Monday, August 6, 2012

I Got Nuthin'...and Hiroshima

Dropped my minivan off at the garage for some work today and ran home, approximately 10 miles.  This is a run I have done numerous times before, but today was a debacle.

I managed some 6 miles before needing to walk a for stretch.  Then the walking breaks became more frequent as I struggled home.  It's a bad feeling to have nuthin', which is exactly what I had--or didn't have--today.

Hopefully tomorrow's run will be better.

Now's the part where I should segue and say, "And now on a lighter note...." but let's turn towards the darker side, shall we?

It was 67 years ago today that the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, with the following result:


 [image credit Boston.com, here]

Targeted for military reasons and for its terrain (flat for easier assessment of the aftermath), Hiroshima was home to approximately 250,000 people at the time of the bombing. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber "Enola Gay" took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 8,900 lb uranium bomb codenamed "Little Boy". At 8:15 am, Little Boy was dropped from 31,000 ft above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 2,000 ft above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 141 lbs) of uranium. Of that, only 1.5 lbs underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was converted into energy - an explosive energy that seared everything within a few miles, flattened the city below with a massive shockwave, set off a raging firestorm and bathed every living thing in deadly radiation. Nearly 70,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 70,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950.


My bad run doesn't seem so bad now.

 

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