Hiroshima/Nagasaki vs conventional B-17 bombing

hiroshima facts wrote in message . ..
"Geoffrey Sinclair" wrote in message ...

So presumably the "affected area/population" is being defined as
something less than the total city, only the districts damaged to a
defined extent and affects on people again to a defined extent.

Yes.

Which makes the figures very vulnerable to arbitrary definitions.

Arthur Harris' acreage destroyed table says 75% of Hamburg and
59% of Dresden were destroyed during the war. The Tokyo fire
storm raid destroyed nearly 16 square miles or nearly 25% of all
buildings in the city, over 1,000,000 left homeless.

The attack on Hiroshima killed around 80,000 and made a further
180,000 homeless, so 80/260 or 31% of the people affected, using
homeless and killed as the definition of affected. As noted above
Tokyo comes in at 7 to 8% using this measure.

The figures behind the 10% claim presume 1 million affected and
100,000 killed.

(10% for Tokyo)

Yet those figures should then read 9%, 100,000 dead out of 1,100,000
dead and homeless, since the two categories are mutually exclusive.

I tried to track down the 50% claim, and it apparently is based on
"Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan" published by Oughterson
in 1956. I don't have that on hand, but I understand that on page 84,
they say that 48% of people within 2 km of ground zero were killed.
And "within 2 km of ground zero" was counted as the "affected area"
for the estimate I was quoting.

In which case the affected area being defined as significantly less than
the area of blast and fire damage. There were deaths and damage
beyond the 2 km/6,600 feet radius.

It is also different to the measure used for Tokyo, since it does not
use dead plus homeless, substituting a 2 km circle instead. It makes
the atomic attacks look more lethal by changing the choice of
measurement. The comparison between the two as reported is
therefore invalid.

The Tokyo raid destroyed 16 square miles, which is the area of a
circle of around 2.25 miles or 3.6 km in radius, what was the death
toll like for the 2 km circle?

On a comparative scale Tokyo comes in at 7 to 8%, Hiroshima 31%
deaths when you count the dead and homeless as the "affected
population", making the atomic strikes about 4 times as lethal.
Though this ignores the reality Hiroshima was not under air raid alert
at the time but Tokyo was, which could account for much to even all
of the difference in lethality.

It looks like the bombing campaign against Germany killed around 1
person per 4,600 pounds of bombs dropped, using the pre war German
borders definition of Germany. The strike on Antwerp I mentioned killed
at a rate much higher than that. Now it could be the reason this strike made
it to the history books was because it was an extreme example of lethality,
but it does show how variable the results could be. In the bombing
campaign against French targets the civilian death toll was around 1 death
per 20,000 pounds of bombs. In theory, assuming Little Boy had a 15,000
ton effectiveness, Hiroshima works out to 1 death per 375 "pounds", the
Antwerp raid 1 death per 360 pounds. Fat Man at 23,000 tons yield works
out to around 1 death per 1,300 "pounds".

The RAF Hamburg firestorm raid dropped 2,707 short tons of bombs,
some of which missed, but killed around 40,000 people, that is around
1 death per 135 pounds of bombs. Many of the deaths were to lack
of oxygen/carbon monoxide in the shelters which had not been set up
to handle such bad fires.

Back to Tokyo,

Put it another way, the Tokyo Police report has 1 injured for every 2
dead, assume the same ratio applies to housing and you have over
1,000,000 homeless and over another 500,000 whose house was
damaged, they would be "affected" as well. That means the dead
as a percentage of affected goes to 84,000 out of 1,600,000, back
down to the 5% range of the European fire storms.

Or again Tokyo had nearly 25% of buildings destroyed, again assume
a 2 to 1 ratio destroyed to damaged, and we have over 1/3 of the city
affected, which would mean, in theory 2,000,000 people. So the
percentage drops to 4%. Just choose the definitions and drop out
the numbers.

This ignores the problems in determining a good population figure for
the city, let alone a subset of districts, given the attacks by definition
would destroy some of the records needed to determine the population
present.

Geoffrey Sinclair
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