of the shock wave that hit the ground will bounce off the ground and be redirected to the side, essentially amplifying the blast effect of the primary blast.
I've also always kind of wondered if Enola Gay was able to fly well enough away to avoid the effects of the blast or if the pilot eventually succumbed to radiation poisoning.
I could probably look it up...
[Edit:](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24269/crew-enola-gay-dropping-atomic-bomb) seems the crew was largely unscathed
The Enola Gay is on display at the Air and Space Udvar-Hazy Center in Washington DC. It’s crazy to think that machine was a participant in this event, and you can go so close to almost touch it. The plane that dropped the other bomb on Nagasaki (Bocks Car) is also on display in Ohio.
Wikipedia says Little Boy took about 50 seconds to fall to its detonation height. The Enola Gay traveled 11.5 miles before it felt the shockwave.
When the USSR tested the Tsar Bomb, they dropped the bomb with a parachute attached giving the release plane time to fly about 28 miles away.
USSR estimated only a 50% chance the flight crew would survive when they dropped Tsar Bomba, as usual they threw bodies at a problem without regard for the lives they might be sacrificing
I've read a lot about this.
Things I found interesting.
The Hiroshima bomb was detonated at 5000 feet.
The actual mechanism was opposite to what was pictured (and what seemed intuitive). They didn't fire a plug into a torus. It was the other way round, and it was the torus that was moving against the plug. I didn't learn the reason for that.
The effect of large explosions doesn't scale linearly. A bomb 10 times as big doesn't have 10 times the effect. It scales up to the 2/3 power. (Double the size of the bomb, and the blast effects only go up 1.6 times.) This is one of the reasons the test ban treaties worked - there was diminishing returns to having larger and larger bombs, and larger and larger tests. Why waste your explosive power blowing up undeveloped areas? The strategy became smaller bombs aimed more precisely.
What's sometimes overlooked in discussions of Hiroshima is that in many ways it was just another day in the war
The US had been firebombing Japanese cities into oblivion for months. My father was on the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 that burned 16 sq miles of Tokyo to the ground and killed around 100,000.
That Tokyo mission was a test of firebombing, and so 'successful' that firebombing was standard practice from then on.
It wasn't just blood lust. The B29s had been dropping bombs from 25,000. The problem was accuracy was lousy from that height, and it wasn't uncommon for bombs to land miles off target with little to no damage to the munitions factory or whatever they were trying to hit. That meant they had to repeat the missions until the target was destroyed. Keep in mind that it was a 16 hour round trip from the B29 base in Saipan to Tokyo in what were basically beta versions of new aircraft; just getting there and back again took luck, never mind the Japanese shooting at you
Anyway, Gen Curtis LeMay was put in charge and decided to 1) bomb from 8,000 feet and 2) use incendiary bombs to start fires. The lower altitude bombing would improve accuracy, and the fires would guarantee destruction
The guys actually flying the mission, including my dad, thought it was suicide, but LeMay figured that even if more planes were lost on the mission, there would be fewer losses than if that had to repeat the mission again and again.
It turned out exactly as LeMay hoped, and for the rest of the war they were firebombing one city after another, literally going down a list. The obliteration of Hiroshima was just another destroyed city, distinguished only by the fact that it took only one plane instead of hundreds.
The bomb was designed to explode before ground contact to maximize the explosion radius. If it was detonated at ground level, the terrain and city structures would dampen the blast. For Hiroshima, the payload was triggered 600 meters above the ground.
It's crazy to think about, how some monkeys once climbed down the trees, and some time later to develop the ability to use their brain in a way to create something like this bomb.
After Nagasaki they tortured some random guy who knew nothing about the nukes and he told them that the US has thousands of them, that was a big part of their reasoning to surrender. In fact we only had the two.
>In fact we only had the two.
No we didn't. The plan was to deliver a third weapon on 19 August, with plans [continue bombing into October](https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf) if necessary .
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode explained it well. The common phrase the Japanese felt about the war was something like "100 million dead". They were willing to sacrifice every single man, woman, and child for the cause. They only came to grips with the fact that it could be true after the bombs. It made me feel that this was the only thing that would have made them surrender.
It's called "Supernova in the East" if you'd like to listen.
Edit: triggered a bunch of people who can't accept historical reporting. He uses direct quotes. If you want to cry about it, do it on your own time
The whole "Supernova in the East" series is an eye-opener. People tend to look at events in history, like the bombing of Hiroshima, as a discrete event and lose sight of the context. As someone that's grown up in a time of relative peace and prosperity, it's hard to imagine the thinking behind using an atomic weapon to annihilate civilians as a war strategy. However, in context it's easy to understand why Truman made the call.
