This Freeman Dyson interview is very apropos: https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/freeman-dysons-interview https://www.manhattanprojectvoices

This Freeman Dyson interview is very apropos: https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/freeman-dysons-interview https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/freema... Kelly: People think that if you have a technological edge, that you can vanquish your enemy, but obviously you have to keep your technological edge sharp. Dyson: It’s the same with civil defense. The Germans were being heavily bombed for about three years, so they got very good at civil defense. Whereas in Britain we were only bombed for six months, we never really got the hang of it. It was a huge difference. It actually took ten times as many bombs to kill one person in Germany as it did to kill one person in London. That was one of the reasons why the campaign failed, that the German civil defense was just very good. You can actually save people with civil defense. Most people are unaware of that. Civil defense does work. It would also work against nuclear bombs. Of course, that is a politically unpopular view, but it happens to be true. Kelly: Can you explain that? Dyson: Well, most of the people who are killed in nuclear bombing are killed by blast and fire, which is sort of old-fashioned, it has nothing to do nuclear radiation. Some people die of nuclear radiation, but that’s a small number by comparison. If you are five feet underground, you are very well shielded from all of that. So most people, even in a nuclear bombing, would survive, if they are five feet underground. Of course, in Hiroshima, they didn’t have that. If the Japanese had had a couple of years, they would have learned, and probably faster than that. It’s quite unrealistic to imagine that, with good civil defense, that Hiroshima would have been so devastating.