9 ms·

It's fascinating to think how many early civilizations or cities may have met a similar fate with the remains just too obliterated to identify / study.

dotancohen 5y ago
This is very reminiscent of the Hiroshima attack. The city was so devastated that it took much time for reports of the destruction to reach the emperor and advisors. And even then it wasn't fully believed. If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki as well.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  > If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki as well It was a bit more complicated than that [0]. There was intense resistance to the Allies' demands for unconditional surrender. Japanese scientists confirmed on the 7th August (the day after the bombing) that Hiroshima had been atom bombed and Nagasaki was bombed on the 9th. The Japanese didn't actually surrender until the 15th August, following a failed coup d'état in which elements of the Army rebelled against the emerging surrender plans [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Events_of_7–9_August https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_coup_d'état_(August_12–15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_c...
  - speeder 5y ago
    If I remember there was also the fact they didn't bothered with the usual emergency meetings regarding the atomic bombs because the damage was less than other things USA did to Japan (like firebombing of Tokyo), but they started to have meetings to plan the surrender when news came that Soviets were sending soldiers toward Japan. According to an ethnic japanese teacher of mine, the Japanese remembered very well how badly it went for them when they tried to invade Mongolia and lost to URSS, and they were more afraid of post-war occupation by URSS than by USA, thus why the surrender became more accepted.
    - axiolite 5y ago
      There's a lot of revisionist history out there. The Emperor singled-out the atomic bombs in his surrender message. Japan was depending on the USSR to mediate a conditional surrender, until they entered the war, which closed that avenue. And the reason the USSR hastily entered the war was because of the atomic bomb, they knew it was about to end. Japan was no doubt very concerned about a second front in the war, but I don't know of any particular fear of the USSR... Japan had soundly defeated a pre-USSR Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. It's quite possible that they would have endured the USSR joining the war effort, if not for the additional "shock" of the atomic bombs, and Truman's bluff that the US would be dropping one every week... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pacific/#transcript https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pacific/#t...
- JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
  This sounds completely improbable. Phones / telegrams and cameras existed. Nagasaki happened 3 days later, I find it hard to believe information couldn't travel that fast.
  - eschulz 5y ago
    You're correct, but the circumstances of the first atomic attack caused significant delays for accurate information to reach the Imperial General Headquarters. The first info stated that Hiroshima was devastated in an air raid, but the officers at high command considered this to be an error due to the lack of reports of hundreds of American bombers over the city on that day. However, they were unable to get any communication from Hiroshima (note that the military headquarters was at the Hiroshima Castle which was completely destroyed). It didn't take days, but it did take many hours for Tokyo to realize that indeed Hiroshima was devastated in an attack. Some officers even thought it was a traditional bombing raid and that there was a technical issue or even sabotage with their communication lines between Hiroshima and Tokyo. Tho Officer Corps at first had little knowledge to understand that it might have been an atomic attack, and that therefore the war had changed in a very serious manner.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    The first outside sign of trouble at Hiroshima was actually the instantaneous loss of all commmunications. The bomb was dropped at 8:15. At 8:16, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation in Tokyo noticed a loss of communications with their office in Hiroshima. Twenty minutes later, the Tokyo railroad telegraph office noticed communications had failed just north of Hiroshima, with confused reports of a "large explosion" in Hiroshima from other stations nearby. There were confused reports of a large explosion. As others have noted, there was no large observed flight of US/Alied aircraft, was would have been typical of a bombing raid. It wasn't until the early afternoon that a Japanese Imperial Army aircraft was flown over the city and made the first direct assessment of the damage incurred to those outside the city. It wasn't until the United States Government informed the Japanese via diplomatic cable the next day that it was clear that what had delivered the damage was a new type of weapon. That initial symptom of loss of communications is actually highly typical of major disasters. For smaller incidents, a more usual problem is that those directly involved simply fail to accept or change their viewpoint to understand what it is that's transpiring. In almost any large disaster, though, a highly consistent consequence is loss of regular or effective means of communications, such that this itself is a fair indication of the scope and scale of a disaster. Compare for example the HMS Sheffield attack during the Falklands War. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/hiroshim/hiro_med.html#ATTACKS http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/hiroshim/hiro_med.html#AT... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disasters_wwii_japanese_leadership_wasnt_aware/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disa... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disasters_the_hms_sheffield_exocet_attack_and/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disa...
