re: #8 engineer cat

the actual deaths are a fact. the predicted deaths “prevented” are hypothetical

we were desperate to end the war and dropping the bomb did the trick, so we can’t really monday-morning-quaterback the world of 1945, but we don’t really know what would have happened in some hypothetical alternate universe if we hadn’t dropped it

what really scares me is that some of the manhattan project scientists said afterward that they weren’t really sure that they wouldn’t “blow up the atmosphere” when they did the first bomb test in the desert

It was one possibility, though the math behind it was wildly optimistic. They actually set up a betting pool over the results of the Trinity Test, from a dud to a runaway fission reaction that would be powerful enough to ignite the atmosphere.