But the worst part was radiation poisoning. Many that did not initially get hit and burned directly went towards the center of the city to find their families and over the course of days, months and years, they almost always died a slow, painful death, with their teeth falling out and their skin and organs becoming necrotic.
Truly, everyone should visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki at some point, if only to understand what true horrors nuclear weapons create. And those are only atomic weapons of the 1940s, the hydrogen bombs we have today that fuse instead of fiss are orders of magnitude more powerful, but at least those under their effects (near the epicenter) will die a quick vaporized death instantaneously.
For more information: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html
Fireball size depends on weapon yield. For a 1 MT weapon, the radius is roughly 870m, at 5 MT ~1010m, at 150 KT, about 250m.
Most US nuclear weapons yield between 600 to 2,200 KT (0.6 to 2.2 MT).
Whether or not individuals are within the fireball radius depends on the height of detonation, parameters of the nuclear explosion itself (shaped nuclear charges are theoretically possible, though I'm not aware whether any present weapons are designed as such), and of course the local population density.
Outside the fireball, the principle lethal mechanism is the shock wave, though thermal pulse can still provide severe burns, and initial and fallout radiation can also be lethal, though over longer periods (hours, days, weeks, or more).
Effects generally fall with the inverse cube law. Larger weapons also experience an inverse cube effect, such that a one thousandfold increase in weapon yield delivers only a tenfold increase in effects at a given distance.
People may be vapourised, though most within a blast effect area will likely not. They may however be severely burned if directly exposed to the thermal pulse. Near in, other lethal effects, which may be delayed by a few seconds, principally from the blast wave, should predominate.
Air-burst attacks would likely decrease vapourisation. Penetrating / shaped charges would have markedly different and highly directional effects.
Major Kong would not have felt a thing.
Obviously we are talking about completely different types of events and magnitudes of death and destruction, and the very notion that you should try to find justification for murder by events you can correlate to people who share ethnicity or nationality with the victims is just a cruel insult to anyone with a hint of human decency.
It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them.
And nuclear war is so much more horrifying and its consequences are so much beyond the pale, that people can't even think of what it would mean.
I don't understand this. Between Iran and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, they seem to be very top of mind for many.
I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist.
Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
That leaves China and Russia. We learned during the Cold War that a policy of aggressive containment is effective and this should continue. Don't give them an inch.
> Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women...
Ezekial 9:5-6
> Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
1 Samuel 15:3
> And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
Genesis 7:23
Two and a half thousand years later, human nature is unchanged. How easily we make peace with wholesale slaughter.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw#t=15s
[0] first test: 29.08.1949
[1] a year in which the US and USSR were, however tenuously, still allied
I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age. I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on.
I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers are extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
I think this is a very naive take.
* We can't really live on another planet in the solar system. * Look at how far the next star is and realise that we won't get there anytime soon (probably at all). * What's the point of surviving on another planet, without any other species? * Without considering the risk of nuclear war, we are in the process of destroying life on Earth.
The resources we put on that project are mostly wasted. We should try to live on Earth, I hear it's a nice place.
I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
We could live on Mars. Just a matter of time. Let engineers iterate.
We would obviously bring species here at home with us to Mars. And then new species would flourish too.
This is not a joke. But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth, and we should all go to hell if we can't. But we only need a few madmen in power for the rest of us to not matter.
It is like saying that the solution to all problems is colonizing Antarctica.
Yeah, we must. As in: it's not rational to even consider that becoming self-sustaining on other heavenly bodies is an alternative.
It's fun, it's interesting, it's many things. But it's not an alternative.
I am more worried that we do not have that many attempts at rebuilding, because coal and oil are finite. OTOH a slower 2nd iteration might actually work better than this one.
Far more important than 18th century vs stone age debate is the fact that there are people in charge that would lead us down either path.
For example where I live there is water around 10-20m depth, but it's polluted (it may be usable for agriculture but not for human consumption); you'd have to dig a well over 100m below the surface.
One reason to use less oil now is to perhaps preserve it in case we need to 'reboot' civilization in the future in case of a future cataclysm.
We were only able to reach beyond (near-)subsistence living because of cheap energy, first coal and later petroleum. All the easily accessible stuff is now kind of gone, so if there's another collapse (which may be more likely to be global in nature: see pandemics), then depending on how much knowledge we lose it could be hard to get back to the say level without the previously cheap/easy energy.
In past collapses (Europe: Western Roman Empire, Black Death) we were able to eventually recover because we at a simply technological level that could keep going even with the loss of a lot of knowledge.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this will be impossible given advanced countries can't even be self-sufficient on Earth.
Is there oil on those heavenly bodies? Probably no, so you're importing your lubricants and seals/o-rings. Advanced fabs? No? Well you're importing your electronics. What kind of silica is there, because if you don't have the right kind of sand, you're mot making your own solar panels. How much radioactive material (uranium, plutonium, thorium, etc) is around if you want to try nuclear power.