- retrac 5y ago
  That largely agrees with what I've read. There were no large air raids on the day of the Hiroshima bombing, and very few would have considered a bomb of that power. So in the first hours at least and into the next day, outside of the city there wasn't an understanding the whole city was basically gone. From their perspective immediately after, there were communication problems that had cut all the telegraph and telephone lines, presumably due to some sort of large (but more normal) disaster in the city centre. Only once the smoke started to clear and an aerial survey could be performed, along with large numbers of survivors pouring into neighbouring cities and towns, would the true scale of it have been clear to the Japanese government (around the same time the Americans were surveying the results, I suppose, a day or two later).
- danielvf 5y ago
  The bombing of Hiroshima was unimaginable destruction, and yet did less damage than the very first mass firebombing attack on Japan four months earlier. At this point in the war the Americans had been hitting Japanese cities with 300-500 super heavy bomber firebombing raids for four months. After bombing all the major cities the Americans were now well into their list of twenty five smaller 75,000 to 300,000 population cities. So Hiroshima was just another day in Japan, just another bombed city. The only thing new to the Japanese was that the destruction was from a new kind of bomb, and the following morning an investigation group had been formed. The Japanese leadership met the following morning, discussed that the city was wiped out via a new bomb, and decided to continue fighting while seeing what kind of better terms they could get before surrendering. Which is what they had been doing for quite some time, and continued to do even as the Soviets declared war on them a few days later. News of the attack traveled to the Tokyo quickly. For example, a major Go championship was being played on the outskirts of Hiroshima at the time of the bomb explosion. Although the windows of the building the game were played in were blown out, and one of the players knocked over, gameplay resumed a few hours later and the match was finished. (https://senseis.xmp.net/?AtomicBombGame https://senseis.xmp.net/?AtomicBombGame) It was assumed in Tokyo that day that the players were probably killed, indicating that news of the city being hit had traveled there.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Each of those "firebombings" were conducted by 50+ B-29 bombers. When you see so many bombers show up on radar, you dispatch the fighters, you know things are about to happen. When you see a SINGLE B-29 bomber, you ignore it. Its just a scout, and one bomber can't do much damage... Until Hiroshima happened. Its unbelievable: the "rules" of the war changed overnight, in a dramatic way that no one in the Japanese army could have possibly imagined. Every __SINGLE__ bomber "scout" could in fact be, the next nuclear bomb. Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      I don't think the Japanese was defending very well against the firebombs either by that point. > Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated. It doesn't really make sense that it is easier to take down 10 bombers than 1, does it? It sounds like you mean the hypothetical where as many bombers were each sent individual to nuke as many cities that would be harder to defend against, because any bombers that got through would do so much more damage. So it's important to differential between potential destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both governments had reason to not emphasize this.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I would expect very few considering how rare early cities were and how rare these low-atmosphere explosions are (and presumably were as well).
dwd 5y ago
Sodom, Gomorrah... there's quite a list in the ancient literature from the region of cities obliterated.
- autokad 5y ago
  'some' theorized Tall el-Hammam is Sodom and Gomorrah
- panda-giddiness 5y ago
  Sodom is specifically named in the article. > It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed. If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam is possibly the second oldest known incident of impact-related destruction of a human settlement, after Abu Hureyra in Syria ~ 12,800 years ago.
  - dwd 5y ago
    Volcanic eruptions also figure prominently in oral traditions throughout the world. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/victoria-s-volcanic-history-confirms-the-state-s-aboriginal-inhabitation-before-34-000-years https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/victoria-s-volcanic-...

dotancohen 5y ago

This is very reminiscent of the Hiroshima attack. The city was so devastated that it took much time for reports of the destruction to reach the emperor and advisors. And even then it wasn't fully believed. If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki as well.