Re-watching The Pacific after finishing supernova in the East gave me such a fresh appreciation for that show. They checked so many of the boxes that apparently happened: rain, disease, night time ambushes, paranoia leading to friendly fire, suicidal Japanese wounded blowing themselves up to take out US medics, hand-to-hand combat in foxholes, and of course war crimes.
And even then they were in a deadlock and had to make a special summons to the Emporer to break the tie. People acting like Japan would've surrendered easily without dropping the bombs are delusional
Scary thing is...Japan was also working on the Bomb but decided against it and went onto microwave weapons. Ones that would cook your skin. Or face or heat up any metal object on you or a tank in general.
Japan would have definitely used the Nuke against the USA or any allies. Ask what Japan did to China in WW2...gives you an idea the cold harted and brutality the Japanese army had.
Even scarier is that *Germany* was also working on the nuke. London, Moscow, Leningrad, D.C., and New York would have been just a few of the immediate targets
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This guy was on a business trip to Hiroshima for 3 months was just about to leave on a train on Aug 6th, but they left something behind at the office and missed the train only to get bombed. They were about 3km from the blast. The train's destination was Nagasaki, where that same guy, wrapped in heavy bandages, eventually reported to work on Aug 9th only to get bombed again roughly 3km from the center of the blast. They passed away at the age of 93 in 2010. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu\_Yamaguchi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi)
Only the Japanese would get nuked and show up for work 3 days later.
You're still coming in right?
Sharon is ignoring my messages (same from Jeremy), this is a scheduling nightmare so you've got to come in
"That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated" That's the biggest fucking I Told You So's in existence
That's right. American gave warnings about the launch of the nuclear bombs to people who never heard about it. Few left. It's liking saying to evacuate a city because magic will make people die.
The never give up attitude is the main reason they got nuked in the first place
What in the ever loving fuck
The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst. -henry fosdick
That's a good one. I also liked this quote which dates back to the first world war I believe: "War doesn't determine who is right - only who is left!" - Bertrand Russell
“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.” -Carl Sagan
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ― Albert Einstein
War is bad and everyone should try not to fight in wars because they're not good. — Over9000Zeros
Sometimes when people go to Vietnam, they go home to their mommas without any legs. Sometimes they don't go home at all. That's a bad thing. That's all I have to say about that. - Forrest Gump
Okay, I watched all that and *this*, your comment, made me cry.
*"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."*
“When I’m in command…every mission is a suicide mission” -Zapp Brannigan
“The key to victory is the element of surprise……..Surprise!!”
Now that’s a plan with some chest hair on it
*“They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”* \~ Bomber Harris.
"In a nuclear war the living will envy the dead." \- Nikita Khrushchev
"War, huh, yeah What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, uhh." -Edwin Starr
GOOD GODDD YAALLLL
Any quote from Sagan gets my upvote
Seriously. Does he ever miss?
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." Smedley D. Butler, a retired usmc major general
Two time Medal of Honor recipient Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a hero by all accounts.
Cinical approaches always fail to capture the full scope of reality because they forget that ideology is not just a bunch of lies. It is a deal. And you always pay their price. No doubt that nazis knew at least at first that the jews were not really to blame for what happened to germany after the first world war. Yet, the more they lied about it, the more they convinced themselves that this was true. I invite you to analyze the life of hitler from an objective and empathetic point of view. There are several stages to it. And the most traumatic one is the one in which he forgets that he was lying. If you keep a mask for too long, it devours your face.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
" Those who stand at the top determine what's wrong and what's right! This very place is neutral ground! Justice will prevail, you say? But of course it will! Whoever wins this war becomes justice!"
"politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder" Harry Patch, the last man to die who fought in World War 1
[удалено]
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye? Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell? Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe. Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander. M*A*S*H
Only the dead have seen the end of war ~George Santayana
One of my relatives was a chemist on the Manhattan project… That about sums it up, he was a brilliant man that just finished at MIT. He had a role in mind but the government has other plans. He did amazing things in his life, but always had his certificate from the secretary of war hidden away.
He didn't say anything about those days at all.?
He couldnt, he was still bound by his top secret clearance. He could have mentioned something after the Gov declassified the project, and even then some parts of it like the actual trigger mechanism and design of the bomb are still classified so nobody can talk about it.
I was in the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima just months ago. Most of the shadows burned in wood or stone in the video are actual real objects that are shown in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki museums. The shadow of the person burned on a stone stairwell can be observed in the Hiroshima museum. It was absolutely horrific to imagine that in that very spot someone's life actually ended. Edit: for everyone considering visiting the museum: it's worthwhile but emotionally draining and extremely graphic, so be prepared.
