You can bomb your hometown too! Just put your location into that link, and it’ll show you the area of devastation if your town were hit by the Hiroshima bomb. Here’s the effect if the nuke went off at my house:
I was a bit disappointed, actually. All that happens to Cyrus is broken windows? The area of firestorms and gross destruction is totally within the bounds of where I routinely walk every day. It somehow seems so much smaller than I imagined.
Then I read the story of this photo, which was taken a few minutes after the detonation, 6 miles away.
Yet even given the delay between the flash of light, the sound, and the explosion, Siemes and his colleagues went to the front of the house to see where the bomb landed. All of the survivors he later encountered had the same impression “that the bomb had burst in their immediate vicinity.” The fact that one massive bomb, kilometers away, could cause this sort of force and devastation defied belief.
“Everybody is running around saying, ‘Oh, it’s weird, my house randomly got hit by a bomb,’” Wellerstein describes it. “When the answer is, no, no, no—you guys are actually fairly far away from the bomb and it was only one bomb. It was huge.”
“I’ve always thought that that was a powerful illustration of how long it takes your brain to wrap around something that is just so unfamiliar,” he continued.
The person who took this photo would have been among the first to look out there and realize that this wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill bomb. It wasn’t the air raid that the citizens of Hiroshima had been anticipating for months. This was the beginning of a new world, one with a bomb unlike anything anyone had ever experienced before, something so new and fearsome that at first no one could understand what it was.
And then it begins to sink in that that little orange circle on the map represents unimaginable horror.
Not seen that photo before, chilling. Does that simulation take account of geography as it looks too regular to me.
We were in Hiroshima last year, and learned the horrific fact that many of the dead were junior high students aka “mobilized students” who had been taken out of school and conscripted into outdoor work (building barricades, clearing roads, etc.) for the war effort. Japan didn’t memorialize those students for decades. http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/virtual/VirtualMuseum_e/tour_e/ireihi/tour_42_e.html
The Hiroshima museum has dioramas (with mannequins) of the hours after the bombing. Many of the victims were walking dead, with horrific burns, who would die within hours or a couple of days. Although it is hard to look at pictures of them, those pictures should be seen, especially if our collective goal is to prevent it ever happening again.
The other thing that struck us is how much modern Hiroshima just looked like any other modern city. Life has to go on, I guess.
The simulation doesn’t have to take geography into account for me. Morris and environs are flat.
Hiroshima was a small bomb (15 kilotons) by modern-day standards (9 megatons)
It somehow seems so much smaller than I imagined.
Whose bombs are assumed to be used here? I heard somewhere that US nukes tended to be less powerful, and relied instead on more precise targeting to destroy specific targets; while Soviet nukes had much higher yield, which compensated for their less accurate targeting.
The other thing that struck us is how much modern Hiroshima just looked like any other modern city. Life has to go on, I guess.
Location, location, location. The people rebuilt their city where it was, for the same reasons their ancestors had build the city there in the first place.
The result was much larger than I espected. My entire home town, where I spent at least 95% of the time between age 0 and age 18, fits neatly within the “complete destruction” zone. The surrounding environs, all the hills and fields I used to roam over, little villages I’d pass on the way to a proper city, are well within the destruction caused by the subsequent fires.
And that’s not even a big bomb.
Don’t worry. They make bombs bigger now. They also pack multiple bombs on the same warhead, so Cyrus could get a nuke of its own at no extra charge.
This simulator has a deeply disturbing level of detail, and allows you to select a yield, or choose a preset one based on a list of real weapons. It’s fucking disturbing.
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Oh geez between this, watching the “nuke” episode of Last Week Tonight, and playing Metal Gear Solid, it’s like I’m reliving the fears of the cold war all over again…
I need some light comedy… Hmm, Dr. Strangelove, that sounds funny.
A nuke detonating directly over my house would knock most of a five-mile-long lake out of its bed, increasing the (ahem) splash damage considerably.
Back in ’45, military planners considered dropping their new A-bomb into Tokyo Harbor to create an instant supertsunami for maximum damage. Horrendous as it was, the Hiroshima bomb served as just a warning of what new hell had actually become possible.
As several people have pointed out, modern nuclear weapons are close to a thousand times more powerful than the only two ever dropped on people intentionally.
It’s entirely possible to make even larger warheads, but even the largest detonation on record still only has a blast radius of around 20 miles. Because it’s an inverse square, the size of the blast zone does not increase very fast with tonnage. Modern nukes have multiple warheads, designed to strike multiple zones, because it’s more effective than just making bigger bombs.