And that's only after you've passed the fact that it's impossible for us to reach the next star.
The strict interpretation of that foreign policy is that any nuclear nation is free to invade any non-nuclear nation and abuse its citizens.
Where do you draw the line? If for example an ally is invaded by a nuclear nation. Should you intervene or just call peace?
Does the rule-of-law between countries have any relevance?
If the shoe were on the other foot, and China had supported a revolution in Mexico and was setting up military bases, the American government would not take it lightly. The US would cook up some reason to wage war against Mexico as a continuation of the Monroe Doctrine. These wars are not about good and evil, as much as it's about empires and power.
Putin and Biden haven't spoken in years. I would say you're proposing ignoring the situation until it becomes even more of a powder keg in a decade or two.
Alternative is accepting some territorial losses, compromising, soldiers go home. Doomsday clock ticks back to 5 minutes to midnight.
You're acting as if this is the first time anyone has annexed territory. Do I like it? No. But you gotta manage with the cards you're dealt and that territory is not worth decades long conflict with two major nuclear powers.
But who will inhabit those other bodies? Humans? The same species that destroyed earth in your scenario? What makes you think that living on Mars would suddenly make everybody peaceful and enlightened?
Oh I see how I can perfectly fit this role sure, I tell you so as the most humble entity that universe ever spawned.
It was of the outmost importance for me to deliver this lie: I don't care about anyone, humanity can go extinct, self included, and it doesn't trigger any emotion in me.
The current climate in Russia and the Middle East may change that.
Fun fact the cover image if this edition was kind of a decoy (perhaps to accentuate the shock): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31
The distillery, being built like a fortress to withstand earthquakes, somehow remained standing. Opa used to say that if he ever got nuked again, he'd want to be surrounded by sake barrels—apparently, they make for excellent shock absorbers.
Every New Year, he'd tell us about "the time I survived a nuclear blast with nothing but a sake buzz." He'd chuckle, pour himself a small glass of the weakest beer he could find, and toast to "the power of fermented rice."
There is also Yoshito Matsushige, a survivor and the only photographer who was able to capture an immediate, first-hand photographic historical account: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/yoshito-mats...
One thing I was surprised by was the number of survivors and also that there was at least one person who survived both bombs [1]
That is one way to win an argument. Not that anyone would prefer that "win".
Nine Who Survived Hiroshima & Nagasaki Hardcover – January 1, 1957
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Who-Survived-Hiroshima-Nagasaki/...
It has been justified repeatedly over the years both in terms of relativism ("The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, yet isn't so controversial"), and in terms of hypotheticals becoming certainties ("The empire was never going to surrender without a massive fight. The US anticipated unprecedented losses from an invasion of the main island, and is still giving out purple hearts printed in anticipation of this invasion")
In the end the historical narrative was that dropping the bombs was necessary to end the war, as written by the winners.
The reality is that we just don't know what would've happened if the US waited. Japan was not an active threat any longer. What was? The Soviet Union that would've certainly "helped" invade Japan, and would've also demanded to carve it up post-war the way they did with Germany.
From evaluating the overall evidence it seems pretty clear that this is what was driving the urgency to drop the bomb, not once, but twice.
The irony is that it's entirely possible that for the population of Japan this ended up a better outcome than having half of it face the "East Germany" scenario for the next 40 years.
And while the "blight" of having actually used nuclear weapons to kill civilians may be on the US forever as the only nation to have done so, the horrors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki almost certainly helped prevent nuclear weapon usage throughout the cold war. If they were never tried, it's almost certain that either the US or the USSR would've been itchy to be the first in some future engagement, and then who knows what would've happened.
So the truth is messy. My position is that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were NOT necessary to end WW2 and did not reduce the overall bloodshed within THAT conflict. But this action counterintuitively helped improve Japan's prosperity over the rest of the 20th century and may have reduced the likelihood of an actual nuclear war over the rest of the Cold War.
I don't think your hypothetical assumption that 20th century peace could not be made without using nukes in WW2 is valid.
Why not even turn it up and say that future peace from nuclear weapons is impossible without living through the global thermonuclear war? Clearly, most people can imagine dangers of that, so they are perfectly capable of imagining dangers of only 2 nukes being used, without them actually being used.
With the information available at the time, dropping the nukes was immoral, and unjustifiable. The public justifications and the ones accepted by the standard western historical narrative do not hold up to scrutiny.
Despite that, I'm claiming that the decision probably inadvertently saved lives.
But that's not a moral argument. There were other means to save lives from nuclear apocalypse, and the US is complicit in its own actions that they've done to ensure a cold war with the Soviet Union.
As said in the announcement, even 80 years after those bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we still need to highlight the dangers of nuclear weapons.
