Best strategy for a nuclear campaign against Germany

[stona]

First things first, nukes are not all that powerful. They explode in a sphere and most of the energy is wasted.

Yes they are, equivalent to an awful lot of conventional explosives. All uncontained explosions explode in this way. I'm not sure what your point is.

Then there is the heat making for a significant non survivable radius, even for the types used against Japan. The radiation poisoning wasn't to clever for the victims either.

Luckily they were powerful enough to ensure a swift surrender, something all the conventional bombing had notably failed to do.

Cheers

Steve

 

[michaelmaltby]

"... a whole cargo ship of explosives went off in a Newfoundland harbor in WW1."

... that would be the SS Mt Blanc in Halifax harbor, Nova Scotia.

MM

Picky Canadian

 

[stona]

The Halifax explosion is estimated to have been equivalent to 2.9 kilotons of TNT compared with the 16 kilotons of Little Boy. That 2.9 kiloton explosion pretty much flattened Halifax and killed more than 2000 people.

Little Boy had more than five times the explosive force of that explosion and yet was itself a pretty feeble nuclear explosion.

To put these figures in perspective it is often assumed that the biggest conventional explosion was the 3.2 kiloton equivalent blast set off by the British in an attempt to destroy Heligoland. The Minor Scale explosion in the US in 1985, which was an attempt to imitate a small nuclear explosion, was probably bigger.

I'm sure all these bangs are googleable

Cheers

Steve

 

[Golladay]

Hiroshima naval base was called what it was because it was in Hiroshima prefecture, not because it was in Hiroshima city, it was about 10 miles away, also known as Kure.

If all the poles and wires are down and destroyed, what good is a electrical plant ?

According to you, all we'd have to do to destroy any Japanese city is set off a few bombs and turn over their cookstoves !!

15,000-20.000 tons is not that powerful ?? Up until the atomic bombs the most powerful man made explosion was when a whole cargo ship of explosives went off in a Newfoundland harbor in WW1.

Hiroshima itself had naval facilities, IJN personnel in the Dockyards of Hiroshima assisted in rescue efforts. Which makes sense as the city was a port and Home to several IJA units.

As for the electricity, the plants were located out of town near the factories, so power supply was not disrupted.

Any event, the bomb's energy was largely wasted into the atmosphere, and pictures taken in the aftermath showed that steel and concrete buildings withstood the assault pretty well. Eizo Nomura was less than 170m from Ground Zero and survived thanks to the concrete design of the building he was in. He lived well into his 80s. Since Little Boy was an air burst, the the Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall survived relatively intact. A ground burst would have flatten it, but did less overall damage.

As for the yield, yes I stand by that statement. Category 3 Hurricanes release energy equivalent to multiple megaton explosions. Krakatoa was 200 megatons equivalent when it blew. Yellowstone's last eruption was in the hundreds of gigaton range. The rock that wiped out the dinosaurs was the equivalent of 800 teratons of TNT going off. The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people and destroyed more area in one night than Hiroshima using less tonnage.

Fat Man despite having more bang, was only marginally more powerful than Little Boy and did less damage due to the terrain of Nagasaki.

Even radiation is overblown as both bombs were airbursts and relatively clean. There were few radioactive isotopes released and what little there was, quickly died down within hours. Heavy Rains helped greatly in that regard.

 

[Jenisch]

I just wished to discuss the effects of the nukes in the Germans cities. Many here already draged the topic off it's context.

 

[tyrodtom]

I just wished to discuss the effects of the nukes in the Germans cities. Many here already draged the topic off it's context.

You can hardly expect anyone to discuss the theory of the effect of nukes on German cities without some mention of the only two times nukes have really been used in warfare.
Plus your scenario was extremely unrealistic. You accelerated the developement of nukes by years, and suggested dropping them on Germany when their use to end the war wasn't needed.

 

[tyrodtom]

But apparently you don't need a really big bomb to do serious destruction in a city, it just has to be big enough to knock over everybodies cookstove.