The other half of the equation is that the world is really quite large. Even our largest weapons are tick bites compared to the total surface area. Even if every nuke on earth was detonated in an optimal spread, it wouldn’t cover that much ground. It would completely screw up the biosphere and make life severely unpleasant for everything that wasn’t incinerated, but Earth has survived worse. Nukes are a terrible idea, from a purely human perspective.
Dancaban @1: The Hiroshima bomb (and Nagasaki’s) was an airburst, exploded several thousand feet above ground zero for maximum awful effect, so typical city geography wouldn’t make much of a difference. If you can see the sky from where you are, then the bomb will get you.
Ranmore @4: Little Boy (15Kt) and Fat Man (20KT) were what would be classified as “tactical” nukes these days. The USAF had some 9MT bombs (the B53, for the brand-name fetishists among us) in its inventory for decades, but they were retired before the end of the Cold War, what with the modern 250–350KT weapons having the right combination of portability, awfulness and accuracy for “bunker-busting”, i.e. attacking static, high-value, hardened military targets with ground-bursts.
…I may know more about this subject than is healthy.
Once I got in a heated argument with a far-leftist who claimed that France, being a nuclear power could easily browbeat tax havens into unsheltering tax-cheating millionaires who hid their money there “Just tell them «Open your accounting books or we’ll nuke you», and if they don’t comply nuke a few of them as an example“.
Out of morbid curiosity, I used that site to look what France nuking the Tax Havens located in Europe would look like. It’s not pretty
laurentweppe:
Oh yes. Particularly since you set those to surface burst, meaning that all kinds of fallout would be generated, as depicted. An air burst at about 800 m wouldn’t produce as much fallout, and would have a greater destructive radius.
And that is just a dinky little A-bomb of about 15 kilotons. Imagine if it were an H-bomb of around 1 megaton. [shudder]
[synchronicity:]
I just saw, yesterday, news that one “survivor” of Hiroshima-day is being returned to service. The Trolley in Hiroshima was not destroyed that day and has been preserved in museum since. It has recently been returned to actual service to trolley actual passengers along the street of Hiroshima.
[/synchronicity]
[anime alert]Grave of The Fireflies a most moving commemoration of the “event”. Worth seeing with a box of tissues for all the pollen that will attack the viewer’s eyes.
way back when I was in high school in the early 60’s I remember an article about “the bomb” in what I think might have been Life magazine with some maps with radius’s all the way out to 50 megaton yield, We were still testing as were the Soviets I can still see the pages in my mind.
uncle frogy
Yeah, I live in a hilly area. I doubt this simulator is realistic enough for my… needs.
I did get some of Marseilles, including, I think, the French Foreign Legion, but not the warbase at Toulon. And a helluva lot of fish. Anyone for glow-in-the-dark Bouillabaisse?
to survive in the shadow of some hills and still be surrounded by nuclear devastation would not be much of a benefit.
uncle frogy
Can’t remember where I first heard of this site, but I admit I spent way too much time messing around with it. Living in Los Angeles, I was curious what a nuclear detonation at Long Beach would do–its big port being a supposedly preferred location for where atomic evildoers would detonate such a weapon–and was surprised that even a WWII-era yield at ground level wasn’t bigger. Detonated on the ground, the fallout would be horrific, particularly from a relatively inefficient gun type weapon that would be the most practical to build, but the explosion alone would not destroy the city, or even come close to doing so.
However, the RAND Corporation, in its alarmist way, studied this back in 2006 and the big worry was such an attack “would have catastrophic consequences for the United States” because of the amount of trade that goes through American ports and the economic effects of temporarily closing them or just making them more secure. (The article also mentions the possibility of relocating two or three million people in Los Angeles, so fallout could be way worse than Nukemap is imagining it.)
Okay, I’m not really worried about nukes–the LA traffic, smog, and sunshine alone are bigger everyday risks to my health–but I do have a morbid interest in how devastating nuclear weapons can be. (And on a side note about sunburns, apparently Edward Teller told people at the Trinity test to put on sunscreen because of the ultraviolet radiation the detonation would release.)
Within a decade of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hydrogen bomb yields were massive, like the 15 megaton Castle Bravo test, where the biggest US detonation occurred due to assuming one of its lithium isotopes would not react. And to give an idea of its power, the fallout from that test landed on a Japanese fishing vessel some eighty miles downwind, later killing one of the crew members.
Ah! Flat as the proverbial pancake then. You need to live in the Yorkshire HILLS.
NelC: “The USAF had some 9MT bombs in its inventory for decades, but they were retired before the end of the Cold War”
I wish I shared your simple, unquestioning faith ;-)
Aka the best movie you’ll never want to rewatch
Couldn’t even destroy the neighbouring ogre.
