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So long as you have one, any would-be attacker is restrained by the prospect of getting nuked. After Hiroshima, the major powers swiftly - and fortunately - realized that this is the only thing you can do with nuclear bombs. Put most bluntly, it has been visited upon people who don't have nukes, nor the near-term prospect of getting them.*īismarck once said that the one thing you can't do with bayonets is sit on them. It is no accident, however, that since 1945 the horrors of war have been visited almost entirely upon people who were already on the margins of an industrializing world. The wretched people of Darfur might fairly beg to differ. The Bomb did not make war impossible, but in some real and meaningful sense it has rendered war obsolescent. (If you want to know more or less everything non-classified about nuclear weapons, I recommend the Nuclear Weapons FAQ. The primitive Hiroshima bomb released rather more than 1000 times its own mass in TNT equivalent energy, and by the 1950s the H-bomb improved on that by another factor of a thousand.
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Poor Alfred Nobel thought that high explosives would make war impossible, but dynamite, TNT, and the like only contain about ten times the destructive energy of plain old black powder, which which people had been cheerfully slaughtering each other for centuries. That is what turned all conventional military thinking on its head. In practical terms, though, what stood out about the atom bombs wasn't the sheer scale of destruction, but that it was wrought by a single bomb from a single plane. I assumed they'd been vaporized, which they probably weren't (they'd have been luckier if they had been), but it is not an image you forget. As a geek kid the images that chilled me most were the victims of whom nothing remained but their shadows, burned like photographic negatives onto surfaces behind them at the moment of the flash.
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There was and is something that catches the attention about an entire city reduced to rubble as far as the eye can see. Still the atom bomb (to use an old-fashioned phrase) stands out. The war as a whole provided several hundred Hiroshimas worth of senseless human destruction. The fire raid on Tokyo the previous March killed more than that the bombing of Dresden a few weeks earlier nearly as many. Amid the greater horror of World War II it was hardly a squib. No one knows just how many, and while the death toll is still argued, "horrific" is sufficiently precise for most discussion. Very roughly 100,000 people died: from the blast, then from the firestorm, and later from radiation. We all know the ugly politics of that war these pictures show us the human side of it.Sixty-two years ago today - yesterday, for most of you reading this, since I live near the tail-end of time zones - the Enola Gay dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Against a backdrop of censorship, political correctness, and military directives to the contrary, in-country Army helicopter nose art flourished in Vietnam, and the failure to acknowledge this archetypal convention in any study of Army aviation history demonstrates a lack of respect for the personal cost of conflict.Īlthough 'Iron Butterfly' may not be as well-known as 'Memphis Belle' or 'Enola Gay' from World War II, it nonetheless carried its crews into battle with just as much passion for life and sense of duty as its predecessors.
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Each is accompanied by a caption containing data particular for each featured image: helicopter name, unit, serial number, photo date, photo location, crew names, artist name, photo contributor, and anecdotal information. The vast majority of these photographs have never before been published, with them all capturing that quintessential and unmistakable American war custom of embellishing one's assigned aircraft with personalized markings. Vietnam War Army Helicopter Nose Art brings to light over 250 recently recovered Vietnam War photographs from Army aviation veterans. Publisher: Fonthill Media LLc | Publication Date: | Pages: 192 | Product Dimensions: 216 x 275 x 11mm | Weight: 774g | Product detail - Author: John Brennan | ISBN-13: 9781625450357 | Format: Paperback