 

[Gixxerman]

There's a decent book on the history of chemical biological warfare by Robert Harris Jeremy Paxman (of all people)
'A Higher Form of Killing'.

There's an element to the idea of a nuclear attack on Germany that has yet to be raised.
The world in the 1940's was very different to ours today in the 21st century teens.
Even in the USA.
My father was in the RAF from the early 1950's and he once said to me that the allies would never have A-bombed Germany.

Because they were white Europeans.

Besides the senselessness of it all in this May 1945 scenario suggested I think that is a significant factor.
Of course if Germany uses her nerve agents (in the west at least) all bets are off.

The only scenario that might make this plausible in my eyes at least is if D-day doesn't happen
(the weather never clears at the right time) or if the invasion gets more bad luck than happened is foiled.
But by then I can't help thinking that the Russians just roll on anyway the conventional bombing campaign continues to dislocate Germany wreck anything worth wrecking.
Even all the underground stuff only does so much, eventually you have to train pilots to fly soldiers tank men to fight, organise collect forces together to act etc etc.

 

[tyrodtom]

They're not going to take a vote before they drop a nuke, it's going to be left in the hands of the same people that decided to bomb Hamburg, Dresden, etc., so don't doubt for a second if they thought it was necessary, that they'd drop it on Germany.

 

[stona]

If anyone wants to get a real impression of just how powerful these early devices were then this is a good link

THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

"In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki the tremendous scale of the disaster largely destroyed the cities as entities. Even the worst of all other previous bombing attacks on Germany and Japan, such as the incendiary raids on Hamburg in 1943 and on Tokyo in 1945, were not comparable to the paralyzing effect of the atomic bombs. In addition to the huge number of persons who were killed or injured so that their services in rehabilitation were not available, a panic flight of the population took place from both cities immediately following the atomic explosions."

"Aside from physical injury and damage, the most significant effect of the atomic bombs was the sheer terror which it struck into the peoples of the bombed cities. This terror, resulting in immediate hysterical activity and flight from the cities, had one especially pronounced effect: persons who had become accustomed to mass air raids had grown to pay little heed to single planes or small groups of planes, but after the atomic bombings the appearance of a single plane caused more terror and disruption of normal life than the appearance of many hundreds of planes had ever been able to cause before."

As for the effect on a European city, the British mission to Japan, having analysed the Nagasaki explosion concluded.

"A similar bomb exploding in a similar fashion would produce the following effects on normal British houses:

Up to 1,000 yards from X it would cause complete collapse.

Up to 1 mile from X it would damage the houses beyond repair.

Up to 1.5 miles from X it would render them uninhabitable without extensive repair, particularly to roof timbers.

Up to 2.5 miles from X it would render them uninhabitable until first-aid repairs had been carried out."

That's essentially the blast damage.

Not really powerful............


Steve

 

[tyrodtom]

I was stationed in the mid 60's, on the southern island, Kyushu. Not far from either Nagasaki or Hiroshima ( Hiroshima's on the main island)
But while there I stayed with some Japanese families, just ordinary people.

This theory that a lot of the damage caused by the Nagasaki bomb was due to overturned cookstoves is probably nonsense. The families I stayed with lived in the traditional Japanese homes for the period and area. Wood construction, paper interior panels, pads stored in closets to sleep on, and they did their cooking on woks, no big cookstove to turn over. The wok was heated by a small alcohol burner. In the summer they cooked outdoors.

Now during WW2 they probably didn't use alcohol to heat, but charcoal or wood. But by 8 am, the time the bomb went off most people would already be at work for a hour or more. Nobodies gonna leave their cookfire burning in the middle of summer, it's heat you don't need and waste fuel.

I wish Shinpachi would get on here, I think he'd know more about domestic Japanese living habits, etc. during WW2.

 

[stona]

Most people were killed by the radiation from the explosion. Primarily the heat (which is simply infra red radiation of relatively long wave lengths) but also burns caused by an intense pulse of ultra violet radiation and X-rays.