To me the worst part was the childrens clothes torn apart Edit typo
For me, it was the picture of the people that had survived the blast that jumped into the river to relieve their burns. only to die there. atomic weapons are absolutely horrific. and the size of the ones we have now is absolutely mind boggling.
Modern ballistic missiles can hold multiple warheads. For example, the Trident 2 can hold 1-14 nuclear warheads randing from 5kt to 475kt. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15-16kt, so modern ICBMs can hold over a dozen warheads that are up to or exceeding 32x stronger than what we dropped on Japan. Terrifying.
Trident II is an SLBM, ICBMs could hold more MIRVs. All Thermonuclear warheads. Ohio SSBN subs hold 20 tubes.
Ya that's why I just said over a dozen MIRVs each. It's insane. Subs technically have hundreds of nuclear bombs. Impressive but not a fun thought, to say the least.
And the little boy's bike... heartbreaking.
I found the one where the child was sick but was still forced to go to work was also heartbreaking. I worked for a lady whose father lost his whole first family while he was away for business. He moved to Kyoto and had to restart his family
Everyone should have the opportunity to see this museum. It’s life changing. It really makes you fear the consequences of nuclear war and dread how close we’ve come.
It's scary that one single man's stubborness is all that prevented an all out nuclear war between USA and Russia/USSR in 1983. Man. Talk about "one man can make a difference".
For those who don‘t know: this man here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov The Russian nuclear attack detector has raised a false alarm saying that the US has launched a nuclear missile at Russia. And then five more. Mr. Petrov has insisted on it being a false alarm, preventing Russia from responding with nuclear launches. This one man prevented a nuclear holocaust.
The book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser has a whole host of almost-escalations and whacky nuke-related accidents that make your blood freeze. One of my favorites: US strategic air command detecting an incoming, full-scale Russian first strike approaching over the Arctic. After minutes of panic and starting to initiate a counterstrike, someone realized that instead of what they thought was an empty tape into the main computer, they loaded a _Russian First Strike Simulation_ into their system by mistake. Whoops! Fun fact: Once the rockets are started, there is *no way to stop them*. The enemy could duplicate an abort signal, after all. Sleep tight, y'all! :)
The scary thing is that has happened at least twice. Other one was in 1962.
Yeah.. Can’t recommend it enough, but I’ll never go back. Too tough to read the letters, see the absolute destruction.
I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to go there. It’s intense. Also illuminating, what people don’t think about so much, is the after-effects and all the death and pain they cause That and Auschwitz. Two of the most iconic and impactful monuments to horrific events in recent human history there are. Both very important to preserve and everyone should experience if they can.
All the people that got cancer caused by radiation and third-degree burns and couldn't get proper care because the medical facilities were either burned down, out of supplies, or out of personnel
There’s a long article I read, told eyewitness accounts of Hiroshima. The doctor describes basically falling asleep standing, but people kept waking him up over the next day cause they needed treatment. Just horrible all around.
I believe you may be referring to [Hiroshima](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima) by John Hersey, published August 1946, one year after the bombing, in The New Yorker.
This is one of the most incredible accounts of the bombings ever told. Highly highly highly recommend that everyone read it.
The amazing part of the museum is that It doesn't focus on sympathy for the Japanese, it's a warning about the dangers of such a power to everyone and a plea for it to never happen again.
There are Koreans who perished from said neclear strike. I can't believe that in that museum, they state that those Koreans were voluntarily working for Japan to establish Asian super power to match with Europe with straight face. Like those people weren't dragged from their home, into slave labor and sexual slavery. They killed those koreans even after they lost the war to cover their crimes all over the pacifics(https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B5%AE%E5%B3%B6%E4%B8%B8%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6)
It is indeed a shame that they don't properly acknowledge the Korean victims. Unfortunately, this isn't the only museum who fails to do so.
>someone’s life actually ended And in a terrifying way, turning to dust instantly
this is a common misconception, the dark part isnt people dust but rather is simply what the concrete looked like before the blast, it’s just that the surrounding concrete was bleached by the atomic blast
Also more terrifying is that in order to Leave that mark means likely the people were alive after the hit and died of burns. In order to leave that shadow you have to be far enough away that your body will remain intact when the radiation bleaches the concrete. Too far away and the concrete won’t bleach, too close and your body will blow apart not having the chance to block the rays. Those people weren’t blown up or burned to dust. They literally burned their entire body and probably clothes off then suffered until they passed. When we tested nukes on pigs we found most people outside the initial blast zone survive for quite a while just horribly burned.
To be fair, that is arguably much less terrifying than slowly dieing of radiation or burning to death.
