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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 136793
Posted: 06 August 2026 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

81 years.

The world changed, and people at the time had no idea how much.

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Evan S. Kurtz
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 04 July 2022
Location: Canada
Posts: 391
Posted: 06 August 2026 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

Let us never forget that, immediately after deploying the most destructive weapon in the history of our species, our best and brightest immediately began working on making the next one bigger.
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Dave Kopperman
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 27 December 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4117
Posted: 06 August 2026 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Rolling back to WWI, we essentially went from killing as a 1-to-1 act to giving a single man the capacity to make our species (and all others with the bad luck of having coexisted in our geological moment) extinct.
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Edward Aycock
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 13 July 2024
Location: United States
Posts: 270
Posted: 06 August 2026 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

I was in Hiroshima in April, and of course it's a very modern town.  I went to the Peace Dome and found myself sobbing.  Then I went to the museum and that was even harder.  Yes, yes, I tell this story and invariably get, "You do know how vicious and brutal the Japanese were with their atrocities?" 

I do, but when you watch a video in the museum of a man start crying 75 years later while recounting his sister's death and having to cremate her when he was10 years old, (" It takes a long time, her head took the longest) it's a bit hard to handle.  I am tearing up telling this. 

There was a man playing a flute across the canal from the Peace Dome, you got the feeling this was a regular thing, and you could hear him for a pretty wide radius, then he went and gonged the peace bell, as did I.  The mallet has an atomic symbol engraved upon it at the end. 

One thing I learned is that since the bomb over Hiroshima detonated in the air, the radiation did not seep into the ground and the radiation dissipated much faster than you'd expect.  

It's a very haunted city though, (and despite being a big urban center, sorta quiet) at least to me.  No matter where you go - a park, a shopping area, there are always stories of unidentified bodies found there after the bomb.

And I thought "Grave of the Fireflies" was hard ...


Edited by Edward Aycock on 06 August 2026 at 4:26pm
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Peter Hicks
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 30 April 2004
Location: Canada
Posts: 2157
Posted: 06 August 2026 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

My wife and adult son visited that same museum in Hiroshima last year and found it to be very tone deaf.  Zero recognition that Japan invaded other countries, started a war with the US, killed 4 million civilians in China, etc.

Regarding the comment above that scientists immediately started working on a more destructive bomb, I found it interesting how that was referenced about halfway through the movie Oppenheimer.  At least one of the team only saw a fission bomb as a stepping stone to making a fusion bomb.
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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 136793
Posted: 06 August 2026 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

According to my father, who was a sergeant in the British Army in Burma when the war ended, I would not be here without these two bombs.

Makes it very hard to be objective about it all.

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