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Many people have the wrong impression that a nuclear blast would just vaporize all of its victims. The "empty street" photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to reinforce this. Those photos were mostly taken weeks after the bodies had been gathered and cremated.pic.twitter.com/5UmR4zRtkh
The US Federal Civil Defense Administration created a "wonderful" pamphlet about the massive effort that would be required for burying American dead after a nuclear war. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/02/29/weekly-document-16-mortuary-services-in-civil-defense-1956/ …pic.twitter.com/RTEgVmhfte
I was thinking about this today, because of all of this hullaballoo about the CDC hearings. People don't like to think about the government having plans for this kind of thing. But these possibilities are part of the world we live in; not talking about it doesn't make it go away.
In fact, I suspect, that not talking about it — and not thinking about it — tends to make the problem worse, because people forget the possibility is even there. Hence part of my interest in reviving the ideas of Civil Defense:https://reinventingcivildefense.org/
Morbid question, but given the height of the blast, would any of the Hiroshima victims actually have been vaporized?
The equations the NUKEMAP uses says that at the height/yield for Hiroshima, being directly under ground zero would expose you to 27 psi and ~100 cal/cm^2. That doesn't sound nearly high enough.
Googling "how much energy does it take to vaporize a human being" turns up this site, which says 3 GJ or so. This is not an exact comparison to the numbers above but that sounds like more than you'd get at the Hiroshima hypocenter.https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/excerpts-from-the-mad-scientiste28099s-handbook-so-youe28099re-ready-to-vaporize-a-human/ …
If you are in/near the fireball, of course. But at ~2,000 feet away (below), the falloff in intensity is pretty steep.
I ran the numbers with the average surface area of a person, and laying down directly underneath would be about 3.9 GJ. So maybe anyone suntanning at ground zero.
What about the 'shadows'?
They're real shadows of thermal radiation on a surface (which either burned or cleaned or damaged the parts that it hit, and didn't the parts that a human blocked the energy). But the body wasn't vaporized — if the person died there, their corpse was manually removed.
I'd always thought they were vapourised. You learn something new everyday.
For education in history's sake: who nuked Japan, why and what did it achieve?
Photos showing victims exist/existed, but were suppressed. As you know.
My Granda visited Hiroshima a couple of days after the surrender as an 18yr old sailor in the RN. He took loads of photos but the films were all ruined by radiation and none of them were any use.
Also forgetting the damage done by the firestorm that followed the blast
Like somebody once said, there wouldn't be enough bulldozers for burying the bodies in an all -out war.
I think there wouldn’t be enough people left to operate the bulldozers
All my fears about nuclear weapons have now been eased.
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