And what about the neutron radiation during the decay that charged the environment, land, objects near the epicentre?
What about the peoples who worked on area through weeks AFTER the blow and died soon from Ray-ilness? Because they’ve got the dose of radiation.
Besides, as we have established it with you before, although the light radioactive dust spreads over hundreads of killometres around by winds, the most dangers heavy radiactive particles fall down enough closely the epicentre right on the territory of city, right?
Yes , especially if keep in mind that in the march '45 they losed half of ther war plants, all of avialable oil fiends and raw resources:)
Seriously , if theyre were no land operation , you NEVER make them helplessness.
And on the second front, Japan suffered as much devastation in the last 6 months of the war, as Germany did in the last three years, and was forced to surrender without need for invasion.
But they simply SAW what was happaned with GErmany( post-war separation) that resisted till the most end. SO they had more then enough reasosn to surrender bit sooner the their full collapse.
Somebody wrote that the Vengeance Weapon V2 project was one of the worst cost-benefit ratio of all the operational weapon systems fielded in WW2. For the amount of man-hours, precious high-grade raw material and energy poured into these projects, the results were poor, with only a one ton warhead, and of course none of them were reusable, it was estimated that 10-12,000 fighters could have been built, or large numbers of SAMS.
Well honestly speaking the V-2 was a revolutional wearpon in concept.Much more effective than the any strategic bomber in prospect.
The simple calculation make you sure of it.But this is whole other thread.
Actually Germans had a lot of lack with it since most beginning, but they constanly improved the V-2 and finally i the 1945 they 've reached the great resault- above the 70% of V-2 succesfully droped on targets.
They actually could build the Vengeance Weapon, but simply had not enough time for it…
We kicked them off before:)
P.S. If you wish to discuss the V-2 just use the related thread.
The Japanese would of never have surrendered and it’s only a shame we couldn’t drop the A-bomb on Japan earlier, like around 1941, so American lives would of been saved. I am sure this would have helped end the war earlier.
Slightly confused about this one - are you asking about the neutron released by the bomb turning normal materials into radioactive ones? Yes, this will happen, but the quantities will be pretty small (compared to the inside of a nuclear reactor for 30 years, the amount of neutrons reaching ground was tiny) and spread over a wide area. Afterwards, this will lead to an increase in the background radiation level - but the chances are the increase would be so small as to be impossible to detect with any known instrumentation. As such, it is unlikely to cause any additional casualties.
Were there any? I’ve never been able to find any references to anyone suffering from radiation sickness in Japan who wasn’t directly exposed to the dropping of either nuclear bomb. If you know anything different I’d love to see your source.
Correct. However, because this was an airburst bomb (i.e. one where the fireball never touched the ground) the smallest particles will still be a very fine dust and so will fall down far enough away that dilution will deal with most of the problem. In any case, the worst of the fallout will decay away within a few hours of the bomb going off, meaning that the chances are anyone exposed to it will have been exposed to far worse from the bomb already.
Note that I’m not saying that fallout is safe (had the cold war ever turned hot it would probably have killed more than any other cause, depending on what year it happened), but rather that it wasn’t a significant killer at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Um, the survey has been shown to be historically incorrect. For instance: German troops never ran out of ammunition - Germany simply bought much of it from Switzerland and Sweden. That is what they couldn’t produce in their dispersed factory system. Certainly the air war hindered German production on some level, but German industry never collapsed until the end, until the Rhineland was overrun. And indeed I never said that there should have been a bomber offensive, I just think the air generals were indeed over-prone to optimistic pronouncements, and rarely paid any attention to the evidence that contradicted their beliefs.
And I couldn’t agree with Feuchter more in that regard; the bomber generals should have put more effort earlier into attacking the petrol station of the Reich war-machine, instead of spattering cities…
The difference between Nazi death camps and bombing is that death camps were not part of war or warlike operations but were of a political, racial, or other exploitative and exterminatory nature while bombing was part of war.
There was no necessity for death camps as part of war or warlike operations while there was a well founded argument that bombing, conventional and nuclear, of cities and other targets which involved civilians was a legitimate and necessary part of war and was a military necessity.
Yes, how many times are you going to say the same thing over and over?
Just a quick note, may have been addressed. German deaths in US/British POW camps were 1%. American and Britsh deaths in German POW camps 2%.
What the Germans and Russians did to each other was as bad as it gets. If an American POW tried to give food to a Russian POW the Russian POW was shot. Of the 200,000 German POW’s from stalingrad, 5,000 came home.
Off topic I know.
As far as dropping the bomb, justified. And quotes from liberal journalists from more recent times do not carry any wieght, and rarely contain any research. Except when they reference each other.
What makes the atomic bomb a war crime compared with other methods of killing people in WWII?
