nuclear-news

How many people would die instantly if an H-bomb hit a city?

 1-megaton H-bomb would kill 370,000 instantly: Japanese research  http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/140412/1-megaton-h-bomb-would-kill-370000-instantly-japanese-  An estimated 370,000 people would die instantly if a one-megaton hydrogen bomb were dropped on a city with one million residents, according to a report compiled by a Japanese research group.

The report was distributed Saturday at a meeting in Hiroshima of foreign ministers from 12 non-nuclear weapons states belonging to the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative.

The NPDI consists of Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

A one-megaton hydrogen bomb is about 50 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

Some 66,000 people would be killed instantly in a city with one million residents if hit by a 16-kiloton atomic bomb, the same scale as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the report said.

The group of researchers, including Masao Tomonaga, president of the Japanese Red Cross Nagasaki Genbaku Hospital, compiled the report aimed at looking into the inhuman nature of nuclear weapons, at the request of the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

As the blast from a one-megaton hydrogen bomb radiates for 18 kilometers, another 460,000 people would be injured in addition to the 370,000 killed, and 36,000 people within 3 kilometers of the center of the explosion would be affected by radiation, the report said.

“We found such a bomb would inflict heavy damage on even a modern-day city,” Tomonaga said. “The Foreign Ministry will be using our report as a scientific basis to show the inhuman nature” of nuclear weapons.

April 15, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, weapons and war