There doesn’t seem to really be a good forum for this, but here’s an article talking about the photos, along with samples of some of them.
This part kind of says it all:
Seeing those pics is like playing Fallout 3. That is uncanny.
I don’t have time right now to read the full article but tomorrow I will.
Never ever be surprised when something historic is thrown away.
The surprise should be that so much gets saved, given how thoughtless people are about the past (and how willfully destructive institutions, corporations, and governments often are about it).
Tuckerfan, I always check out the threads you start, because you invariably link to something very interesting.
It’s an interesting article, and the photographs are chilling.
But the idea that the effects of a nuke are somehow unimaginable seems hugely short-sighted.
These images of another city destroyed in that same war don’t look all that much different.
The difference is not so much in the gross effects on the city or the people, but the time and effort required by the aggressor to create those effects. (Yes, this is ignoring the lingering radiation hazard - that’s why I am trying to focus just on gross effects.) I don’t see any objective difference between condemning a non-combatant child to death through conventional inferno, and doing the same with a nuclear fireball. In some respects the fireball might be more merciful, in its immediacy.
If one wishes to use such images to rail against war, and the atrocities that man can commit against man, I’m all for it.
To pretend, or even make the serious claim, that the atrocities of the nuclear age are without match or parallel prior to the Alamogordo bomb seems based on a great deal of hysteria and willful ignorance.
Matching the firestorm of Tokyo, or Dresden, by an airstrike would be well-nigh impossible with the US’ current arsenal, AIUI. That is not the same thing as saying it would be impossible to re-create such conventional infernos.
The focus on nuclear weapons as being a unique source for such images of devastation just doesn’t seem realistic to me.
The A bomb does it is seconds. When I was a kid they showed movies of Hiroshima . One that struck me was a concrete bridge that had the shadow of a person on it. The person was vaporised and all that remained was a faint shadow.
Our bombs now are much bigger and better at killing. We have spent billions on destruction.
Then of course we get the bonus of radiation poisoning.
Strangely, those photos make me feel that the destructive power of the A-bomb is vastly over-hyped.
The over-hype is a good thing, though, because otherwise I’m sure we’d have had WW3.
Little Boy and Fat Man were firecrackers compared to the toys of a generation later. Roughly, as they were to Grand Slam and similarly large HE devices, so Tsar Bomba was to them in its turn - and it was about the place by 1961. Scary.
Just doing a quick Google search, I ran across this image that’s apparently from Popular Mechanics, comparing the size of the mushroom clouds from several bombs. You may need your reading glasses: http://www.365.com.mk/images/stories/storii/andrej/maj07/tsar_bomba.jpg
A short clip of Tsar Bomba.
Looks like the clouds are just icons for the bomb yield, though - not literal representations.
The thing about the Tsar is it explodes, and then it explodes some more, and just carries on exploding for about half a minute, and those fantastic clouds keep transforming and changing shape until they finally settle down into some sort of a pattern. That is one Big Fucking Bomb. :eek:
The Tsar bomb is unbelievable. Amazing that that was almost 50 years ago.
As others have stated, nuclear weapons have gotten a lot more powerful in the past 60 years. The Hiroshima bomb was a fart compared to what we are capable of now.
The Tsar Bomba was around 3,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It was admittedly never weaponized, but had that thing been dropped on an American city, it would have completely vaporized everything within (I think) a 5-mile radius. Not knocked over, turned to rubble, or whatever. Vaporized. Turned to plasma in a split-second. If detonated on the ground, it would have left a 7500-foot-wide crater.
There wouldn’t be anything left to take pictures of, just an enormous empty hole of molten rock and dirt.
The power of nuclear weapons is definitely not “overhyped.”
Perhaps not, but the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are compared to the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo.
For what it’s worth, the guy who uploaded the video claims:
The Wikipedia article on Tsar Bomba doesn’t mention that blast radius for vaporization vs. incineration, but it does give a few interesting factoids about the power of the bomb:
5.4 yottawatts is a whole lottawatts. :eek:
Btw you do superscripts like this: 10{sup}24{/sup}, but with [square] brackets, not {braces}. Thus: 10[sup]24[/sup]
Btw2: 100Mt is “only” 0.1 billion tonnes of TNT, not 0.1 trillion.
I don’t think there’s much chance I’d have seen this had you not shared it, Tuckerfan. Thank you for that. Even if parallel accounts exist it’s still a sobering read. While I wasn’t going to go through every comment below the article, I did find the third, that by a Joseph Coates, to be worth reading.
I’m glad it was a curious person who wandered by the discarded suitcase that day.
Agreed, here. These photos shouldn’t be lost.
I suppose it falls to me to pedantically point out that, while the story of them being found in a discarded box in the street is striking and the finder’s reaction to them interesting, the pictures themselves were not hitherto unknown. Only this particular collection of prints was ever “lost”.
Indeed, the second picture - it’s the Hiroshima Gas Company building - has always been one of the most widely reproduced images of building damage in the city. Versions of five out of the ten pictures in the article even appear together (not brilliantly reproduced, it must be said) in Rain of Ruin (Brassy’s, 1995) by Goldstein, Dillon and Wenger.
All the original official photographic material generated in Japan by both the Manhattan Project’s Atomic Bomb Investigating Group and the Strategic Bombing Survey has been preserved by the U.S. National Archives. Not least because their documentation of the damage was important to the Cold War efforts to reliably predict what the effect of some particular dollop of megatonnage would be. But also because they were always recognised as historically important.
Of course, additional copies are worth taking care of, particularly if they prompt people to reflect on the images.