It is a sobering thought that 95% of the immediate deaths in Nagasaki and 60% of those in Hiroshima were due to burns. Far fewer were killed by the blast and its secondary effects (like building collapse, falling debris etcetera).

Virtually no one within 1000 metres of the explosions survived.

Cheers

Steve

 

[tyrodtom]

I visited Nagasaki in 1966, the shadows on the bleached concrete made a impression on me.
It's took a pretty intense flash to do that.

 

[Readie]

this googles up as the most powerful man made explosion...in 1961, in about 16 years
its astonishing to think how far the nuclear bomb had come since the American A bomb

Tsar Bomba - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Golladay]

If anyone wants to get a real impression of just how powerful these early devices were then this is a good link
THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

"In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki the tremendous scale of the disaster largely destroyed the cities as entities. Even the worst of all other previous bombing attacks on Germany and Japan, such as the incendiary raids on Hamburg in 1943 and on Tokyo in 1945, were not comparable to the paralyzing effect of the atomic bombs. In addition to the huge number of persons who were killed or injured so that their services in rehabilitation were not available, a panic flight of the population took place from both cities immediately following the atomic explosions."

Radius of total destruction was 1.6km^2. However, that is misleading as many buildings did survive the explosion intact and those buildings had survivors especially the Rest House which survived largely intact and had a survivor. Resulting fires resulted in a devastated an area roughly 11km^2. Again that is misleading as the fires took a while to build as the blast wave snuffed out the initial fires caused by the thermal wave. Because of firebreaks put up since 1944, areas within that 11km^2 area escape unharmed. Over all roughly 20 percent of the city was destroyed, but its industry and port escaped damage.

For Nagasaki, the damage was confined to the Urakami Valley which protected the majority of the city and the Port. Again Reinforced buildings survived relatively intact and only one factory was destroyed, the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works. The rest were only damaged and were able to continue work such as the the Mitsubishi Arms Plant and Steel Plant. Chinzei School only 457 meters from Ground Zero only suffered the collapse of its fourth story. The building as a whole was still standing and machine tools and survivors were pulled from it.

Actually try to get real data first from the raw field reports before they got summarized for the layman and to present to Congress. There are a lot of caveats in how much destruction nukes can do vs the hype.

 

[tyrodtom]

You speak of the rest house had A survivor, singular, 1. Out of how many in that building ?
And then the Chinzei school, survivors again, but a unspecified number. And out of how many in the building before the explosion ?
Meaningless without the rest of the story.

In earthquakes when you have whole buildings collaspe to piles of stone, often a few lucky people will be pulled from the rubble. I suppose that proves earthquakes are just hype too.

 

[altsym]

They're not going to take a vote before they drop a nuke, it's going to be left in the hands of the same people that decided to bomb Hamburg, Dresden, etc., so don't doubt for a second if they thought it was necessary, that they'd drop it on Germany.

I think Europe is a unique situation. Its not an Island in the middle of the sea, and unlike Japan there allied forces everywhere, whereas Japan.. no allies on the Island. I have to stick to my guns here and say there was no way a nuke would be dropped anywhere in Europe during WWII.

 

[tyrodtom]

Like someone else already pointed out, we set off the first nuclear bomb in our own country.
Do you honestly think we'd care more about Europe.

 

[altsym]

Yup I think dropping a nuke on Berlin or anywhere in Germany would set off the Russians like hell was coming.
The US relations with the Russians wasn't the most trustworthy during WWII. I seem to recall P-51's and La-7's
going at it late 44 or early 45.

 

[tyrodtom]

I agree, the origional poster's timeline of going nuclear after May 45 would not be likely, plus not remotely needed.
But had the final phase turned out differently, with both the western allies, and the Russians not as sucessful in their advances.
With more of the Germans new weapons becoming operational, if the war in Europe had stretched into late 45, I think the allies would have went nuclear.