What is the most accurate estimate for deaths as a result of the bombings, including those who died after due to the effects of radiation, burns and such?
There really isn't that accurate an estimate due to the uncertainty of how many people were present in the cities, but the USSBS estimates ~110,000 combined dead from immediate effects. See http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/AtomicEffects/ for the very interesting study. Of particular note is the fact that there were a total of zero radiation casualties apart from those exposed to the blasts themselves.
ps.: Arguing with Putinboos is as bad as arguing with Nazis, srly.
Radiation casualties is incredibly hard to actually detect, to be honest. I mean, an elevated cancer risk means that - say - 670 people instead of 650 people in a cohort of 10,000 die of cancer over a given time slice, but none of those deaths can be directly attributed to the radiation - any more than shaving a die so it falls on six 17% of the time instead of 16.7% of the time means you can look in from the outside and say "There! That one of the fifty times he got a six was the illegal one!"There really isn't that accurate an estimate due to the uncertainty of how many people were present in the cities, but the USSBS estimates ~110,000 combined dead from immediate effects. See http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/AtomicEffects/ for the very interesting study. Of particular note is the fact that there were a total of zero radiation casualties apart from those exposed to the blasts themselves.
What is the most accurate estimate for deaths as a result of the bombings, including those who died after due to the effects of radiation, burns and such?
Wow, that is rather interesting. You see I am debating with a friend of mine who is Russophile. One of those types that think the US is like the Empire and Putin is Luke Skywalker. He asserts that the atomic bombs caused over a million deaths, a terribly high estimate of course.
It's same doing that with the opposite "stronkians".ps.: Arguing with Putinboos is as bad as arguing with Nazis, srly.
Again, the "opposition" is just as bad. As the saying goes, you have his side, her side and the truth.It really is becoming a bad problem, especially with RT news and Sputnik news spouting on about how Putin is god
Wow, that is rather interesting. You see I am debating with a friend of mine who is Russophile. One of those types that think the US is like the Empire and Putin is Luke Skywalker. He asserts that the atomic bombs caused over a million deaths, a terribly high estimate of course.
Any similar sources on the bombing of Tokyo?
Indeed - we have anecdotal evidence suggesting there were some secondary radiation deaths, and we know that there have to have been some tertiary deaths simply because we know radiation exposure ups lifetime cancer rates, but the latter two are impossible to quantify precisely.I wouldn't trust USSBS for shit on radiation casualties. We have eyewitness accounts of people who were otherwise completely unaffected by the thermal pulse and blast wave dying from acute radiation sickness months after the bombing. I do doubt that radiation deaths amount to anything more then a quarter of 60-80,000 immediate deaths at most. And trying to separate the long-term effects of radiation exposure (ie: stuff like cancer and leukemia) from potential natural causes after the 1940s is an exercise in futility.
Indeed - we have anecdotal evidence suggesting there were some secondary radiation deaths, and we know that there have to have been some tertiary deaths simply because we know radiation exposure ups lifetime cancer rates, but the latter two are impossible to quantify precisely.
What we do know is that the two strikes were relatively clean as far as fallout went, and that there were people killed by secondary radiation, and we have both lowball and highball.
I should point out that the Tokyo raid took much longer to do it's killing via direct effects: 6 hours compared to the less then 5 minutes for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. When put in that perspective, Hiroshima probably ranks as the most people killed in the shortest possible time by human agency in history.The conclusion I tend to come to is that Tokyo was deadlier in direct casualties but that it was also bigger and less likely to have down-the-line deaths.
Can anyone confirm/nix if that is actually the case?
I recall reading somewhere that all Hibakusha (as defined as people who survived the bombings) deaths are attributed to bomb effects and thus contribute to the death toll, which will thus presumably keep increasing until every person who was in those cities at the time has died.
A quote in this AP sourced piece from yesterday seems to confirm this:
"There were 5,359 hibakusha who died over the past year, bringing the total death toll from the Hiroshima bombing to 297,684."
This seems fallacious, as average mortality rates from all causes would have resulted in the deaths of many of those people over the intervening seven decades anyway, regardless of bomb effects.
Can anyone confirm/nix if that is actually the case?
It gets worse. When calculating safe radiation dose rates (e.g. as a classified radiation worker I'm permitted a dose of 50mSv/year, since that is considered to give an acceptably low mortality rate), we have precisely two data points - Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Linear-No-Threshold model (which assumes that risk of cancer is purely down to accumulated dose and not to dose rate) is then applied.Radiation casualties is incredibly hard to actually detect, to be honest. I mean, an elevated cancer risk means that - say - 670 people instead of 650 people in a cohort of 10,000 die of cancer over a given time slice, but none of those deaths can be directly attributed to the radiation - any more than shaving a die so it falls on six 17% of the time instead of 16.7% of the time means you can look in from the outside and say "There! That one of the fifty times he got a six was the illegal one!"