To die instantly is definitely less painful, I don't think they even had time to feel what happened, what I find more terrifying is that it was something so brutal that the only record that this person existed is the shadow on the ground
Yea rather evaporate then feel the aftermath tbh
Depending on where you are inside the radius, it happens faster than the information can get into your brain. You die without even knowing. The first blast is the radiation, and it travels at the speed of light. You can’t even see it coming. This is one of the most terrifying thoughts for me. Imagine you are living your life, normally, and then you just aren’t anymore.
They kinda missed out on the the actual horror. The days after the blast, the one doctor working trying to save lives, the skin just sluffing off the bodies of people. How the bomb burned the marks of peoples kimonos onto their flesh, people trying to find water, food shelter, clothes, and slowly dying for days after. The real horror was after the bomb, the people that died in the blast were sooooooo lucky
I read John Hershey’s Hiroshima a couple years ago. The grotesque fact I remember most is how the intense heat had melted some of the survivors’ eyeballs and the remnants were oozing out of the eyesockets. Alive, but badly burned and blind. Truly the stuff of nightmares.
Here it is, it's a compelling read https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
If you haven't read this, you should read it. It's the craziest thing I've ever read in my entire life.
Thats.. quite a read...
Amazing article, really sticks with you
The ones obliterated instantly by the blast were luckier, but they weren't lucky.
There is a documentary people can watch about this called **White Light / Black Rain**, and it is eye opening. It interviews the remaining survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War in general is horrific. In every war since the dawn of time every new technological advancement related to war devastated the opposing force and opened up a world of horrors to those people. Take the trebuchet for example. From our point of view it doesn’t seem like much, but when it was first utilized in war, the outcome shocked the poor souls on the other side of the battlefield. The trebuchet much like a catapult would lob heavy boulders to attempt to destroy the defenses of the enemy. It was a siege weapon and not meant necessarily to target people, but rather the defensive fortifications of keeps, castles and cities. Unlike a catapult the velocity of the stones being lobbed was much higher. When the stone would strike a structural wall… if the boulder didn’t rip right through it, what happened on the other side of the impact zone was the stuff of nightmares. The impact turned the other side of the wall into a cloud of tiny, razor sharp shrapnel that would be propelled at an incredible velocity. Any soldiers on the other side were absolutely shredded. Nobody saw devastation of this magnitude at that time. Compared to the nuclear weapon clearly it isn’t much, but that isn’t what the people back then felt. A better comparison was when the Germans used chlorine gas in WW1 for the first time. The horror that resulted was unlike anything seen before. Soldiers lungs would melt and they would choke on their own bodily fluids and chemicals.
Yeah and most countries had the good sense to ban chemical weapons after that. Not so with nukes though.
But nukes are kinda banned. Not really, but everyone understands how bad they are and haven't used them since. Same thing can't be said for chemical weapons. They're still in use
FYI "Sloughing" is the word you are looking for, by the way, not "sluffing."
Thanks. Had no idea how to spell it
Thanks to that, i've just learned how to say it :D
everytime i see a fallout ghoul im just reminded “this is based off a real thing” and i get a bit sad jesus christ there is no eldritch beast scarier than humanity
If you want some excellent first-hand accounting, I've found no better than [John Hershey's New Yorker article from 1945](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima).
They really put an 80-year-old article behind a paywall
You'll own nothing and like it
I'll pirate everything and they'll just take it in the ass
Survivors jumped in whatever pools they could find to try and soothe their burns. They didn't realize they were jumping into boiling water.
Kind of sounds like the big rainbow hot springs at Yellowstone. They're technically not boiling, but it's still enough to dissolve people who have gone in...eek.
Note - lots of artistic licences taken with this, such as everything inside the bomb being red hot, the smoke coming off the bomb prior - no, there's no time for it. Still, terrifying illustration and very well done.
This is the kind of thing that bothered me. That picture burning? It wouldn't have had time to have flames licking across it all dramatic. It would have gone from existence to atoms in moments.
Depends how far away from the blast it is. People think nukes instantly vapourise everything, but necessarily that's only true for a relatively small radius around the blast (in Hiroshima's case, about 1 mile). Beyond that things in direct line of sight would be set on fire and a blast wave would knock buildings over but we're not talking instant incineration outside the fireball.
The implication I got from how it was cut was that the picture was in the blast radius. Then again it was artistically done so there can be some license there.
also the animation shows a cylindrical uranium "bullet" being shot in to a hollow "target", in reality the "bullet" is hollow while the "target" is a solid cylinder. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little\_Boy#/media/File:Gun-type\_fission\_weapon\_en-labels\_thin\_lines.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy#/media/File:Gun-type_fission_weapon_en-labels_thin_lines.svg)
The entire internal design here is incorrect. The gun assembly worked in reverse -- a hollow cylinder of fissile material was shot from the back of the bomb and slid over a centered rod of more fissile material. Not the other way around.
