It's hard to overstate the impact of going from conventional bombs (killing groups of people) to atomic bombs (wiping out entire cities). Actually, overstatmen

It's hard to overstate the impact of going from conventional bombs (killing groups of people) to atomic bombs (wiping out entire cities). Actually, overstatment of the impact of going from conventional to "atomic" bombs is the norm. http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2008/05/philip-j-dolans-formerly-secret.html http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2008/05/philip-j-dolans-former... ‘The wide publicity given to the appalling destruction caused by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has possibly tended to give an exaggerated impression of their effectiveness. Perhaps the best way to counteract this impression, and to help to get the atomic bomb to scale, is to consider the numbers of atomic bombs that would have to be dropped on this country and on Germany to have caused the same total amount of damage as was actually caused by attacks with high explosive and incendiary bombs. ‘During the last war a total of 1,300,000 tons [i.e. 1.3 MEGATONS of bombs] were dropped on Germany by the Strategic Air Forces [of Britain and America]. If there were no increase in aiming accuracy, then to achieve the same amount of material damage (to houses, industrial and transportational targets, etc.) would have required the use of over 300 atomic bombs together with some 500,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs for targets too small to warrant the use of an atomic bomb