Topic: Nuclear Weapons
...In 1946, the Manhattan Engineer District published a study that concluded that 66,000 people were killed at Hiroshima out of a population of 255,000. Of that number, 45,000 died on the first day and 19,000 during the next four months. In addition, "several hundred" survivors were expected to die from radiation-induced cancers and lukemia over the next 30 years. (This report is also known as the Oughterson Commission study.) This is the low-ball estimate, evidently because it was based on a census of households in Hiroshima and therefore did not account for the deaths of soldiers and Korean forced laborers, who are generally numbered at 20,000--though I can't find any solid justification for that figure. If they all died, which is very unlikely, and if we add a thousand deaths instead of the several hundred estimated by Oughterson's group, then we seem to be talking 87,000 fatalities directly attributable to the explosion.
The American researchers did an extensive random sampling of the surviving population, asking how large their family was and how many had been killed. From the results it was calculated that 25.5% of the civilian population had been killed. The great unknown, of course, is how large the population was at the time of the explosion. Where the Manhattan Engineer District gave a figure of 255,000--a figure based on the June 1945 rice-ration records, which survived the blast--others have posited 300,000 or even 400,000 including military and "day workers" (the eumphemism of choice for the Korean slave laborers). These populations would not have been shown on the rice-rationing records.
But even if 400,000 people were present in Hiroshima on August 6, the death toll ought not to exceed 102,000, if the American methodology was sound...
Source: http://www.warbirdforum.com/hirodead.htm
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