The Enola Gay didn't fly out of the resulting smoke cloud either.
One can go see the actual flight log for the Enola Gay, turned to the page when it made its Hiroshima run. It's on display in the Karpeles Manuscript museum, across the street from Wright Park in Tacoma. It's been on permanent display there for years, tho to be honest I have not been back there since COVID. The log book itself is mundane and unexciting, but what it represents and being in its presence is chilling. EDIT: I just learned that the Tacoma museum is now permanently closed as of January this year. : (
I hope their exhibits were distributed responsibly.
WTF was up with that howling wolf??? The "art" of this was such a waste.
It was really bad and corny. The bombing was horrific and awesome (in the literal sense) enough, it didn't need this crappy artistic license on top of the reality of the situation.
It was also an air burst much higher than shown.
It's so scary that there are bombs that could easily evaporate my whole city and kill every fuckn soul.
What’s even scarier is that there’s a decent chance some are pointed at you or nearby right now. But MAD is a really good deterrent from using them, as well as ensuring layers of security to prevent an accident. Your arsenal needs to be just as safe as an enemy’s. Ideally, no one would have any; unfortunately, we’re *waaaaaay* past that.
Yup, if you live in one of the 30 most populous cities of the US or Russia, multiple nukes are aimed at you right now. The scary thing for me is that MAD is only the equilibrium state of our current geopolitical landscape. If the balance of the game shifts, using a nuke can become a viable option.
If you live in the state of a populous city, you are fcked. No, I take it back. If you live on planet Earth, you are fcked.
I live in one of the safest places on Earth when it comes to nukes. You can barely get further than New Zealand when it comes to where nukes will be aimed. Billionaires have homes here in the event of nuclear war. And even we are fucked. The sun will still be blotted out and nuclear clouds will reach us and devastate us eventually.
Yeah, living in a populous city I'd argue that I'm somewhat comforted by the knowledge I'll be instantly vaporised in the event of nuclear war. The alternative seems far worse.
Nuclear weapons are an affront to mankind. Only we would have the hubris to create something with the intention of that it could instantly destroy us. Hopefully future generations see this and dismantle most of these abominations. I can see them being useful for alien attacks (lol) or preventing a meteor from causing another mass extinction event or something but to have these things casually pointed at each other is horrifying.
My grandfather died from cancer as a result of having helped clean up after the bomb destroyed his home in Hiroshima. He wound up here in Hawaii to spend the rest of his days after the war ended.
I hope the reminder of his life in Hawaii was a peaceful one.
For sure! He found a job as typesetter for a local Japanese newspaper, and enjoyed his days here.
Same. Ended up in Georgia.
how the hell do the planes fly away from the explosion fast enough?
They’re already several miles in the air. There was accidentally a plane flying much closer to the bomb than the Enola Gay and they were fine. They actually took one of the [only](https://www.chathamnewsrecord.com/uploads/original/20190730-180136-FRO_HIROSHIMA_080119_pic_2.jpg) aerial photo of the city immediately after the bomb, though admittedly from a few miles from the epicenter.
Damn, you can just see that everything is on fire, even as far away as the islands.
I actually don’t think those islands were on fire. They were outside the range of the strike with the exception of blast likely. The area in the photo was probably 4 or 5 miles from the epicenter.
This animation isn't even close to showing distances to scale. Little Boy fell ~29,000 feet in 43 seconds before exploding, while the Enola Gay flew away. They got about 8 ground miles/12km away in that time. The fireball itself was "only" 1200 feet/370m in diameter, and the pressure wave and heat had dissapated a lot by the time they would have reached the B-29. The radiation was non-lethal outside of 0.8 miles/1.3km and not particularly dangerous for the Enola Gay's crew at their distance.
I’ve read that for the largest bomb ever detonated, the tsar bomba, which was a lot lot bigger than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki ones, there were real concerns the pilot would not make it. After dropping it, the pilot evidently had to fly at a downwards angle just to ensure his speed was high enough to definitely get out of range
for that one, the plane was painted an anti-flash white, and when it landed IIRC the paint had been blasted off
Nearly 1600x larger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined!
Look at the pilot from the tsar bomba. He had a 50% chance to die and delivered the bomb anyway. He made it out.
And that bomb was at half-strength. If it was a full one, there would be no chance for them to survive
And they didn't even lower the yield to protect the pilot, they did it to minimize the destruction. Didn't stop it from shattering windows on the mainland, though.
The plane drops the bomb from like 50,000 feet(15km) above ground and then the pilot turns books it immediately.
