hiroshima facts wrote in message . ..
"Geoffrey Sinclair" wrote in message ...
This will probably appear in the wrong place thanks to a buggy news server


deleted text,

"No this is not a version, this is a change of subject, from the fact
the definitions were changed when comparing the lethality of
WWII nuclear and conventional attacks."

Using nukes, it is possible to subject a city to multiple groundbursts
resulting in at least 100 PSI overpressure throughout a large area.
Bomb shelters that are conspicuous enough to be detected by
reconnaissance flights can be targeted for a direct hit.

I see, bomb shelters that are conspicuous, direct hit, I presume
you have noticed the accuracy of the nuclear weapons strikes,
the aiming points were missed.

Visual bombing gave reasonable accuracy. Good enough to get an A-bomb
close enough to hit any shelter that was noticed.


Ah yes, the myth of accurate visual bombing persists. Presumably
the atomic attacks have agreements with the rain gods so clouds
will not interfere with the clockwork precision attacks being used
in these make nuclear weapons look as bad as possible scenarios.

As an aside when the 8th Air Force measured accuracy in the final
4 months of 1944 it found in good visibility 64.3% of bombs landed
within 1/2 a mile, 91.5% within 3 miles. So a ground burst 1/2 a
mile away (1 in 3 bombs) is considered good enough to destroy
underground shelters, another myth.

The above accuracies were from around 20 to 25,000 feet. Moving
from a bombing altitude of 20,000 feet to 30,000 feet roughly doubled
the average error. The rate of increase in error went up as altitude
went up. The bombing errors at 20,000 feet were around 4/3 those at
10,000 feet on average.

I presume also the shape of the nuclear bombs will be altered to give
them the needed aerodynamic qualities to maximise accuracy

I presume you have noticed the
average accuracy of WWII bombers dropping from 30,000 feet.
I presume all the aircraft release together and achieve a perfect
bombing pattern, with no weapon caught in the blast of another
before it detonates.

The bombers could release together,

Ah yes the wonder hyper precision attack force, formation
bombing when the aircraft are dispersed to achieve the
wonder bomb pattern with no problems for the aircraft in the
middle to escape the blasts.

or they could fly in one bomb
every few minutes. It would work either way.

Ah yes, one wonders why more WWII attacks were not done like
this, maybe the chance for the defences to intercept individual
bombers? Maybe the way dust and smoke from the first strikes
played a part, dodge that mushroom cloud, go left at the next
mushroom cloud, now where are those landmarks again?

Direct hits presumably mean ground bursts?

Yes. All the bombs in my example were ground bursts.


Well that cuts down the casualties given topography, the shielding
effects of hills, see Nagasaki for a good example, and the energy
wasted digging a crater, as well as upping the chances of the
bomb failing to explode.

Why not parachute commandos in with machine guns and line
up the population and just shoot them? It seems as realistic.

Ground bursts were a perfectly realistic option using 1945 nuclear
technology.


Ah a change of subject, from giving the attackers far greater abilities
than historical, just ignore WWII experience, go with the 1930's the
bomber will always get through, and destroy civilisation.

Note deliberately targeting air raid shelters is more than any
air force did in WWII, also such structures would best be
attacked by armour piercing bombs.

A nearby groundburst from an A-bomb would be quite effective.

So how close and how big does a blast have to be in your
opinion to destroy an underground shelter?

I expect that this will result in 99.9999% casualties amongst any part
of the populace within the 100 PSI zone that is not inside an
inconspicuous 100 PSI blast shelter.

It is becoming clear that your assumptions are nuclear weapons
incredibly bad, definitions altered to suit.

My assumptions are that nuclear weapons are incredibly effective.
They are perfectly capable of producing a 100 PSI shock.


It is becoming clear that your assumptions are nuclear weapons
incredibly bad, definitions altered to suit.

You can explain how
come 7% of the people caught within 1,000 feet survived the
real attacks despite no warning but you have decided to announce
only 1 survivor in a million for your hypothetical attack?

None of the survivors experienced a 100+ PSI overpressure.

So we are talking about the 7% of people within 1,000 feet
who survived so presumably we are talking about the nuclear
explosions being within less than 1,000 feet of each other.

Everyone within the 100 PSI overpressure area in my example does
experience such a blast wave. In addition, many of them would be
directly exposed to fireball plasma, and to incredibly intense
radiation.

Presumably after being carefully staked out on the ground, in an
area of no cover etc.

I included the one-in-a-million survivor just to be conservative in my
estimate.


This is becoming very funny, we have the arrival of the nuclear
cluster bomb, multiple bursts so close together people are caught
well within the lethal blast radius of the individual bombs. What is
the radius being used for this 100 PSI overpressure?

Had WWII continued, our weapons output in early 1946 should have been
able to produce enough A-bombs every three months to achieve that
level of destruction over an area of 3.5 square miles.

