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From: art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Hiroshima/Dresden
Message-ID: <1990Aug16.030221.14909@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 16 Aug 90 03:02:21 GMT
References: <1990Aug11.015024.19481@cbnews.att.com>
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From: art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)

In article <1990Aug11.015024.19481@cbnews.att.com> convex!cash@uunet.UU.NET (Peter Cash) writes:
|
|
|From: convex!cash@uunet.UU.NET (Peter Cash)
|
|I got into an argument recently over which caused more casualties--the
|bombing of Hiroshima or of Dresden.  (I was arguing that conventional
|weapons can inflict damage of proportions that we associate with nukes.)

Actually, the figures I have seen give the fire bombings of Tokyo as far
worse than either H or D.

|
|It seems to me that I remember that Dresden casualties were estimated at
|somewhere between 70 to 200 thousand.  I think that casualties at Hiroshima
|were around 50 thousand. Anybody have any reliable figures?

No, and nobody ever will.  The figures vary from 50k to 200k depending on
who you read and when they stop counting.  For example, today there are
people dying in Hiroshima who are counted as Bomb victims.  They may well
be, but these same people are getting into their sventies and eighties, a
time when we all tend to go.  If somebody took a dose of radiation forty
five years ago and now develops a cancer, does that mean he was a victim
of the radiation?  No person, professional or otherwise, can say.