I saw a post on here showing the ‘shadow’ of a boy standing near the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bomb explosion, it’s not actually his shadow but just the spot that didn’t get ‘bleached’ by the damage of the explosion. I read that he was vaporized in quite a lot of comments on this case but one comment explained that the boy wasn’t actually vaporized, but how did he actually die? Where is his corpse or what’s left of it? How is the damage of atomic bombs different than ‘normal’ bombs used in wars?
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To actually be rendered into vapor you’d have to be very, very close to the fireball. The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated too high for that. (The exact distance you would need to be would depend on the size of the nuclear bomb detonated. The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated about 2,000 feet in the air, to spread their more “medium” damage out to a larger area.)
The people who died there in the immediate (several weeks) aftermath died because they were crushed (by buildings or objects or trees that were knocked over or collapse), knocked into things by the blast wave, burned by exposure to the radiant thermal energy (the immediate heat), burned to death by the subsequent fires that spread after the detonation (many were alive but trapped under buildings, and then the buildings burned), drowned in the boiling-hot rivers that they sought refuge in from the fire, died from injuries sustained through things like windows shattering in their faces, and/or received a high radiation dose (depends on how close they were to ground zero, whether they were inside a building or not, etc.) that could increase to mortality of any other injuries (like burns) or kill them outright (acute radiation syndrome) if it was high-enough.
There were also people at both who would later die of fatal cancers caused by their radiation exposure. This is fewer than most people tend to guess, but still several thousand people.
The reason the corpses are missing in most of the photographs of the damage is because the photographs were taken in September or October 1945 for the most part. The first thing the Japanese Army did when it sent relief to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was dispose of corpses, often by cremation. This was for both sanitary and religious reasons. But it means that most of the photos we have of the damage are “corpse-less,” which has fueled a lot of misunderstandings (like the idea that people were just vaporized, as opposed to dying very painfully and then being cremated).
The difference between atomic bombs and conventional bombs is that atomic bombs are as a rule much, much more powerful than conventional bombs. Thousands or millions of times more powerful, depending on the bombs you are comparing. They also have radiation as an effect, both as an immediate one and as a delayed one (fallout, which was not a big issue at Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the size of the bombs and the altitude they were detonated, but would be in any large-scale nuclear war). They also deliver all of their energy all at once, which can make them much more deadly than even an equivalent amount of conventional explosives being dropped over time.
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