Inherent inselectivity of the aforementioned weapon, my dear Mr. Rising Sun. Accordingly to the International Law nuclear weapons are directly illegal because the terminal effects of the nuclear weapons neither are limited to the military personal only, nor devoided of terminal effects toward members of the non-combatant, civilian population.
The terminal effects of the nuclear weapon are also not contained in strictly certain time and distinctive place, due to inevitable nuclear contamination of the complete Earth’s surface, which always will occur, thus directly violating the principle of strict and stringent immunity of non-beligerent nations in a given time and place.
The principle of neutrality, in its classic sense, was aimed at preventing the incursion of belligerent forces into neutral territory, or attacks on the persons or ships of neutrals. For example: “the territory of neutral powers is inviolable” (Article 1 of the Hague Convention (V) Respecting the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in Case of War on Land, concluded on 18 October 1907);
“Belligerents are bound to respect the sovereign rights of neutral powers . . .” (Article 1 to the Hague Convention (XIII) Respecting the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers in Naval War, concluded on 18 October 1907);
“Neutral states have equal interest in having their rights respected by belligerents . . .” (Preamble to Convention on Maritime Neutrality, concluded on 20 February 1928). It is clear that the principle of neutrality applies with equal force to transborder incursions of armed forces and to the transborder damage caused to a neutral state by the use of a weapon in a belligerent state.
Because of the above described indiscriminative effects of the nuclear Weapons - the weapon will have absolutely the same terminal effect on soldiers as upon civilians, or on states in war and on neutral states, or on states which are no longer at war with each other- the use of these weapons is considered to be a war crime, as well as a crime against humanity in accordance with the Nuremberg Principles.
It was stated in a post awhile back(#621 I believe) that a hydrogen bomb would destroy the world. FYI (The first thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb), code-named Mike, was detonated at Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands, Nov. 1, 1952. ) It certainly didn’t help the Island people but the world is still here. This has been a very interesting thread to read.
Well, I think that inappropriate utilization of the expression “destroy” caused that previously mentioned misunderstanding, my dear Mr. Nstooolman.
Perhaps this tiny explanation will be sufficient to unriddle this unnecessarily convoluted theme.
As we all do know, the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 straightforwardly prohibited nuclear weapons tests, “or any other nuclear explosion” in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water, as well as all underground nuclear explosions if they cause "radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits of the State under whose jurisdiction or control" the explosions were conducted.
In accepting previously mentioned limitations on testing, the nuclear powers practically confessed that nuclear detonations have injected highly radioactive, harmful particles into the upper atmosphere, which through vertical mixing accomplished radioactive follaut over a relatively long time and wide geopgraphical areas, and ultimately polluted every part of the Earth.
Providentially, they accepted as a common goal “an end to the contamination of man’s environment by radioactive substances.” 
Original text of the Treaty is available here:
I understand all that, but my question was directed to the effects rather than the legality of atomic weapons in WWII.
Firebombing in Germany and Japan was horrendous in its effects and harmed many more people. It just did it with more bombs and more planes. Given a choice between being a victim or a severly injured survivor of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo and Hiroshima, there’s nothing to make one more appealing than the other to me.
I don’t think it matters much whether you get third or fourth degree burns from phosporous, napalm, or a nuke. Or whether you get burned by burning fuel oil as a civilian passenger surviving a naval or air strike on a ship, or you are injured by having your guts forced out of your orifices by secondary explosions in the water, or being savaged by sharks after being shipwrecked, or tortured for hours or days by having your skin flayed as a prisoner, or being bayoneted repeatedly, or having your foetus sliced out of your womb and killed before your eyes. Or countless other lousy ways of dying or being injured and, if you survive, carrying the consequences physically and mentally for however long you may survive.
I think focusing on certain weapons, such as nukes and land mines (which affect non-belligerents long after a war is over with just as much force as during the war, unlike the aftermath of WWII atomic weapons) currently and dum dums and other things previously, completely misses the point. War is what should be avoided.
By restricting the opportunities to make war as utterly terrible as technically possible, we allow ourselves to maintain a supposedly humane but really inhumane brutality which is acceptable to us in what should be a completely unacceptable activity as supposedly civilised and humane people.
This allows some people to think that they will achieve something worthwhile by banning nukes and land mines etc, as some people think they achieved something worthwhile by banning bare knuckle boxing of unlimited duration. I don’t see that it makes much difference to modern boxers who still get their brains mashed with gloves in three minute rounds.
I do understand your point, my dear Mr. Rising Sun. So tell me, please, what types of permanent oncogenic and terratogenic effects upon human beings in neutral nations are produced by the active use of burnig oil, white phosphorus or napalm?
Full scientific description of the aforementioned processes will be highly appreciated.
