
A new study claims that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima may have been far deadlier than had been originally believed.
An incredible new study claims that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in Japan in World War II may have been even deadlier than we realized. The bomb, which was dropped in 1945 and killed 80,000 people right away and tens of thousands more from radiation, helped hasten the end of the war in combination with the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Brazilian scientists published a study recently in the journal PLoS One that described a techinque known as “electron spin resonance spectroscopy.” They were able to use this technique to measure the damage that the bomb’s radiation caused.
They were able to determine that the Hiroshima bombing resulted in 9.46 grays of radiation. That is an incredible number, considering that one to two Gy absorbed in a few hours would cause radiation sickness, and four to five Gy would be fatal.
“We used a technique known as electron spin resonance spectroscopy to perform retrospective dosimetry. Currently, there’s renewed interest in this kind of methodology due to the risk of terrorist attacks in countries like the United States,” Oswaldo Baffa, Full Professor at the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto School of Philosophy, Science & Letters (FFCLRP-USP), said in a statement.
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