Comment by wbl
9 hours ago
They did not get vaporized in the fireball. We have survivors at the hypocenter. Intense burns and radiation poisoning killed most plus conventional blast damage mechanisms. Half the acute deaths happened after the first day.
Sure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity.
Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!"
I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful without comparing them, but lots of awful things happen without involving nukes.
They were certainly a novel way of causing a reasonable amount of death and destruction.
Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.
> Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.
The application sure, but the novelty of it being nuclear rather than conventional kept parties interested in it for quite a while!