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Comment by noelchurchill | Hacker News Reader

It looks bad, but not as bad as I always imagined.

These are relatively tiny nukes coming in one at a time - the sort of thing we might see if attacked by North Korea or Iran in 10 years. The fusion weapons used by the USSR were fifty to five thousand times as powerful.

Also, the USSR wouldn't have used them one at a time.

do you think that the 0.5Kt test in North Korea was a success of a small nuke, not a failure of a bigger one :)

I do - North Korea isn't going to nuke anybody, ever. They need insurance that the US won't invade them.

I am not so sure they where tiny - even at the scale of the Chineese bomb, the windows where I live wouldn't even be shattered; yet I used to commute longer than that (in fact past what would be ground zero) by bike.

It seems to be about right--the predicted damage to Hiroshima from Little Boy matches up pretty well with observed damage (see http://www.atomicarchive.com/Maps/HiroshimaMap.shtml)

I think it's just a very different geographic scale of the cities involved. We learn that Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb; we don't often hear that Hiroshima is tiny in comparison to e.g. LA (which would require something on the scale of Tsar Bomba, or multiple strikes, to destroy it to a similar degree).

Also, as the bombing of Tokyo showed, one didn't need an atomic bomb to flatten a Japanese city of the time. Japanese housing was very flimsy (probably because of the earthquake risk; you either build something tat withstands a quake, or something that will not hurt you when it falls down on you). Bamboo and rice paper provide very limited coverage from any blast, burn very well, and leave almost nothing.

Also, Hiroshima was built mostly out of wood and paper -- supposedly, the fires killed a huge number of people who weren't killed directly by the bomb.

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