The Tokyo fire storm raid destroyed nearly 16 square miles or nearly
25% of all buildings in the city.

Right so we have nuclear attacks delivering 60 to 100,000 kt being
compared to conventional attacks delivering around 5% the explosive
yield.

Oops my mistake above should be tons, not kilotons.

My example used about 1,000kt total explosive power.

This is good, given the larger atomic strike in WWII was 25 kt, so
we have 40 such weapons being used to make a 1 Megaton attack.

This will be launched in crystal clear weather, with no interceptions,
no interference from fires already started, with accurate intelligence
as to air raid shelters, with precision unheard of in WWII and is
still unheard of for free falling bombs from 30,000+ feet, against an
unwarned population, and so on.

Since we are now moving into mass produced weapons the problems
of fusing and weapons assembly need to be made clear. When the
allies inspected the unexploded bombs dropped on German oil
installations they found around 15% had not exploded, many due to
the tails falling off, but also fuses. A 2.5% failure rate would be 1
unexploded nuclear weapon per 40 weapon strike.

Just remember folks throw away all the perfects above and just
chant how bad nuclear weapons are, even though someone who
hides behind an assumed name needs to cook the books to prove it.

Furthermore the aircrew delivering the nuclear attacks have
superb intelligence and well above average accuracy, no weather
problems, interceptions, mechanical failures and so on.

The bomb tonnage delivered by the 20th Air Force looks like this,
month, tonnage

Jun-44 547
Jul-44 209
Aug-44 252
Sep-44 521
Oct-44 1,669
Nov-44 2,205
Dec-44 3,661
Jan-45 3,410
Feb-45 4,020
Mar-45 15,283
Apr-45 17,492
May-45 24,285
Jun-45 32,542
Jul-45 43,091
Aug-45 21,873

Now add the arrival of the previously European based bomber units
to the 1946 attacks if we are going to talk 1946, including RAF units.
After all there was still 75% of Tokyo to go.

I saw nothing in any three month period that would equal 1,000kt worth
of explosive.

Yet again we have someone giving their preferred outcome a
helping hand and trying to pretend the "competitor" will not also
improve.

Instead we have a 1 megaton atomic attack, 40 times the biggest
attack in WWII, with more precision than any WWII attack short of
those low level types, skip bombing ships or sending bombs through
the walls of Gestapo HQs.

It looks as though the peak month in the war in Europe saw around
150,000 tons of bombs dropped. The above figures for the 20th air
force were without any transferred units. How many Japanese cities
would be left by the time the nuclear weapons for the 1,000 kt strike
would be ready?

I expect that no conventional weapons attack, from any era you choose,
could achieve that level of casualties.

This is hardly surprising, since the nuclear attacks are simply
allowed to be so good and so much bigger than the attacks
they are being compared to. The result was in before the
experiment was run.

Nuclear weapons are allowed to be so much bigger because they ARE so
much bigger.

Ah yes, just ignore the way the definitions have been altered to make
them look even worse.

Had the war continued into 1946, our bomb output would have been
332.42 kilotons per month (although no single bomb would be over
50kt).

The above wonder attack at 1,000 kt would therefore take 3 months
supply of weapons once production reached this level, if indeed it
could do so in 1946.

I like the two digits precision when calculating yields given the 10%
variation in estimates of the yields of the weapons used.

Since nuclear weapons have to potential to provide much more explosive
power than can be achieved by conventional weapons, and thus kill far
more people than can be achieved by conventional weapons, I think it
is fair to note this when comparing nukes to conventional weapons.

Try again, fair is comparing lethality versus the effort expended,
tonnage of explosives used for example, not by changing the
definitions.

It is fair to note that by providing much more tonnage of explosive
than could ever be provided by conventional weapons, nuclear weapons
can kill far more people.

Especially if those weapons can be delivered with far better
accuracy than achieved historically and the methods for computing
lethality can be rigged in favour of the weapons.

Now stop comparing the lethality of conventional and nuclear attacks
from WWII which were nothing like the new "fair" standard. How
about we change the HE bombs into biowar weapons, then call
that "fair".

I acknowledge that bioweapons are equal to nukes in killing people.
They are considered WMDs for very good reason.

I suggest rather than changing the subject you start to analyse why
you need to bias the results in favour of nuclear weapons.

I have no need to bias anything. Nuclear weapons are far more deadly
than conventional weapons on their own, with no need of bias.

This is becoming funny, after setting up a hyper precision attack,
after altering the definitions to make the weapons look more lethal
the claim is no bias. If the weapons are that much more deadly there
is no need to rig the results.

The RAF used 2.7kt to kill 40,000 people at Hamburg, call it 3kt, now
multiply by 333 to give the RAF a 1,000 kt strike. Other attacks could
drop 3kt bombs and kill only a few people. Rather than trying to
understand this we have the attempts to use 2 (nuclear) strikes and
extrapolate them using the sort of precision and weather the modern
USAF would be envious of and multiplying the explosive yields by a
factor of 40 or more.

