Posted on 04/15/2017 11:33:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
On Thursday, the U.S. military dropped a MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs) on an ISIS tunnel complex in Nangahar Province in Afghanistan. Shortly after that, USA Today posted a breathtakingly ignorant graphic purporting to show that the MOAB contained over 70 percent of the destructive force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
This epic fail occurred even though the following comparison was known early on:
The MOAB has the force of 11 tons of TNT. For comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had the force of 15 thousand tons of TNT.
The destructive force of the MOAB dropped on ISIS therefore had 0.07 percent of the force of the first A-bomb.
That comparison was totally lost on the graphic-creating wizards at USA Today and its alleged layers of editors and fact-checkers (HT Washington Free Beacon; red box is mine):
The graphic appeared at USA Today's original published story on the attack for several hours, but has since been corrected to indicate that the Hiroshima A-bomb had the force of 15 kilotons of TNT.
Given the genuine comparison, though, the real question is why the post-correction graphic remains. In the words of one commenter at the story who was one of the first to point out the original graphic's error:
Someone should contact the author and let them know their research is whacked. The Hiroshima bomb was 15,000 tons of TNT equivalent, compared to 11 tons for the MOAB. That makes it less that 1/1000th as big. It's disingenuous to compare the two. The MOAB is just a really, really big conventional bomb.
It is indeed disingenuous to compare the two — unless the goal, even after the correction, was to somehow create a false equivalence between a conventional bomb which reportedly killed almost 100 in an attack targeting enemy combatants and an atomic bomb which leveled an entire city, killed 90,000 - 146,000 of its inhabitants, and left thousands of others with life-shortening and deeply life-affecting burns and radiation-caused illnesses.
USA Today's error gives away the fact that someone there actually believed that the U.S. military under Donald Trump — but not requiring his permission — dropped a bomb 73 percent as destructive as the Hiroshima A-bomb. Further, those involved in reviewing the graphic before or perhaps immediately after it went live, which one would hope included reporters Jim Michaels and Tom Vanden Brook, either agreed with that comparison or were too naive to question it.
In other words, there is every reason to believe that Trump Derangement Syndrome — originally betrayed when USA Today's Editorial Board broke a since-inception 34-year tradition of abstaining from presidential election recommendations by declaring the Republican nominee "unfit for the presidency" — is thriving at the enterprise which pretends to be "The Nation's Newspaper."
No one is killed by radiation from a MOAB. The comparison works for the number killed by the concussion of the explosion.
I was under the impression the Hiroshima bomb was on the order of 20 tons on TNT.
I thought it seemed off somehow but couldn't put my finger on it until this thread appeared on FR.
The VIDEO shows him continuing to write...
-1
/sarc
Maybe they were watching Fox News who had a graphic the other day that showed the MOAB at 11,000 tons of TNT.
Media = liars = distorters
What irresponsible unprofessional lunatics.
Do you comprehend the meaning of "Kilo"?
Do you really think the US would have conducted the expensive, massive, hyper-secretive Manhattan Project -- for the bang of a semi-trailer of TNT?
Do you really believe a 20-ton bang would have scared the Japanese into surrendering?
~~~~~~~~~~~
SMH...
USA Today - the Voice of Idiocracy!
It’s got electrolytes!
Do you comprehend the meaning of the word asshole? Because that’s what you are. I asked a simple question.
Glad you’re appreciative of the food for thought I offered — so you could self-correct your misperception. Get back to us when you’ve grown up...
Get back to me when you learn some manners you jerk.
Math is hard. You triggered a snowflake melt down.
My father was a member of Task Force 132.4 at Eniwetok Atoll, Operation Ivy. He witnessed the detonation of Ivy Mike and Ivy King. Ivy King was the largest yield to date fission bomb. Ivy Mike was the very first fussion device measured in megatons, not kilotons. I say device because it was not a deliverable ordinance. It was a “wet” device using liquid hydrogen housed in a huge building on one of the islands of the atoll. The firing mechanism spanned 2 islands. I have most of his documentation from that time. Even a leather patch that a militaria dealer was stumped with. He’d never seen anything like it.
Hiroshima was about 16kt, Nagasaki was about 21kt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
Hiroshima was about 16kt, Nagasaki was about 21kt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
About 20,000 tons.
The guy at the board doesn’t look like his is finished with writing the equation.....
I remember learning that stuff in the 9th grade....
You have to admit, it was not a nice bomb and that hurts liberal sensibilities if a Republican drops it. LOL
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