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Comment by indrora | Hacker News Reader

It's a real blast, though.

(In all seriousness, I hope we never, ever in this lifetime cause humans to suffer like we did on that day)

I mean, I'm probably just being contrarian and I too would appreciate it if people stopped suffering, but like, people are suffering worse than that right now as we type this.

Sure.

70,000 dying in a flash certainly puts an end to their suffering.

They did not get vaporized in the fireball. We have survivors at the hypocenter. Intense burns and radiation poisoning killed most plus conventional blast damage mechanisms. Half the acute deaths happened after the first day.

Sure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity.

Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!"

I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful without comparing them, but lots of awful things happen without involving nukes.

>"were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!"

that's debatable. like, worst single instance atrocity? possibly is

I mean, even only considering bombing raids, more people were killed during the various fire bombing campaigns against japanese cities and so on, granted those took 1000 planes instead of 1, but somehow I doubt the people burning to death considered that a meaningful distinction.

They were certainly a novel way of causing a reasonable amount of death and destruction.

Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.

> Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.

The application sure, but the novelty of it being nuclear rather than conventional kept parties interested in it for quite a while!

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