After all the Nagasaki bomb was around 10 times the explosive yield
of the Hamburg raid and killed fewer people. Yet we have a strike at
40 times the Nagasaki yield going in and casualties going up about
linearly, but then it is assumed to be a perfect strike.

It is also possible to achieve, with conventional weapons, the sorts of
lethalities that were seen in the nuclear attacks.

How much conventional explosive do you think it would take to kill 50%
of the people in a 2km radius?

I presume you have forgotten Pforzheim? I presume you have forgotten
40,000 deaths at Hamburg with less than 3,000 tons of bombs?

Oh sorry, I forgot, nuclear weapons are bigger bangs, so we now go
to those killed in the blast radius of an individual bomb, but wait I can
drop thousands of conventional bombs, each lethal to humans within
so many feet, so I can make up my 2km by 2km by pi area that way,
just adding the 100 PSI blast areas of individual bombs together,
all against an unwarned population out in the open (fragmentation
bombs come to mind), or my precision guided AP bombs on those
well known and marked air raid shelters, in perfect weather, with no
interceptions, smoke problems etc. etc.

The rest of the post is simply deleted text,

It was also quite
possible to have minimal loss of life in a major conventional attack.
These are the results of thousands of WWII bombing raids. Trying
to selectively choose results and definitions to make the 2 nuclear
attacks look more lethal is foolish, after all in absolute terms
Nagasaki was around 1/2 the casualties, and in explosive terms
around 2/7 the casualties. Those figures alone should give pause
to the creation of wonder nuclear strikes.

The limit on conventional delivery of explosives is aircraft over
target, the Lancaster delivered around 10,000 pounds of
bombs, put a modern bomber on the job and the number goes
up by a factor of 4 or so. Or simply switch to a combination
of conventional bombing and missile strikes to increase the
explosive delivery rate.

Just as the WWII limitations on nuclear strikes have gone
away, keep the bomb small enough for the aircraft to survive,
the limitations on delivering conventional bombs have been
significantly reduced.

Hamburg was so lethal because of the firestorm killing people
in otherwise safe shelters. Normally the best thing to do in an
air raid is get into a shelter. Large numbers of people running
away on the surface are going to be killed by blast, stampedes,
vehicle collisions and so on.

The IJN strike on Pearl Harbor used around 0.1 to 0.15
kt of bombs, killed 2,400 people. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima
was around 100 times more powerful, it should have killed 240,000
people at this level of lethality. Take away the people killed on the
Arizona and you still end up with the Hiroshima bomb needing to
kill around 120,000 for equivalent lethality.

Try to understand the results of air raids in WWII varied dramatically,
using 2 attacks to generalise the effects is an exercise in selective
quotation, not facts.

I would have thought the sudden attack ability comes down to the
delivery system, aircraft, ICBM, shipping container, truck, and the
warning system in place to detect the approaching delivery system.
There are clear examples from WWII of populations ignoring
warnings until it was too late because the bombers had previously
always attacked somewhere else.

Again this assumes people are unprotected and ignores the fact
fleeing during an attack is likely to raise the number of dead. The
protection from blast gives good protection from radiation.

A machine gun can kill thousands of people per hour if they have
no protection.

Now we have "core area" to go with "area affected". Understand
there are plenty of raids in WWII that killed more people than the
atomic strikes per ton of explosive dropped. Even in terms of
absolute numbers killed Hiroshima comes in at 1 or 2 with Tokyo,
Nagasaki at 4 behind Hamburg at 3, Dresden at 5.

It has everything to do with it if you want to compare conventional
and nuclear attack lethalities, otherwise why not simply compare
the lethality of say 2 Zeppelins in WWI and 100 Lancasters in WWII.
No guess as to which one kills more people.

Sigh, to minimise casualties move people before or after the raid,
not during it, keep shelters away from flammable areas, keep the
people in the shelters during the raid. Movement during a raid is
obscured by smoke and dust and exposes people to shrapnel,
blast, stampedes and rapidly changing conditions, the "bridge" to
safety being hit for example, the confusion as landmarks are
destroyed or obscured.

In WWII the lethality of conventional attacks varied widely, starting
large fires was the usual way of killing large numbers of people,
incendiary bombs were the best way to start fires. The WWII
nuclear attacks were at least 3 times more powerful in explosive
terms than the biggest conventional raid, but the biggest conventional
raid was not the most lethal, in either absolute terms or deaths per ton
of bombs used.

So far instead of supplying facts you are supplying opinions and
showing a great lack of knowledge about the results of conventional
air raids. Then you bias the definitions to make the nuclear attacks
look more dangerous.

Geoffrey Sinclair
Remove the nb for email.