Oct 24 - Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

[mastabator247]

I'm aware of these photos and some worse ones too.

The major blast radius was "only" 1 mile not even fully totaling harbor in Nagasaki (I believe it missed and thus hit the city center killing almost 1/4th of its population). Except destroying or damaging almost half of the whole city it also destroyed 3 major weapon plants.
Sure some effects were still in play up to 3-4km from the ground zero.
I'm not saying that it was a nice move from Americans but really, if you think about it it wasn't just an "all bad an evil pointless move". Like I said it was only that shocking because it happened in a moment.
Without the need for pointless long fights with many more people dying PLUS it delivered a huge shock effect making them instantly give up.

It pretty much ended the war and paradoxally reduced the amount of potential casualties imo.
Seriously, up to 150k dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki vs. almost 80million (about 50million civilians) over a few years of war.
It's less than 0.2%.

[Puke]

I'm not disputing the use of the bombs, I just thought your "didnt really destroy the city" sentence was, well, let's leave it at "weird".


And it's not like you can say "they targeted such and such weapons plant". I mean, they had to drop the things on *something*. The real reason was of course the psychological impact of the bombs. High command didnt really give a damn about what the bomb annihilated, as long as the Japs knew they had it.

[mastabator247]

yeah okay, what I meant is that it's not that they totally annihilated these cities - like wipe them off the map.
It was more like devastating a huge part of them, blowing everything in the ground zero and leaving surroundings in ruins but there were areas that remained in good condition.
That's what I've meant with "not destroying whole cities".

These nukes were supposed to do both - destroy important military facilities and create the shock value. In theory they tried to aim at areas with the highest military/civilian ratio. These bombs dropped from a high attitude missed their real targets. In Hiroshima it was an ironic mistake since it exploded directly over a clinic while Nagasaki wasn't even a target for the second bomb.
It's pretty important to note that after that a lot of Japanese still didn't want to give up their fight and they were not far from taking a few more A-bombs.

[Puke]

Nagasaki wasn't a target? I've never heard about that. Do you mean that Nagasaki wasn't an intended target at first (possible) or do you mean that they actually missed whatever they were going for and ended up lobbing it out over Nagasaki (not true)?

The reason the A-bombs flattened so much is because most Japanese houses at the time were still made of wood. That's why firebombing also worked like a treat.

[mastabator247]

Originally Posted by Duke

Nagasaki wasn't a target? I've never heard about that. Do you mean that Nagasaki wasn't an intended target at first (possible) or do you mean that they actually missed whatever they were going for and ended up lobbing it out over Nagasaki (not true)?

The reason the A-bombs flattened so much is because most Japanese houses at the time were still made of wood. That's why firebombing also worked like a treat.

I mean that the second bomb was aimed at Kokura but weather conditions were bad and after 3 runs when they were running out of fuel they had to drop the bomb over Nagasaki.



Actually Kokura was a target for the first nuking too. I guess they were really lucky.

Yeah most houses in Japan are still made of wood so despite there being a blast radius of 1 mile everything around was in flames soon after.

[Puke]

That's what I mean with High Command not really giving a hoot where they'd drop it on. There were tons of good targets that could do with a "taking-out", but reason 1 to 10 was "let them know we can do this".

[mastabator247]

However there was a list of potential target cities. Sure, almost half of Japanese cities had some sort of weapon plants but Nagasaki had Mitsubishi weapon factory and the only torpedo facility, it was somewhat a secondary target.
Kokura was their primary target because the nuclear explosion would have caused the biggest damage there. Also the city was unaffected by the war by that time.

[tupac4li4e]

Getting back on track a bit more......

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