I don’t know.
What injuries were suffered in neutral nations from the WWII atomic bombs?
What types of pain, disfigurement, loss of expectation of life, and loss of enjoyment of life are unique to the dead and surivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that didn’t apply to victims of all other weapons of war?
I don’t know.
Thank you, my dear Mr. Rising Sun. Absolutely fair, magnificently old-fashioned and completely accepted answer. 
What injuries were suffered in neutral nations from the WWII atomic bombs?
Read this study very carefully. Practically all answers are contained in this pretty unknown work. And if you do need any further scientific evaluations, just say a word -your old Librarian will be on your service.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/
What types of pain…
Certain quite horrible variants of pain, caused by long-term activity of the Strontium 90 are described here. And I am assuring you that they were absolutely unique.
http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/full/12/20/6231s
Till our next meeting, as always – all the best. 
We all know that there are some things which hurt more than others, but I don’t know that the source or cause of pain or the agents which cause it make all that much difference if it is intense pain. Misery and agony are still misery and agony, whatever form they take.
Would you rather have mesothelioma, melanoma, or carcinoma?
In which organ?
It’s not much of a choice, but some might be less bad than others. Still, you won’t find anyone queuing up to get any of them, because they’re all miserable and agonising.
I doubt that, for example, Sgt Erwin http://www.medalofhonor.com/HenryErwin.htm would have felt much happier during his two and a half years of immediate medical misery from a phosphorous burn knowing that at least he hadn’t been injured by Strontium 90, which could have made him feel really bad. Or that the Japanese who could have been injured by that bomb would have felt deleriously happy if they had been injured by it rather than by Strontium 90.
My position is simply that there are all kinds of pain and misery inflicted by war and that nuclear aspects are just one of them.
Nuclear injuries are just one of many different ways to an awful result, and a result which we should try to avoid by avoiding war rather than being focused on avoiding a few of the weapons of war which don’t do much more harm than any other weapons at the individual level, which is the only level that matters if you’re the poor bastard who cops it.
I don’t know that the source or cause of pain or the agents which cause it make all that much difference if it is intense pain.
Oh, there are significant differences, my dear Mr. Rising Sun. Although no convincing demonstration has yet been given that the pain threshold is a physical constant from man to man, or from one time to another in a given man, it is generally accepted that certain variants of cancer are producing pain marked with 9 (excruciating, unbearable) on the officialy acknowledged McGill Comparative Pain Scale, thus requiring constant use of opioids for the treatment of pain. Please, just follow this link:
http://bja.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/94/1/95.pdf
Would you rather have mesothelioma, melanoma, or carcinoma?
With a smile all two of them, my dear Mr. Rising Sun (third one, previously mentioned by you – cancer - is only a generic denomination!), but not this one that is usually caused by residual activity of the Cesium 137. (Attention: highly distressing photography!)
Adenocarcinoma pylori
My position is simply that there are all kinds of pain and misery inflicted by war and that nuclear aspects are just one of them.
And my position is that nuclear weapons are representing the only variant of weaponry that is capable to generate completely indiscriminative lethal effects upon non-combatants and civilians, as well as the unnecessary suffering to the previously mentioned categories of population in completely neutral and non-beligerant states – in a nutshell, a weapon capable to produce a harm much more greater than that unavoidable to achieve otherwise completely legitimate military objectives.
If an envisaged use of weapons would not meet the requirements of international law, a threat to engage these weapons in such use would also be contrary to the international law and therefore liable to be punished as a crime against humanity.
I know that, which is why I invited you to nominate, from a wider selection, which one you would prefer of cancers which are ‘only a generic denomination’ and, presumably, less unpleasant that other cancers. Such that carcinoma of the larynx or oesphagus has to be much more pleasant than carcinoma in various parts of the digestive system. It’s a choice between spewing up the food you put in or blowing it out the other end, with lots of pain in between in both cases as you assist your decline by starving. Which cancer do you prefer?
You know too much.
And my position is that nuclear weapons are representing the only variant of weaponry that is capable to generate completely indiscriminative lethal effects upon non-combatants and civilians
How is that different to being in Dresden or Hamburg or somewhere where George Bush or Israel or Hamas or whomever has decided to unleash lethal weapons upon non-combatants and civilians?
My underlined bold.
But doesn’t that drag us back to the eternal questions about Allied ‘strategic’ bombing in Europe and elsewhere?
Where there is no agreement about the critical terms ‘unavoidable’ (modern term = ‘collateral damage’, where the corpses and wounded look just like the ones in the ‘surgical strike’, unless we’re supposed to detect an expression of post-mortem relief in their dead faces that they were in the ‘unavoidable’ casualty list and only ‘collaterally’ damaged).