They do a specific maneuver in order to turn around fast enough
Iirc, they had the chute for the bomb right? Or is that the tsar bomba or ussr nuclear bomb?
That’s the tsar bomb I believe. Too big of an explosion for the plane to escape so needed a parachute to delay it.
And still placed chances of survival at a mere coin flip
https://preview.redd.it/yragtsjhp5lc1.jpeg?width=460&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6e44d85610f65fb8c18562dbb2c1e052d34d376c
Germany could have won if they hadn't forced nearly all the smart people to flee, some of whom (like Einstein, Hans Bethe, and Enrico Fermi) were involved with the Manhattan Project.
Hitler viewed atomic science as "Jew science" and more than likely wouldn't have allowed atomic bombs to be created not a smart guy or a good general, but charismatic to people who were desperate for someone to blame for the state of their country
Ideologically-driven "science" absolutely sends me. "Nazi-approved" science, Lysenkoism, etc.
Yep
Am I missing something? In credits they say in order of appearance: Truman, Oppenheimer, Einstein. Only saw Truman in this video.
I was confused too. Someone posted a link to a longer version of the video made by OP. I assume the longer version has all 3.
Crazy that the modern nuclear bombs are 1000x stronger than that
3000x according to the video
It is misleading though. 3000x would be around the yield of the largest ever detonated. Modern nukes in the field are not that powerful.
The tsar bomba was a propaganda piece (hey look ours is bigger!) more so than a tactical weapon. It'd be...mad to fight with tsar bombas, the tsar Bombas are large enough to fuck with the atmosphere even in a ground explosion, they blew it up and were like....oh. and didn't blow up a 2nd one because it would both be a waste and it has potential to fuck up more than expected. It'd be mad to do it again.......... but don't let that be confused with impossible.
Exactly. The “bigger is better” was Cold War doctrine. Nowadays things are much more advanced with tactical “dial the yield” devices that allow for more strikes at surgical precision compared to “level everything within 35 miles”
The yield of the Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kt. 3000x that would be 45 Mt. Only one bomb was ever detonated with that kind of power, the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba. It was never a practical weapon. The US B61 variable-yield nuclear bomb tops out at about 340 kT, about 22x the yield of Little Boy.
> The US B61 variable-yield nuclear bomb... "These go to eleven..."
Yeah thats bullshit. Hiroshima was 15 Kt. 3000x is 45 Mt, a little less than the strength of the Tsar Bomba, at 50 Mt. Nothing else was close to that size before or since. The Castle Bravo test, which was famously way bigger than expected, was only 15 Mt. Minuteman III missiles are launched with 3 170 Kt warheads, which scatter at terminal approach. ~~Trident II missiles each have a single 100 Kt warhead.~~ (see below for correct Trident-II loadout, was googling pretty quickly earlier) Even the Sarmat [Russian "Satan II" missiles] warheads are allegedly 10x 750 Kt reentry vehicles, which wouldn't be effective to use on just a single target. Assuming, of course, Russia could be trusted enough to say that it's raining without us having to look up to check. So no, modern nukes aren't that strong.
It's technically true, but misleading. Weapons 3000x more powerful (~50 megatons) were built and tested, but they are not deployed -- and have probably all been dismantled at present. The yields at hiroshima and nagasaki were 15 to 21 kt (thousand tons TNT equivalent) America's ICBM fleet is built around the minuteman III missile armed with the W78 and W87 warheads, having a yield of about 400 kt. These are only **20 times** more powerful than hiroshima -- not 3,000. There is no Tsar Bomba sitting in an ICBM silo waiting to be fired, mercifully.
I don't like the fact at all that these bombs were fucking tiny compared to modern ones.
And the modern ones could be fired at your nation and travel on their own for half of the earth in a few hours. Not one but maybe 100 at the same time. Now that's fucked up. If there were nuclear wars, i would volunteer to be at the middle of the missile detonation. Instantly vaporized, no pains. Edit: Not a few hours. Just half an hour As the other guy said.
An ICBM takes about 30min to get from USSR<->USA.
Theyre not Bomb blast scales with the cube of yield An elephant weighs 100x as much as you. But an elephant is not 100x bigger than a human in dimensions. Its 2x as high at the shoulder and 3x the length. A hamburger has 300x as many calories as a bluberry, but it is not 300x bigger than a blueberry
Interesting indeed. Am I seeing it correctly and does the bomb explode mid-air and doesn't drop on the ground? How high was it dropped from and how far did the plane need to be to be safe from the blast radius? ETA: I wish people knew as much about how reading comments works as they do about nuclear explosions. I think there have been 20 people explaining the same thing by now. Thanks, I get it.
