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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush
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To: Wharf Rat who wrote (26482)4/27/2004 5:30:42 AM
From: Raymond Duray  Read Replies (2) of 93284
 
Re: What about Tokyo? Interesting question. It might have let us get by with one bomb, which might have killed just as many people.

Curtis LeMay had firebombed Tokyo earlier in the summer of 1945 and the city had already suffered somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 murders/casualties in one night of total conflagration. So, Tokyo wasn't a particularly good test site for the effects of an atomic device. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had specifically been spared the devastation of earlier incendiary raids on Japan for the purpose of investigating the full effect of "the gadget" on intact civilizations. Needless to say, the atomic bombs were a complete success, i.e. civilization was complete unintact after contact.

But, by then, Edward Teller was already laying the theoretical foundations for the even completer successes to come with thermonuclear devices.

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Interesting factoid: Every second, the Sun produces as much energy as 10,000 average sized nuclear bombs.

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Here are two highly recommended books on the Gadget and the creation of the thermonuclear age:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes
amazon.com

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
by Richard Rhodes
amazon.com*

I've read them both and found them highly illuminating for the general reader.
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