Pointless.
ranmore: I have little difficulty believing that they decommissioned those devices. The trend is toward more, smaller devices with increased accuracy, and having those old clunkers sitting around was using up slots under the arms reduction treaties.
You want the epitome of disturbing, read that list of preset yields carefully. I quote:
Drop that one on your house, and see what happens. (Mind you, I’m dubious about the site’s fallout predictions. Not the size, so much as the direction. I would’ve thought it would go along with weather patterns, which in my area [West of Chicago] means moving to the southeast, and maybe even curling back north into Michigan after going around Lake Michigan, not the southwest.)
That said, I managed to give the bulk of the North and West sides of Chicago third degree burns. So that’s something.
I don’t think they make them that small anymore.
Looks like you got in a lucky shot, PZ. Starbuck has a two-out-of-three kill ratio against incoming nukes.
Happy Hiroshima Peace Memorial Day (or, as I call it today: my 51st trip around the sun).
Recommendation for Grave of the Fireflies- no sharp objects nearby and something light scheduled immediately afterwards
Where does the US get off lecturing Iran about trying to acquire nuclear weapons when the US is the only country to have used them, and it used them against 2 civilian targets? The arrogance of the US will be its downfall. See http://original.antiwar.com/thomas-knapp/2015/08/05/august-1945-lets-talk-about-terrorism/
@Raging Bee
Ian hit a couple of the points, but the US planned nearby detonations of “smaller” bombs (in the hundreds of kilotons TNT range) so that the shockwaves would “interlock” and do more damage. The really big bombs – Megaton Level – were mostly used to destroy fortified underground facilities, like the Soviet counterpart to NORAD and other such facilities.
Air bursts are also much, much better in terms of fallout pollution than ground-bursts IIRC. That’s why Hiroshima is a city people live in today. That doesn’t bode well for the area where I live (Salt Lake City) – if the Soviets had decided to target the area in a nuclear exchange, the airport and railroad junction both would have been hit hard with ground-bursts.
@Ariaflame
Jesus, that movie. I’d strongly recommend watching Spirited Away right after it.
@31 William Webb
Not exactly true. Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had significant military and industrial assets – if they hadn’t been on the target list for nuclear strike along with Kokura, they likely would have been hit by conventional bombing campaigns with comparable (or worse) devastation.
The Simulator is the product of Alex Wellerstein. Far from being a sicko, he’s an excellent historian of nuclear weapons, and I’d encourage anyone interested to take a look at his blog for a lot of interesting analyses: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, they never would have happened if successive Japanese governments hadn’t gotten into the imperialism game, starting with the Japanese ending Okinawa’s limited independence in 1879.
Whatever They are using for maps is stunningly thorough.
In the vicinity of my hometown, they include places that haven’t been a
town-with-people-living-there
for 80 or more years.
I’m pretty sure the second amendment entitles me to stockpile these in the basement to defend myself from sex-sex marriage.
Last post was supposed to end with *same*-sex marriage.
timgueguen
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, they never would have happened if successive US governments hadn’t gotten into the imperialism game, starting with toppling various democratic regimes in the world and installing puppet regimes.
Don’t throw bricks if you live in a glass house.
Grave of the Fireflies is a stunningly heartbreaking film that takes place in Japan during and after the incendiary bombing of the city of Kobe. Nothing to do with nukes.
In some ways the firebombing was even more destructive in cities like Kobe and Tokyo. You don’t need nukes to cause incredible devastation.
PDX_Greg, I’m not an American, so your comment has no effect on me.
Grave of the Fireflies isn’t about the nukes, but about the fire bombs America had been dropping en masse for a long time before the nukes were dropped. In terms of lives taken, those fire bombs did more damage than the two nukes, though of course the threat of the nukes was the implication of just how much worse it COULD get.
It’s actually based on a true story, with some details changed, and I recommend it. The biggest mistake they made when they released that movie was pairing it with My Neighbor Totoro. That’s about as huge a disconnect as you can get short of Stephen Spielberg pairing E.T. with Schindler’s List. Both movies had far greater success with the (separate) home releases.
What ever rationalization for actually using “The Bomb” are used or the arguments against using it are. It was at the end of a very brutal and horrible war that had no lack of pointless deaths in staggering numbers, city bombings, fire bombings, death camps, death marches all climaxing in city killer atomic bombs. What were the results years later after massive post war aid? prosperous countries mostly peaceful with out huge military expenses while we………..
uncle frogy
Oops, wrong attribution. That’s what happens when you try to answer a comment while just about to run out the door.
I highly recommend the documentary “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.
SwanGeese @ 45:
Thanks for the recommend, it’s on my to be watched list.
^ And mine.
Thanks, SwanGeese.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Gratuitous Mass Murder – http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/07/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-gratuitous-mass-murder/