Dr Carl F. Miller, who worked for the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at later nuclear tests to measure fallout on ships with washdown safeguards that were sailing under the expanding mushroom clouds, hit out in the February 1966 magazine Scientist and Citizen:

‘Reliance on the Effects of Nuclear Weapons has its shortcomings… I was twenty miles from a detonation … near ten megatons. The thermal flash did not produce the second-degree burn on the back of my neck, nor indeed any discomfort at all.’

http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/samuel-glasstone-and-philip-j-dolan.html

Miller’s declassified fallout report: http://worf.eh.doe.gov/data/ihp1d/78192e.pdf

http://www.vce.com/trinity.html

There is also a brilliant pbs documentary “Race for the Superbomb”:

www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb

Anyone interested in issues related to nuclear weapons–whether you are for or against–should see these films on a big widescreen tv. As a physicist I am afraid I do have to admit to having a morbid fascination for nuclear weapons. In particular, both films feature digitally restored and very powerful footage of the terrifying 10Mt Ivy Mike and 15Mt Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb shots in the Pacific, set to rather effective and haunting music. Witnesses talk about it being like sticking your head in a blast furnace, even though they were 50-60 miles away. The fireball expanded to 4 miles in a few seconds and vaporised about 120 million tons of coral and seawater. Where the test island was you later see a blue crater in the ocean miles across and deep enough to submerge a skyscraper. It is fascinating albeit scary stuff.

The biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated, by the Soviet Union in the artic circle, the Tsar hydrogen superbomb at 60Mt, is described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

Scrolling down to the bottom there is a link to the “video of the event”. (It takes a few minutes to load.) What is really scary is that this was a scaled-down version of a 100Mt+ design. Anyway, here’s hoping that the only place where anyone ever sees these things again is on these films.

The 40-year total leukemias from radiation for Hiroshima and Nagasaki was 89 persons out of 36,500 irradiated survivors. http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/faqs/faqse.htm#faq2

‘Nuclear weapons may be more effective in achieving a certain goal, less painful, and they have the power to discourage anyone - both sides - from continuing the war. But they are powerful and if they’re used properly, they can also lead to relatively positive consequences, not just negative consequences. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are examples.’

As has already been pointed out, the justifiability of bombing Hiroshima was debatable, but bombing Nagasaki was inexcusable.

Furthermore it is not the case that neuclear weapons are “less painful”. 60 years on, people are still dying of cancer in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting from the bombs.

‘2) under certain circumstances, environmentalist perfectionism and luxury becomes secondary.’

It’s hardly perfectionism and luxury!

To everyone using Wikipedia references: accuracy is not guaranteed. Usual caveats apply to info you find online that could have been written by any old dude who thinks they know something.

–IP.

No one has answered my question yet. If you were making the decisions in Iran, would you build the bomb?

Or, leaving Iran, the mullahs, Islamic fundamentalism, Israel, the Palestinians, and the rest of it out of the question, if George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfield were threatening your country with a nuclear attack, and if you had the capability of producing a nuclear weapon, would you build one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_casualties_by_country says 62 million died in World War II.

The bomb stopped it. Because of the “overkill” close to the detonation, collateral damage is reduced. By conservation of energy, the blast can’t do work in demolishing buildings and not lose energy in the process.

“Overkill” reduces the number of fatalities by concentrating most of the energy close to the explosion.

Hiroshima set off a firestorm because the man in charge on Tinian, Colonel Tibbets, had learned while bombing Europe earlier in the war that the only way to make an impact is to focus on dry wooden houses - for example the medieval area of Hamburg was old 4-6 storey wooden houses and was ignited. I don’t see cities built like that these days, do you?

The anti-nuclear hysteria is bad for three reasons: (1) it drives fraudulent anti-physics or at least generally anti-nuclear (pro-ignorance) public feeling about the knowledge of the facts of nuclear energy, (2) it ridicules civil defence which would be particularly effective in a terrorist attack or a limited war, at least to minimise casualties from burns, glass and debris and fallout, and (3) it puts a nasty stigma on the big bang cosmology, reducing public interest in the big bang (which is totally absurd, if you see supernovae and compare the energy release to Hiroshima, you see how crazy anti-nuclear fanatism is).

In a controlled sample of 36,500 Hiroshima-Nagasaki irradiated survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. Published in Radiation Research volume 146:1-27, 1996, see http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/faqs/faqse.htm#faq2

Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result.

Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51 % in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7 %.

Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (mainly natural), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate was 9 %, spread over 40 years.

For example, it takes only 354 to 800 Russian warheads to destroy every city and town in the United States that has a population density in excess of 1,000 people per square mile (urban and metropolitan USA, 36.3% of the U.S. population, 94 million people)

http://www.nukefix.org/nukepix.html#350to800

That is roughly 400 megatons of Russian nukes - most of them being half a megaton. Half as many bombs could kill more than half of the 94 million people, hitting the more densely populated areas first.

Even if a 2 megaton bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the 2 megatons of conventional damage of WWII is equivalent to 271 of such 2-megaton bombs, assuming no overlap in damage areas.

271 bombs, each of four times the punch of the Russian arsenal, could killed more than 47 million people if targetted as above. That many people did not die in WWII bombings.

In all, 18,000 tons of high explosives had been dropped on England during eight months of the Blitz. A total of 18,629 men, 16,201 women, and 5,028 children were killed along with 695 unidentified charred bodies.

Hiroshima had a population of some 255,000. An estimated 66,000 people died. (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/abomb/mp10.htm. Estimates vary.
This page http://www.ccds.charlotte.nc.us/History/Japan/save/blane/blane.htm says 140,000 died. Let’s go with the low figure). The bomb on Hiroshima had a yield of 13,000 tons of TNT.

So, let’s see:

England - 18,000 tons - mostly on London - 40,553 fatalities
Hiroshima - 13,000 tons - 66,000 fatalities - no one knows for sure, the destruction was so massive.

We now look at this statement and scratch our heads:

Even if a 2 megaton bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the 2 megatons of conventional damage of WWII is equivalent to 271 of such 2-megaton bombs, assuming no overlap in damage areas.

This is because the same amount of explosive, divided into a large number of small bombs, is more efficient at causing destruction. Most of the energy is wasted as close-in overkill in big bombs. So conventional weapons are far more effective than nuclear ones.

Of course, one explanation is that to Science, the killing of people is not damage.

Do you not think that if Hitler had managed to put one 10,000 ton bomb into the middle of London that Great Britain would not have surrendered? Or at least, that organized British resistance would have come to an end?

I repeat - if Science is representative of the decision-makers in a country, then every responsible national government should seek nuclear weapons as a deterrent.