http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=339291829&size=o Megaton ratings of various nuclear bombs. This partly answers the question of why, if nuclear weapons are so bad, does Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only still exist, but people still live there?
In 1960, a suspicious President Eisenhower sent an envoy to the SAC’s headquarters in Omaha to check out their remoured-to-be-excessive targetting plans. A city that closely resembled Hiroshima in size and industrial concentration was slated to be hit by one 4.5 megaton bomb, plus three more 1.1 megaton bombs in case the first bomb didn’t go off. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was just 12.5 kilotons. (From Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon.) 15:17
