"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.



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.

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.




I agree with the rest:

One problem with comparing the data is the non atomic attacks
were against alerted cities, with people in shelters, the atomic
strikes were against unalerted cities and it makes a big difference
to the casualty figures. On 5 April 1943 the USAAF hit the Antwerp
industrial area with 172 short tons of bombs, killing 936 civilians,
it would appear the population assumed the bombers were going
somewhere else. There are plenty of such examples from the air
war in Europe, as late as April 1945 with the RAF attack on
Potsdam, the population appears to have assumed an attack on
Berlin, one estimate is perhaps 5,000 dead, the pre war population
was 74,000, 1,962 short tons of bombs dropped.

Given the difficulty in knowing the population numbers at the time
of the attacks on axis cities it would be interesting to know how
the estimates of populations in specific parts of the cities were done.

I would expect a nuclear weapon to be more lethal to those in the
target area, mainly the difference between most damage being
inflicted almost instantaneously and fires breaking out rapidly
versus the time it takes to put hundreds of bombers over the target.

Geoffrey Sinclair
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