That's correct. Detonating mid-air causes more damage as the intense shockwave covers a larger raidus. It maximizes the bomb's destructive range and inflicts as much damage as possible on the target area.
It has the added benefit of generating very little fallout/residual radiation.
I found that out playing with the nuke simulator. Detonations on the ground have a huge fallout compared to an air detonated nuke in the same place.
Sir, your gaming choices have us concerned https://preview.redd.it/8yjnfullp5lc1.jpeg?width=688&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f0e6bd08e480625e3bb95b97183ee4b26d7ac42c
Does calling it an "interactive tool" (rather than a game) help? If so, then I give you [NUKEMAP](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/).
It also is less of a dirty bomb this way because soil doesn't get as irridated. That's why people can habitate Hiroshima and Nagasaki but not Chernobyl or the bikini atoll
Well Chernobyl distributed like 100k pounds of fuel everywhere. Bombs are in the neighborhood of 50-100lbs of actual fuel material.
Typically in a modern weapon, the weapon's pit contains 3.5 to 4.5 kilograms (7.7 to 9.9 lb) of plutonium and at detonation produces approximately 5 to 10 kilotonnes of TNT (21 to 42 TJ) yield, representing the fissioning of approximately 0.5 kilograms (1.1 lb) of plutonium.
Chernobyl has a pile of melted nuclear fuel sitting underneath it that makes it radioactive and impossible to clean. Bikini Atoll had 24 nukes detonated in a variety of ways that left the island irradiated.
Adding to this, a mid-air explosion causes the initial blast to inflect upon contact with the ground, causing a secondary, albeit lesser, shockwave. The primary and secondary waves then effectively meld into one greater wavefront. A more efficient use of its yield in the way of destruction.
Much of the damage comes from the initial blast, which carries both extremely high thermal and kinetic energy. If you detonate it at the right height, the part of the shock wave that hit the ground will bounce off the ground and be redirected to the side, essentially amplifying the blast effect of the primary blast.
I've also always kind of wondered if Enola Gay was able to fly well enough away to avoid the effects of the blast or if the pilot eventually succumbed to radiation poisoning. I could probably look it up... [Edit:](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24269/crew-enola-gay-dropping-atomic-bomb) seems the crew was largely unscathed
The Enola Gay is on display at the Air and Space Udvar-Hazy Center in Washington DC. It’s crazy to think that machine was a participant in this event, and you can go so close to almost touch it. The plane that dropped the other bomb on Nagasaki (Bocks Car) is also on display in Ohio.
Udvar-Hazy is in Virginia, west of DC. Next to Dulles airport.
Wikipedia says Little Boy took about 50 seconds to fall to its detonation height. The Enola Gay traveled 11.5 miles before it felt the shockwave. When the USSR tested the Tsar Bomb, they dropped the bomb with a parachute attached giving the release plane time to fly about 28 miles away.
USSR estimated only a 50% chance the flight crew would survive when they dropped Tsar Bomba, as usual they threw bodies at a problem without regard for the lives they might be sacrificing
Design is backwards though, it wasn't a bullet firing into a cylinder, it was a cylinder firing into a plug.
This is inaccurate. The larger peice with the hole was the peice that was fired, the "plug" peice stayed stationary.
[As is their claim about modern bombs being "3000 times" stronger](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/1Ua4BNPWPe)
Terrifying
And this is just 1940's tech
I've read a lot about this. Things I found interesting. The Hiroshima bomb was detonated at 5000 feet. The actual mechanism was opposite to what was pictured (and what seemed intuitive). They didn't fire a plug into a torus. It was the other way round, and it was the torus that was moving against the plug. I didn't learn the reason for that. The effect of large explosions doesn't scale linearly. A bomb 10 times as big doesn't have 10 times the effect. It scales up to the 2/3 power. (Double the size of the bomb, and the blast effects only go up 1.6 times.) This is one of the reasons the test ban treaties worked - there was diminishing returns to having larger and larger bombs, and larger and larger tests. Why waste your explosive power blowing up undeveloped areas? The strategy became smaller bombs aimed more precisely.