The threat and use of such weapons is still allowed by customary international law. Maybe movements like this will help change this sad fact. There has been progress in this direction. However, of course, nuclear-weapon states have been vehemently opposed to that, although they are obliged to negotiate a general and complete nuclear disarmament.
Current literature says that the non-usage of nuclear weapons has become a widespread international practice, but that the resistance of nuclear powers has prevented the formation of an “opinio juris” thus far. What is at stake is whether an international custom can be formed despite the opposition of certain states — as long as several other states acknowledge the custom.
As a teenager we also visited concentration camps on a school trip, and a survivor joined the trip from Norway to Germany. We got to know him a bit during the week long trip, and there was a session where he told his story. I'll never forget this, and I think it affects me to this day.
Soon we will have no Time Witnesses left.
Edit: I remembered a very specific anecdote he told, about how him randomly having learned to knit helped when in a concentration camp, as some officer wanted something to be made, and he then could sit inside and do that instead of working himself to death in the quarry. Based on this I managed to find his name again now.
Haakon Sørbye, thanks for telling us your story.
You can't turn material into "nothing". At best you can turn it into equivalent amount of energy if you collide it with antimatter.
That being said I don't really feel the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration". In both cases you stop being biology and start being physics in a subjective instant. (at least from the perspective of your own central nervous system, which has not enough time to even detect that something has happened)
In both cases you go from a living, breathing, laughing, thinking human being into contaminants in the air or surfaces around you.
What do you feel is the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration"? Is it about how big your largest continuous chunk is? Where do you draw the line?
It could be (and I think it's more likely) that the rest of the stone was lightened, and the part in the shadow, wasn't.
No "residue of a person", just literally "shadow".
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone
The immense heat and light from the detonation burned/discolored the stones, but not in the shadow of the person sitting on the steps. Hence why you can see these 'permanent shadows' in various places in the city. Some caused by humans, but most are just shadows of structures. For example bridge railings: https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/photographs/hiroshima/im...
Many Asian countries feel scant sympathy toward Japan. From Indonesia to Malaysia to the Philipipines or even worse and for much longer, in Korea and China. In each of these countries the Japanese perpetrated massacre, forced labour, gang rape and forced prostitution in the millions. Even European women who were stranded in their former colonies were not spared. In fact their diaries are the foremost historical sources.
Their brutality is such that the hatred towards colonialist European nations were ameliorated and pretty much forgotten these days. It's sickening to me that outside East and Southeast Asia itself, most of the world only remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima when it comes to casualties in the Pacific theatre of WW2.
This sympathy felt even more misplaced considering even to this very day, unlike Germany, Japanese historiograpy deliberately downplays Japan brutality during occupation or that there was any aggression on their part at all. Most Japanese college mates in the US that I've talked to were not even aware that Japan occupied my country for years resulting in millions of casualties.
No one goes around expecting New York City to attone for the events that led up to 9/11.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/385216...
Why? Purely because of the combinatorial math of proliferation, and the likelihood of either an accident or a crazy person getting control of a bomb.
I wish it weren't so, but eventually your luck runs out.
If you wanted to give a Nobel Prize to someone for preventing nuclear wars, give it to Nuclear Winter researchers and military analysts.
I just had an argument about madness that is MAD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41776112
Actually, it would be interesting if someone researched the relationship between gun culture and acceptance of MAD. Both on national (cultural) and individual level.
And yes guns are used as a deterrent a lot more than they are used to shoot to kill.
MAD is everything that held it all together during the Cuban missile crisis. Later countries agreed not to pursue ABM so as to keep the deterrent.
Your snark is misplaced.
Perhaps the committee thought it was best to express its opinion on current conflicts indirectly, as it has done so in the past.
I do agree, and this is my point: this particular committee expressing concern rather than celebrating success is a source of lament to me.
The reason we seemingly can't have peace is because we deliberately refuse it.
You have no issue but it is sad?
> could not find someone deserving that is working on a more current conflict. I guess this is not a positive outlook for the current state international conflicts.
Just any issue would be fine for you? Or could it be some specific issue that you care abuot.
> Or could it be some specific issue that you care abuot.
I, of course, have causes that are closer to my heart. But even if it was a conflict I had no previous knowledge, learning about it through the news of its end, or even that people are working hard to solve it, is kind of beautiful. Peace in our time is always awing.
Of course there are other current candidates who would also deserve it, but I think it might be also a matter of how hot and current the problem is, and how much political impact this message would have. Russia and their threats are cooling down for the moment, so it's "safer" to send this message, instead of anything related to the Middle East, for example.
Now that it appears the world is once again creeping towards nuclear stand-off this time with a very large non-zero chance that a country pushed towards existential crisis will not hesitate to detonate a nuclear device, it makes the people justifying Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuking as completely deranged.
