First, I agree that nuclear explosives have indeed caused more harm than good. The "plowshares" program never went anywhere; radioactive natural gas was considered a showstopper and conventional explosives are more than sufficient for major earthmoving projects.
Now, to put the quotes from MikeWasHere05 into slightly more focused context:
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Originally Posted by http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/2001/09/06/stories/08060003.htm
Studies on 1600 children who were irradiated while they were in their mother's womb during the atomic bomb explosions in the two cities revealed that 30 of them suffered clinically severe mental retardation.
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There was no detectable threshold dose below which the effect was zero.
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This is neither cancer nor genetic damage. This is merely disrupted development, very similar to fetal alcohol syndrome.
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Originally Posted by http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~copeland/atomicbomb.html
On the other hand, leukemia, a non-tumor type cancer, is remarkably different. An excess risk of leukemia was one of the earliest delayed effects of radiation exposure seen in the victims, and today, more than 50 years after the bombs, this excess is reflected as the most widely apparent long-term radiation effect
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This "excess" is
fewer than 100 individuals. While statistically significant, it is also clearly not the magnitude of issue that some people think it is.
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Originally Posted by MikeWasHere05
What I was trying to say with the cancer argument was that nuclear bombs cause very harmful medical problems, including cancer.
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The statistics support you when you say nuclear bombs cause medical problems including cancer. However, they contradict you when you predict the number of deaths.