I was wondering how big were the atomic bomb impacts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how many casualties were there on the first day and later on. I had a discussion in class, and I am really interested, did the Tokyo bombing take more casualties and did more pressure than atomic bombs?
Well you can get the casualty figures from Wikipedia. They are as good as any other source for that kind of basic information.
The deeper question is the Tokyo bombing comparison. The Tokyo bombing by most accounts did kill more people than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki individually. This is not, however, because firebombing is more deadly than atomic bombing. This is because Tokyo had a much larger population packed into a much higher density than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The latter two cities were relatively moderate in size; Tokyo, on the other hand, was one of the highest-populated metropolises in the world.
In terms of square mileage, the firebombings destroyed more in Tokyo than the atomic bombings. But in terms of casualties per square mile, the atomic bombings were 4-5 times more deadly.
This blog post discusses this question explicitly, and also calculates what the casualties would have been if an atomic bomb had been dropped on Tokyo in March 1945 (several times higher than the firebombings). This table in particular is a useful one for comparing the differences in terms of raw numbers.
