Re: Hiroshima...No Sound?

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> > > That is a puzzlement! At the center of the Hiroshima blast
> > > buildings, structures and people were pulverized and
> > > disappeared.
> >
> > That's funny. I understood that the building at ground zero
> > is kept standing unrepaired as a monument. Is that not true?
>
> Now it is REALLY a puzzlment.

In addition, I vaguely recall that the building was a religious
structure of some sort and that one of the survivors, a monk
wearing a leather cassock, was inside the building at the time.
I believe the cassock saved him from being cut to ribbons by
the glass blown inward from the dome. Now that my initial
impression about the building has been reinforced, can anyone
tell me about that monk? Was he a Jesuit, as I vaguely recall?

The Hiroshima bomb was detonated as an airburst at waht was
calculated to be an optimum altitude for maximum destruction.
If it had detonated on the ground it would indeed have
pulverized everything at ground zero. Instead it killed a lot
more people and destroyed many more structures than a ground
burst would have. The building underneath it was reinforced
better than the average Japanese building. That's probably why
some of its structure survived. It was not hit by the blast
wave from the side, but from directly overhead, a direction
in which gravity also acts and the building is strengthened to
resist collapsing.

I've found a site on the web which claims eight Jesuits who
lived eight blocks from ground zero survived. That may be the
source of the story I remember. Another site,
http://neutrino.nuc.berkeley.edu/neutronics/todd/nuc.bomb.html
tells us that everything within a half mile of ground zero was
vaporized, a claim I find unbelievable. Pulverized is more
likely, but given the nature of the bomb ("only" ten kilotons)
I doubt that. The bomb was detonated 600 meters above the
ground, and the overpressure at ground zero was less than two
atmospheres, scarcely enough to pulverize any but the most
fragile materials, if the word "pulverize" is taken literally.

Leigh