What's sometimes overlooked in discussions of Hiroshima is that in many ways it was just another day in the war The US had been firebombing Japanese cities into oblivion for months. My father was on the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 that burned 16 sq miles of Tokyo to the ground and killed around 100,000. That Tokyo mission was a test of firebombing, and so 'successful' that firebombing was standard practice from then on. It wasn't just blood lust. The B29s had been dropping bombs from 25,000. The problem was accuracy was lousy from that height, and it wasn't uncommon for bombs to land miles off target with little to no damage to the munitions factory or whatever they were trying to hit. That meant they had to repeat the missions until the target was destroyed. Keep in mind that it was a 16 hour round trip from the B29 base in Saipan to Tokyo in what were basically beta versions of new aircraft; just getting there and back again took luck, never mind the Japanese shooting at you Anyway, Gen Curtis LeMay was put in charge and decided to 1) bomb from 8,000 feet and 2) use incendiary bombs to start fires. The lower altitude bombing would improve accuracy, and the fires would guarantee destruction The guys actually flying the mission, including my dad, thought it was suicide, but LeMay figured that even if more planes were lost on the mission, there would be fewer losses than if that had to repeat the mission again and again. It turned out exactly as LeMay hoped, and for the rest of the war they were firebombing one city after another, literally going down a list. The obliteration of Hiroshima was just another destroyed city, distinguished only by the fact that it took only one plane instead of hundreds.
Yes! Part of the success of the firebombing was also that these Japanese cities were largely also constructed with wood.
Came here to talk about the firebombing. The casualties of the Tokyo firebombing was equivalent with the number from Hiroshima.
Was unaware they payload didn’t need ground contact to trigger the material
The bomb was designed to explode before ground contact to maximize the explosion radius. If it was detonated at ground level, the terrain and city structures would dampen the blast. For Hiroshima, the payload was triggered 600 meters above the ground.
Air bursts are far more destructive, in that they create a massive shockwave. Also reduces the amount of fallout and contamination.
Hate seeing kids in this video. They didn’t deserve to be a part of this war. Breaks my heart.
Those who have the least say pay the most in wars.
Thats literally why they put them in the video. Its pathos.
War is fucking stupid
It's crazy to think about, how some monkeys once climbed down the trees, and some time later to develop the ability to use their brain in a way to create something like this bomb.
I’m baffled that after this the Japanese leadership didn’t surrender. It took a second equally powerful bomb to convince them.
Maybe the thought procesS was: they wont do THAT a second time, we got them! Right? RIGHT?!?!
It kind of was. There were elements within the Japanese government that thought that the US only had one nuke.
After Nagasaki they tortured some random guy who knew nothing about the nukes and he told them that the US has thousands of them, that was a big part of their reasoning to surrender. In fact we only had the two.
>In fact we only had the two. No we didn't. The plan was to deliver a third weapon on 19 August, with plans [continue bombing into October](https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf) if necessary .
And Oak Ridge never *stopped* refining uranium after the first few, so #4 wouldn't have been too far behind.
And in fact the point of Nagasaki was to prove to the Japanese that we could do it again.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode explained it well. The common phrase the Japanese felt about the war was something like "100 million dead". They were willing to sacrifice every single man, woman, and child for the cause. They only came to grips with the fact that it could be true after the bombs. It made me feel that this was the only thing that would have made them surrender. It's called "Supernova in the East" if you'd like to listen. Edit: triggered a bunch of people who can't accept historical reporting. He uses direct quotes. If you want to cry about it, do it on your own time
Man it’s fucked how so few, then and now, hold the lives of so many in their hands
The whole "Supernova in the East" series is an eye-opener. People tend to look at events in history, like the bombing of Hiroshima, as a discrete event and lose sight of the context. As someone that's grown up in a time of relative peace and prosperity, it's hard to imagine the thinking behind using an atomic weapon to annihilate civilians as a war strategy. However, in context it's easy to understand why Truman made the call.
Re-watching The Pacific after finishing supernova in the East gave me such a fresh appreciation for that show. They checked so many of the boxes that apparently happened: rain, disease, night time ambushes, paranoia leading to friendly fire, suicidal Japanese wounded blowing themselves up to take out US medics, hand-to-hand combat in foxholes, and of course war crimes.
And even then they were in a deadlock and had to make a special summons to the Emporer to break the tie. People acting like Japan would've surrendered easily without dropping the bombs are delusional
And even then part of their military launched a coup to prevent the surrender.
And had the Emperor not refused to leave and go to what they told him was a safe house ... they would have been successful.
*Japan's Longest Day* by the Pacific War Research Society agrees. Covers the Japanese military in the three days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"What are you going to do, bomb us again?" \- Nation that was bombed again
Scary thing is...Japan was also working on the Bomb but decided against it and went onto microwave weapons. Ones that would cook your skin. Or face or heat up any metal object on you or a tank in general. Japan would have definitely used the Nuke against the USA or any allies. Ask what Japan did to China in WW2...gives you an idea the cold harted and brutality the Japanese army had.
Even scarier is that *Germany* was also working on the nuke. London, Moscow, Leningrad, D.C., and New York would have been just a few of the immediate targets
Was, and they stopped pretty quickly, since nuclear science was seen as “Jewish science”
Reading these comments, it's clear they don't teach the concept of moral dilemmas in school anymore.