Which bombings in Europe or Japan were against completely legitimate military objectives?
If the European targets and the Tokyo fire bombings were acceptable, what’s wrong with Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
As far as I can work out, only the weapon used.
If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been obliterated by conventional bombing on the same days as the atom bombs were dropped, would anyone now be bemoaning the evils of conventional aerial bombing, which since WWII has been enthusiastically employed in most parts of the globe except upon the soil of the major participants in WWII, they being rather busy using or supplying it for use elsewhere?
There is and has been no shortage of anti-nuclear weapon movements, but no ‘Ban the 100 / 250 / 500 / 1,000 pound’ conventional bomb movement. If they’d been under the over-run on a B52 strike with conventional bombs they might have a different view.
Why am I a legitimate target and not the victim of a war crime if a conventional bomb plunges through the roof of my house and detonates in my kitchen while I’m having my breakfast, but somehow I’m the victim of a war crime if a nuke air bursts above my house and kills me just as dead as the conventional bomb, with every other circumstance being exactly the same?
But, as I indicated in an earlier post, isn’t international law or, more accurately, the international law of war, farcical?
Where is the sense in, for example, outlawing all dum dums but not a .50 sniper rifle which in the current conflict cut a man in half in Iraq at 1,400 metres? Would you rather be hit in the guts with the latter or the former, which in standard military calibres with standard military competence might be accurate to a few hundred metres at best, assuming you have a desire to survive? Why is it that Japanese reversing small arms projectiles in WWII to increase destructive power did not offend the laws of war when the intention and result was similar to dum dums?
The point I am pursuing is that law and science and other human attempts to categorise actions and weapons and so on tend to fall into the usual trap of disciplines obsessed with classification that they put form ahead of substance.
A sensible humanistic approach would start from the proposition that war is bad because people get hurt, and that any weapon used in that deplorable exercise is as bad as any other.
Yes, nuclear holocaust is fun when it happens to others.
Don’t think it was so much a problem of getting their hands on ammo, the critical problem was getting it from point A to point B, because of the destruction of the transport system, as Feuchter says…
Germany possessed one of the most complex and well maintained railway systems in the world. By the end of 1944, marshaling capacity had fallen to forty percent of normal and barely twenty percent by the end of January 1945. This severely hampered the receipt of raw materials and delivery of the finished products.
The water transport system, which was mainly used for the transport of coal and coke, was initially very efficient. In the first few months of 1944, 66 thousand tons of coal and coke were moved by water daily. By October 1944, the daily average had fallen to 23 thousand tons. This crippled the industrial and railway sectors. They were effectively useless without coal to heat their boilers.
But apart from that, on the most vital product of all for the Wehrmacht, oil, I think the numbers speak for them selves.
In May 1944 the Germans produced 156,000 tons of aviation gasoline and the allied forces dropped 51,000 tons of bombs on German and Romanian oil installations.
In August the amount of gasoline produced had dropped to 17,000 tons.
By January 1945 aviation gasoline production had fallen to 11,000 tons. By March it ceased altogether.
The production of gasoline for road vehicles had dropped from 134,000 tons in March 1944 to 39,000 tons in March 1945.
The production of diesel oil had fallen from 100,000 tons in March 1944 to 39,000 tons in March 1945.
Production from the synthetic plants declined steadily and by July 1944 every major plant had been hit. These plants were producing an average of 316,000 tons per month when the attacks began. Their production fell to 107,000 tons in June and 17,000 tons in September.
Oil from ploesti was down 80% by the time the Red army over ran it, after more than 5,400 heavy bomber sorties, along with almost 4,000 fighter sorties were flown against it.
By December, according to Speer, the fuel shortage had reached catastrophic proportions.
When the Germans launched their counter-offensive on December 16, 1944, their reserves of fuel were insufficient to support the operation. They counted on capturing Allied stocks.
Failing in this, many panzer units were lost when they ran out of gasoline.
In February and March of 1945 the Germans massed 1,200 tanks on the Baranov bridgehead at the Vistula to check the Russians. They were immobilized for lack of gasoline and overrun.
German aircraft, tanks and vehicles were almost running on empty.
Although the majority of the bomber command offensive was area bombing, it’s interesting to note the considerable tonnage on specific targets…
Oil installations…93,902 tons [compared to the Luftwaffe’s 60,000 tons on the whole of Britain] U.S. 130,915 tons=total 224,881 tons.
Transport…107,420 tons U.S. 307,115 tons=total 414,535 tons.
Sub yards…16,721 tons U.S. 17,108 tons=total 33,839 tons.
Chemicals…14,615 tons U.S. 18,212 tons=total 32,827 tons etc.
Because this occurred sufficiently late in the war in that Germany was due to be defeated, some times the decisive nature of the bombing is over looked.