I urge y'all to visit Hiroshima and see first hand the horrors of nuclear terrorism. When you attack civilians directly, its terrorism no matter what side of the fence you are on.
- Liberal democracies should have Nuclear Weapons.
- Dictatorships and Communists countries shouldn't.I'm not intimately familiar with Japanese self-perceptions - but from the outside it seems like post-WW2 the country really leaned into a view that "nuclear weapons are terrible" to the point of distraction - instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines. There seems to be much less anxiety about preventing getting into a similar situations that triggered WW2: neo-colonial military bullying and domination of neighbors, xenaphobic oppression of ethnic groups, sycophantic following of cultural leaders etc. and an intense worry about the more tangeable use of nuclear weapons - which I'd argue is something that even if it were to come to pass would almost certainly never involve the Japanese people.
I wonder how this seeming diversion of public attention is perceived in Japan itself.
As I understand it, the anti-nationalist narrative was repressed due to anti-communist agendas of the occupation forces (ex: freeing of nationalist war criminals)
Would be curious to hear from anyone Japanese on the topic
Let's compare using Wikipedia as a source:
Atomic bombings in Japan:
50,000–246,000 casualties.
Air Raids in Japan:
241,000–900,000 killed,
213,000–1,300,000 wounded,
8,500,000 rendered homeless.
* one early bomb is more or less equivilant to one conventional HE + incendiary raid.
* 2,000+ other bombs have since been detonated, a good number of which were orders of magnitudes more destructive than the early "first gen" bombs used on Japan.
Nuclear war with the larger weapons that followed would be considerably worse than incendiary bombs, in physical destruction, in immediate deaths, and in injuries and following mortalities.
I can't register a difference between a nuclear bomb and, say, a GBU-12 Paveway conventional bomb. They both destroy and kill brutally, the magnitude is irrelevant and it would be great if we never have to use either of them.
Post-war Japan is against nuclear weapons to an absolute, but it must be admitted that the response to nukes in particular is just as much a kneejerk reaction. NHK literally spams the entirety of August with anti-nuclear propaganda every year. Japan's anti-nuclear stance is also hypocritically at odds with relying on the US nuclear umbrella for national security.
More rationally, post-war Japan is against wars of any and all kinds to an absolute. This goes as far as refusing to defend the US in the event of an attack on the US-Japan alliance; this was only changed recently in the last decade or so after strong pressure from the US to reciprocate the US's defense commitments to Japan.
Nationalism is a... complex topic. You will be considered a crazy person if you wave the Japanese flag or put up a flagpole on or around your house, but at the same time loyalty and reverence to the Emperor still remains strong and the country is politically and culturally very conservative/liberal with a very interesting mix of individualism and conformity. Most Japanese ex-pats actually leave Japan because they are more progressive and can't stand the conservative culture.
Japan is actually quite welcoming of foreigners, but there is a hard gentlemen's agreement that if you're in Japan you do as the Japanese do. Those who can adapt are welcomed, those who can't/don't are excluded and ejected sooner or later.
According to them, the US dropped the bomb because they wanted to show their strengths against the Soviets. It makes little to no mention of the bloody battles in the Pacific.
It used to bother me a lot, until I realized that
- the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers ("you're not a god anymore...except for those who still believe you are")
- all surrounding countries have incentives to to keep distances from Japan (in particular as long as the US are there, Japan and China will never be allies, same for Russia), Taiwan being the exception.
I see no future where Japan nationalism is truly solved, short of these two things also getting solved. And boy is there no end in sight to this.
This was a deliberate political decision in an effort to not repeat the grave mistake of how post-WW1 Germany was handled which essentially led to WW2. Denying Japan of their identity and dignity would have risked an eventual WW3, and the US did not want to even entertain the possibility.
It also didn't help that practically all of Japan were not going to see their Emperor deposed or worse; Japan was willing to compromise on literally everything but the Emperor in making peace with the US and the west, and the extended Imperial family along with all the other nobles thereof lost their titles and powers in the post-war occupation and restructuring.
And yet some high ranking military planers were seriously pushing for employing nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Do you think they just haven't seen any nuclear test videos?
> It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons.
Because humans keep building, and fielding nuclear weapons. Not sure where you live, but chances are good your taxes are used to build, and maintain nuclear weapons and the means to carry them.
Also on a side note:
>the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.
Well, first thing, this is a quite restrictive anthropocentric and restrictive POV for what count for a weapon. Putting appart all things that triggered previous mass extinction as they might not really fit the expectation of weapon and "ever witnessed as implied agent", ok. But let's consider European invasion of America: while this was not intended and per design, it somehow greatly leveraged on bacteriological weapons.
Currently humanity is also at war with biodiversity, and the scale is massive and worldwide, using a large panel of tools.
Of course we are more prone to empathy to our fellow humans, and nuclear weapons are abominations.