Why do you think that the U.S. military was just as concerned with the ability to judge the effects of the nuclear bombs on their targets as they were with the military objectives?

Question

anonymous · Answer

Because radiation. If they were going to strategically control a vital piece of the battlefield around a target that you're going to nuke, one of the things that they would want to know was whether they had anything to worry about from radiation. They didn't immediately march soldiers into Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but they still wanted to know what the effects were because they really had little idea.

Nukes are extremely 'dirty' compared to conventional bombs that just explode because they irradiate whatever they detonate around, spreading fallout, which can spread far beyond the target area. Thousands more died in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from radiation burns and exposure, and more in the following years because of sicknesses such as cancers that were attributed to the fallout.

The last thing military planners wanted was for the same thing to happen to their soldiers.