
The Fallout – The medical aftermath of Hiroshima - vezycash
http://hiroshima.australiandoctor.com.au/#c1
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crazytony
If you ever get the chance, visit the memorial and museum in Hiroshima.

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pjg
I agree. I had read and occasionally seen a documentary on the A-bomb dropped
on Hiroshima. I lived in Tokyo for a while and visited Hiroshima and the
A-bomb museum. They had a "scaled" model of the entire city and the bomb
hanging on the model with the proportional distance at the height it exploded
(represented with red ball - size of billiards ball ) That picture/model is
ingrained in my memory - it gave me an instant visual of the scale of horror.
Pictures/movies don't come close to describing it. If you can go to the A-bomb
museum in Hiroshima - do it.

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mstade
I have not visited Hiroshima, or Japan at all for that matter, but I just
recently came back from visiting the beaches of Normandy, the American
cemetery, Arromanches, and other war memorials around there.

While obviously not the same thing, I recognize what you say about the scale
of horror – it really is unfathomable from pictures, movies, and other
representations. You simply have to visit to get a feel for just how big some
of these key events of the war actually were, and it's absolutely mind
boggling and horrific.

What really got me about visiting Normandy though was how real it all suddenly
became. I'd like to think I'm a fairly well educated person when it comes to
modern history, and particularly in terms of WW2. But since I grew up in a
country that wasn't really pulled into it, everything just seemed so distant
(even though it physically wasn't, I'm from Sweden) and in many ways unreal.
That all changed with Normandy, and it was a very strange and mixed set of
quite strong emotions involved. I can only imagine what it's like to visit
Hiroshima, and hope I some day get the chance to do so.

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ptaipale
I could recommend another, shorter trip, if you can spare a few days: get a
Russian visa and drive to Haparanda - Kuhmo - Kostamuksha - Belomorsk.
Nowadays, it's a one-day drive.

Look at Stalin's Canal there, and imagine that when it was built, the wasted
humans were many enough to lay along the canal, buried there head to toe, to
form a chain as long as the man-built parts of the canal itself.

The canal was never economically or militarily useful, it was just a project
used to get rid of people.

Not quite as many people killed as in Hiroshima, but they were each one
separately and individually starved, beaten or shot to death instead of being
killed remotely by one big industrial bomb. The killing machinery was human
and it worked slow and it worked eye to eye.

From Belomorsk you can take a boat trip to Solovetsk, which was the original
development lab for how to starve people in concentration camps. Both Soviets
and Nazis studied and developed their methods based on the findings there.

Notice also that you won't see memorials for those who were killed. The
miserable swamps are their monument.

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Symmetry
As nuclear weapons get larger the radius at which the fire and concussion is
deadly grows faster than the radius at which their radiation is deadly. For
relatively small bombs a lot of the deaths from the initial explosion are
going to be from radiation and the two bombs dropped on Japan were small
compared to the ones standing by in the cold war.

Of course, unlike the bombs dropped on Japan modern thermonuclear weapons burn
large amount of U328 with the fast neutrons created from fusion, resulting in
large amounts of fallout. They may not cause many radiation deaths from their
explosion but the fallout they create will endanger people downwind for a long
time after the initial explosion.

I don't have words to convey how much I hope we never see those weapons used
in anger.

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hga
_Of course, unlike the bombs dropped on Japan modern thermonuclear weapons
burn large amount of U328 with the fast neutrons created from fusion,
resulting in large amounts of fallout. They may not cause many radiation
deaths from their explosion but the fallout they create will endanger people
downwind for a long time after the initial explosion._

That depends, some use U-238 for this purpose to about double the yield, some
don't, like the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba in its one test:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)

 _I don 't have words to convey how much I hope we never see those weapons
used in anger._

Nothing that I know about human nature suggests that they'll again never be
used in anger, it's only a question of when. Hopefully not any time soon.

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Symmetry
The replaced the U-238 in the Tsar Bomba test with lead when they tested it at
the cost of halving its power, you're right. But sadly I've never heard of
that being done with a deployed thermonuclear weapon.

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mynameishere
When reading on the web, I usually hit ctrl-A (highlight all) to change the
contrast of a website's text. Not usually a problem.

On this website, on Chrome, doing this causes it to immediately unhighlight
everything, and then eternally highlight-unhighlight-highlight-unhighlight at
random intervals. I've never seen quite such bizarre behavior. Works on FF
though.

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maho
I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted. I can reproduce this behaviour in
Chrome. I don't have the best eyes and occasionally use the same trick to
increase legibility.

The myriad subtle ways in which designers of "rich websites" break
accessibility can be quite frustrating. And most of it is completely
unnecessary - the article would still be an amzing read if it were a classic
article with standard scroll behavior.

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tptacek
Comments about website formatting are a pestilence, and off-topic for HN.
Because the topic of web design is both subjective and very accessible, even
to people who have barely skimmed the article, they tend to spawn large,
distracting subthreads --- sometimes those subthreads even end up at the tops
of threads.

Petitioning site owners to change their design via HN threads almost never
works, but (ironically) is virtually guaranteed to degrade the HN thread
itself. So, just don't.

