"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...
NOYB wrote:

Is it more humane to kill 100's per day times thousands of days...or doom
the same number of people in a matter of seconds? And which one has more
shock appeal to subdue the enemy by exhausting his will to fight? I know
how FDR chose to answer those questions.


And as your radioactive cloud circles the globe, creating 500 million slow
death cancer cases, any wonderful ideas about how we'll keep it out of the
US
and the one or two other nations on the globe still friendly toward us?

You're exaggerating the effects to people outside the "immediate effect"
range, assuming the attack is done with an "air blast" instead of a surface
blast. Scientists have made predictions of various scenarios, and they've
come to the conclusion that air blasts have a lot less delayed effects from
radiation fallout. In fact, they've calculated that a 1-Mt air blast over a
city would have the following delayed effects *worldwide*:

Somatic effects (Cancer deaths, thyroid cancers, thyroid nodules) : between
1900 and 3700 people worldwide.

Genetic effects (abortions due to chromosomal changes, other genetic
effects): between 450-4500 cases worldwide.

So a worst-case scenario is that 8200 people are affected worldwide (outside
the "immediate effect" area)...which is certainly lower than the total
number of people killed in terrorist attacks over the past 2 decades.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/pdfs/7906.pdf (table 14)