Why isn’t Hiroshima a Nuclear Wasteland?

in the waning days of World War II the United States government decided to conclusively and decisively end the war with Japan with a hitherto unbelievably powerful weapon the atomic bomb in the August of 1945 a 15 kiloton nuclear warhead was dropped in the Japanese city of Hiroshima where I'm standing right now Hiroshima remains one of the only two locations on Earth where people witnessed firsthand the awesome and terrible power of an atom split for offensive purposes but unlike other cities that have had brushes with nuclear disasters like pripyat in Ukraine and Fukushima here in Japan Hiroshima is not abandoned far from it as you can see the city is flourishing why the answer has as much to do with history as it does physics this is the true story about Hiroshima survived the atomic bomb millions of mostly young men had already died in the meat grinders of world war II's battlefronts when in 1945 the United States decided that a few hundred thousand more lives would be the final nail in so many coffins to avoid a ground invasion of Japan something the Japanese people had already proven would be a tooth and nail battle for every square inch of Island then President Harry S Truman made the impossible decision to in what would last only milliseconds forever separate history into two eras the time before Atomic weapons and the time after just three weeks after the first successful nuclear detonation the Trinity test U.S scientists had decided that Hiroshima Japan was a city suitable for the shock to leadership that was needed to finally knock an already reeling Japan out of the war the city was an Army Depot at the time surrounded by Hills that would provide a focusing effect for what was the most funded and secretive government project in U.S history there would be no leaflets dropped this time no demonstration bomb no warning shot strike was ordered the bombs that would be dropped special on August 6 1945 the B-29 bomber the Enola Gay had made its top secret trip across the Pacific Ocean and was approaching Hiroshima from 10 kilometers above 17 seconds past 8 15 am the bomb designated little boy dropped silently into clear sky for almost a minute nothing happened the Airmen in the Enola Gay feared their mission was a dud but 44.4 seconds after release the bomber's cabin filled with a blinding white light a fireball with the same surface temperature as the sun had expanded to wider than the Eiffel Tower is tall in less than a second 580 meters above the Shema Surgical Clinic far below them the intended target was this bridge approximately 240 meters away from the hospital but given the apocalypse that followed the Mist didn't matter [Music] the Enola Gay was already 16 kilometers away when it was rattled by shock waves it reportedly felt like being under heavy fire the crew most of whom didn't know exactly what they were dropping was reportedly speechless it's now something of a legend that enola's co-pilot Captain Robert a Lewis broke the Silence with my God what have we done but co-pilot Colonel Paul W Tibbetts remembers it differently fellows Tippets announced over the intercom you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history a short time ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy that bomb has more power than 20 000 tons of TNT the Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor they have been repaid many fold and the end is not yet with this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction hard numbers on the number of people that died as the result of the Hiroshima bombing have been revised and revised again for decades it's hard to get accurate body counts when thousands of bodies were literally turned into vapor but it's generally estimated that in less time than it took the Enola Gay to fly to Japan and back some 70 to 80 000 people had died thirty percent of hiroshima's population seventy percent of the buildings were Rubble or char or both the total number of deaths would increase over the next 20 to 30 days to between 90 and 140 000 people as the seventy thousand injured succumbed to bodily damage exacerbated by acute radiation syndrome unsurprisingly the few doctors that were left eighty percent had died in the blast had no idea what acute radiation syndrome was it had never happened before and therefore they could not effectively treat it this crisis was compounded by the fact that the average radiation dose that would kill approximately 50 percent of adults the ld50 was halved for the initial survivors as radiation injuries stressed the same immunological systems that are stretched thin by extensive blast injuries and deep body Burns what you're seeing now are the images that I can safely show on this platform and in curating them I may be giving you a false sense of the damage to be clear the full reality is much much worse than what you are seeing here if you do seek out images of the aftermath of the body's featureless after being flash black with otherworldly heat they will shock you as they arguably should [Music] for all the destruction it caused the little boy bomb was terribly inefficient of the bombs 64 kilograms of uranium less than one kilogram underwent fission this figure made what happened even more terrifying Jewel of energy that devastated Hiroshima a fireball so hot it etched negatives of people into concrete a blast wave so intense it shattered Windows 200 kilometers away came from less than a gram of matter converted directly into energy an entire city obliterated by the weight of a butterfly today's nuclear weapons are thousands of times more powerful foreign there are four ways to offensively detonate a nuclear bomb what distinguishes them is Altitude above a hundred thousand feet a nuclear detonation is considered a high altitude burst which produces a much larger Fireball and more electromagnetic effects owing to the lack of a dense atmosphere below a hundred thousand feet is an air burst where thermal energy and blast makes it to the ground a surface burst Fireball touches the ground and a subsurface burst explodes underground or underwater each type of burst has its own tactical considerations a high altitude burst might take out enemy Communications an air burst blast wave rebounds off the ground and Deals major thermal and blast damage to exposed enemy forces and structures surface and subsurface bursts create the most amount of Fallout and can destroy hard and or buried targets the burst that leveled Hiroshima in 1945 began half a kilometer above the city the reflected blast wave and thermal radiation was more than enough to create the shock to leadership the American government wanted crucially however the fireball did not touch the ground it was an air burst so there was not a vast amount of dirt and vaporized debris for radioactive particles and fission products to attach to and fall out of the sky with as they got heavier by the time the fission products in the cloud at Hiroshima got cool enough to fall out they had already decayed enough and become diffuse enough to pose no long-term radiological danger to downwind populations the radiation damage done to hiroshima's Residence occurred over around 60 seconds and the majority of the residual radiation from the bomb was emitted in 24 hours it follows from the physics then that Hiroshima and Nagasaki another airburst would experience few if any long-term health effects from nuclear fallout despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary and indeed this is what the majority of studies and summaries of studies Point towards and Hiroshima today has a population well over a million people a habitable Hiroshima is contrasted with a place like pripyat here in 1986 a nuclear reactor exploded and then burned for days which dispersed actual pieces of nuclear Fuel and longer-lived fission products across a large area there was no nuclear detonation Chernobyl was effectively a dirty bomb not a nuclear one as a result kripyat will remain abandoned for decades though spending time there isn't as dangerous as you might think today stand in Hiroshima at Ground Zero with a geiger counter and you won't record anything above normal background radiation far from a nuclear Wasteland you'll find a thriving tourist destination a carefully curated and cared for Park dedicated to that day where foreigners and buses of local school children can learn about what happened some 80 years prior Hiroshima today is a bustling beautiful city scarred but healed today Hiroshima Japan has undoubtedly risen From the Ashes a consequence of both how offensive nuclear weapons are used and where 80 years on this city is a living breathing Monument to both why we need to get rid of our nuclear weapons and in the face of nuclear weapons how the human Spirit can endure and survive until next time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 6,692,966

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, chernobyl, nuclear, Hiroshima, Japan, A-bomb, Atomic bomb, Enola Gay, Rebuilding, Chernobyl, Fukushima, WWII, Nuclear, bomb, tourist, Oppenheimer, atomic bomb, nuclear bomb

Id: e3RRycSmd5A

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023