KineticLensman 5y ago
> If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki as well It was a bit more complicated than that [0]. There was intense resistance to the Allies' demands for unconditional surrender. Japanese scientists confirmed on the 7th August (the day after the bombing) that Hiroshima had been atom bombed and Nagasaki was bombed on the 9th. The Japanese didn't actually surrender until the 15th August, following a failed coup d'état in which elements of the Army rebelled against the emerging surrender plans [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Events_of_7–9_August https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_coup_d'état_(August_12–15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_c...
- speeder 5y ago
  If I remember there was also the fact they didn't bothered with the usual emergency meetings regarding the atomic bombs because the damage was less than other things USA did to Japan (like firebombing of Tokyo), but they started to have meetings to plan the surrender when news came that Soviets were sending soldiers toward Japan. According to an ethnic japanese teacher of mine, the Japanese remembered very well how badly it went for them when they tried to invade Mongolia and lost to URSS, and they were more afraid of post-war occupation by URSS than by USA, thus why the surrender became more accepted.
  - axiolite 5y ago
    There's a lot of revisionist history out there. The Emperor singled-out the atomic bombs in his surrender message. Japan was depending on the USSR to mediate a conditional surrender, until they entered the war, which closed that avenue. And the reason the USSR hastily entered the war was because of the atomic bomb, they knew it was about to end. Japan was no doubt very concerned about a second front in the war, but I don't know of any particular fear of the USSR... Japan had soundly defeated a pre-USSR Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. It's quite possible that they would have endured the USSR joining the war effort, if not for the additional "shock" of the atomic bombs, and Truman's bluff that the US would be dropping one every week... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pacific/#transcript https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pacific/#t...
JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
This sounds completely improbable. Phones / telegrams and cameras existed. Nagasaki happened 3 days later, I find it hard to believe information couldn't travel that fast.
- eschulz 5y ago
  You're correct, but the circumstances of the first atomic attack caused significant delays for accurate information to reach the Imperial General Headquarters. The first info stated that Hiroshima was devastated in an air raid, but the officers at high command considered this to be an error due to the lack of reports of hundreds of American bombers over the city on that day. However, they were unable to get any communication from Hiroshima (note that the military headquarters was at the Hiroshima Castle which was completely destroyed). It didn't take days, but it did take many hours for Tokyo to realize that indeed Hiroshima was devastated in an attack. Some officers even thought it was a traditional bombing raid and that there was a technical issue or even sabotage with their communication lines between Hiroshima and Tokyo. Tho Officer Corps at first had little knowledge to understand that it might have been an atomic attack, and that therefore the war had changed in a very serious manner.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  The first outside sign of trouble at Hiroshima was actually the instantaneous loss of all commmunications. The bomb was dropped at 8:15. At 8:16, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation in Tokyo noticed a loss of communications with their office in Hiroshima. Twenty minutes later, the Tokyo railroad telegraph office noticed communications had failed just north of Hiroshima, with confused reports of a "large explosion" in Hiroshima from other stations nearby. There were confused reports of a large explosion. As others have noted, there was no large observed flight of US/Alied aircraft, was would have been typical of a bombing raid. It wasn't until the early afternoon that a Japanese Imperial Army aircraft was flown over the city and made the first direct assessment of the damage incurred to those outside the city. It wasn't until the United States Government informed the Japanese via diplomatic cable the next day that it was clear that what had delivered the damage was a new type of weapon. That initial symptom of loss of communications is actually highly typical of major disasters. For smaller incidents, a more usual problem is that those directly involved simply fail to accept or change their viewpoint to understand what it is that's transpiring. In almost any large disaster, though, a highly consistent consequence is loss of regular or effective means of communications, such that this itself is a fair indication of the scope and scale of a disaster. Compare for example the HMS Sheffield attack during the Falklands War. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/hiroshim/hiro_med.html#ATTACKS http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/hiroshim/hiro_med.html#AT... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disasters_wwii_japanese_leadership_wasnt_aware/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disa... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disasters_the_hms_sheffield_exocet_attack_and/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disa...
