"Two A-Bombs Blast U.S. City" Topic

Remember that….? (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Must have missed it.

I do remember the "duck and cover" drills, which would have been utterly futile in a real attack.

Fail to differ with you but "duck and cover" could have saved your life. As you get further from the blast area the shock wave becomes the most immediate dangerous thing. To be able to not get fried by the blast, radiation and heat but get slashed by flying glass from a window that shatters miles from the blast would not be fun.

When I was in the military we calculated the various bands and what the survival probability was. There is a simulator online that lets you use a map and set off various nuclear weapons and see what those bands are.

There was a book by Dean Ing called "Pulling Through" which I found interesting.

Duck and cover would never have saved anyone at my school. We were mustered in the cafeteria. The cafeteria was very high ceilinged, and its west-facing wall – we were "Sunset View" – was glass. I remember that even in second or third grade, I thought this was a problem.

Rick

Yeah remember Duck & Cover … If nucs hit if not killed out right. Sooner or later you'd be dead. Unless you were out in the middle of no where in cave or bunker, etc. But with fallout, etc., even in a cave … your chances of survival would eventually be very low …

Legion 4--How then, did anybody near Hiroshima or Nagasaki live? All depends on proximity to ground zero, as gamershs says. You could take simple steps to improve your chances, such as ducking and covering. Of course, in a strategic nuclear exchange, all bets are off.

Mike

"Fail to differ with you but "duck and cover" could have saved your life".

Nope.

When I was doing these, back in the day, I was in the plausible CEP radius of numerous multi-megaton warheads, targeted for the local, major air and naval bases. IIRC, there was also an army base not too far away as well, so duck and cover would have done nothing against those.

I imagine the Russkies, back in the day, would have launched at least half a dozen of those at these targets, in order to ensure detonation and elimination of these priority targets.

Also, given the priority military targets, I suspect sub-launched ballistic missiles fired on a low trajectory would have been used to cut their flight time, so there would probably have been no warning of the inbound strike, anyway.

Legion 4--How then, did anybody near Hiroshima or Nagasaki live? All depends on proximity to ground zero, as gamershs says. You could take simple steps to improve your chances, such as ducking and covering. Of course, in a strategic nuclear exchange, all bets are off.

Yes, I know all that … I had the additional duty of an Army Atomic Demolitions Missions Officer[back pack nucs] and attended the NBC course. I knew how to calculate blast radii, yields, radiation exposure, etc., etc. Not anymore though …
And I was referring to MAD. You answered your own question to me …

Of course, in a strategic nuclear exchange, all bets are off.

Also then and now the Atomic/Hydrogen/Nuke WMDs were and are much more powerful then the two dropped on Japan in 1945.

But IIRC the people that survived those two bombs in many cases had radiation poising, etc., and continued to die for quite a long time afterwards. I'm not sure anymore of the numbers of those killed by those bombs immediately verses those that died afterwards from radiation, etc.,. I'm sure the ratio was high in any event …

Based on this article, as I suspected it looks like more died afterwards then immediately … link