Startling Facts About the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski

[Marlin]

Startling Facts About the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski


https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/08/06/startling_facts_about_the_atomic_bombings_of_hiroshima_and_nagaski.html

[HeavyD]

Not sure I would classify any of those things as "startling", but it sure does grab one's attention.

[scotoma]

Dead men don't startle. I would say that this goes way beyond startle to awesome and frightening. Thousands of humans disintegrated, some leaving no trace, some leaving a shadow on the ground. Others literally having the life sucked out of them. Thousands more left with a slow painful sickness until death and some living for several months/years with debilitating illness. For those that lived, they would never go home again because there was no home. Good info and it certainly gets one's attention. Dramatic, swift and painful. Mankind has done other things that have been less dramatic, slow, but even more painful.

[RDTroja]

That many deaths at one time is shocking, but the estimates for taking Tokyo if we could not get Japan to surrender were in the range of a million or more dead. Over 100,000 Americans died and more than twice that many were wounded (and many of those permanently disabled) in the Pacific Theater alone. So as bad as it was, it still saved lives in the long run.

If we were the aggressors in that war, it would have been unconscionable to drop those bombs... but we weren't. We just wanted to make it end.