[He lets out a soft sigh, physically steeling himself.]
Right. You should know what an atom is... well. When you split one, it releases energy. Sometimes it's a little, and sometimes it's a lot - it depends on the element. If you fill a bomb with radioactive material and then set it to explode and split those atoms, you can release a huge amount of energy.
Do that over a city... and you can kill a huge amount of people. Even now they still don't know how many died directly from the bomb, because there was widespread structural damage. And right near the blast zone, some people were simply... vaporized. The first bomb in Hiroshima killed about twenty thousand soldiers... and between seventy and a hundred twenty six thousand civilians, including the injuries and sickness after the first few weeks. In Nagasaki there were between thirty nine and eighty thousand killed.
... But the long term damage was much worse. Cancer rates spiked - especially in children - in addition to birth defects. Radiation sickness was widespread - and deaths from those are absolutely agonizing. Not to mention that a good portion of the cities were destroyed. All in all it was a... an awful thing.
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ninetydegrees
cw: ... nagasaki and hiroshima, cancer, awful things, etc.
[He lets out a soft sigh, physically steeling himself.]
Right. You should know what an atom is... well. When you split one, it releases energy. Sometimes it's a little, and sometimes it's a lot - it depends on the element. If you fill a bomb with radioactive material and then set it to explode and split those atoms, you can release a huge amount of energy.
Do that over a city... and you can kill a huge amount of people. Even now they still don't know how many died directly from the bomb, because there was widespread structural damage. And right near the blast zone, some people were simply... vaporized. The first bomb in Hiroshima killed about twenty thousand soldiers... and between seventy and a hundred twenty six thousand civilians, including the injuries and sickness after the first few weeks. In Nagasaki there were between thirty nine and eighty thousand killed.
... But the long term damage was much worse. Cancer rates spiked - especially in children - in addition to birth defects. Radiation sickness was widespread - and deaths from those are absolutely agonizing. Not to mention that a good portion of the cities were destroyed. All in all it was a... an awful thing.