retrac 5y ago
That largely agrees with what I've read. There were no large air raids on the day of the Hiroshima bombing, and very few would have considered a bomb of that power. So in the first hours at least and into the next day, outside of the city there wasn't an understanding the whole city was basically gone. From their perspective immediately after, there were communication problems that had cut all the telegraph and telephone lines, presumably due to some sort of large (but more normal) disaster in the city centre. Only once the smoke started to clear and an aerial survey could be performed, along with large numbers of survivors pouring into neighbouring cities and towns, would the true scale of it have been clear to the Japanese government (around the same time the Americans were surveying the results, I suppose, a day or two later).
danielvf 5y ago
The bombing of Hiroshima was unimaginable destruction, and yet did less damage than the very first mass firebombing attack on Japan four months earlier. At this point in the war the Americans had been hitting Japanese cities with 300-500 super heavy bomber firebombing raids for four months. After bombing all the major cities the Americans were now well into their list of twenty five smaller 75,000 to 300,000 population cities. So Hiroshima was just another day in Japan, just another bombed city. The only thing new to the Japanese was that the destruction was from a new kind of bomb, and the following morning an investigation group had been formed. The Japanese leadership met the following morning, discussed that the city was wiped out via a new bomb, and decided to continue fighting while seeing what kind of better terms they could get before surrendering. Which is what they had been doing for quite some time, and continued to do even as the Soviets declared war on them a few days later. News of the attack traveled to the Tokyo quickly. For example, a major Go championship was being played on the outskirts of Hiroshima at the time of the bomb explosion. Although the windows of the building the game were played in were blown out, and one of the players knocked over, gameplay resumed a few hours later and the match was finished. (https://senseis.xmp.net/?AtomicBombGame https://senseis.xmp.net/?AtomicBombGame) It was assumed in Tokyo that day that the players were probably killed, indicating that news of the city being hit had traveled there.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Each of those "firebombings" were conducted by 50+ B-29 bombers. When you see so many bombers show up on radar, you dispatch the fighters, you know things are about to happen. When you see a SINGLE B-29 bomber, you ignore it. Its just a scout, and one bomber can't do much damage... Until Hiroshima happened. Its unbelievable: the "rules" of the war changed overnight, in a dramatic way that no one in the Japanese army could have possibly imagined. Every __SINGLE__ bomber "scout" could in fact be, the next nuclear bomb. Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    I don't think the Japanese was defending very well against the firebombs either by that point. > Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated. It doesn't really make sense that it is easier to take down 10 bombers than 1, does it? It sounds like you mean the hypothetical where as many bombers were each sent individual to nuke as many cities that would be harder to defend against, because any bombers that got through would do so much more damage. So it's important to differential between potential destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both governments had reason to not emphasize this.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I would expect very few considering how rare early cities were and how rare these low-atmosphere explosions are (and presumably were as well).

dwd 5y ago

Sodom, Gomorrah... there's quite a list in the ancient literature from the region of cities obliterated.

autokad 5y ago
'some' theorized Tall el-Hammam is Sodom and Gomorrah
panda-giddiness 5y ago
Sodom is specifically named in the article. > It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed. If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam is possibly the second oldest known incident of impact-related destruction of a human settlement, after Abu Hureyra in Syria ~ 12,800 years ago.
- dwd 5y ago
  Volcanic eruptions also figure prominently in oral traditions throughout the world. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/victoria-s-volcanic-history-confirms-the-state-s-aboriginal-inhabitation-before-34-000-years https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/victoria-s-volcanic-...