The death toll from the south Asian tsunami disaster could soon rival that [View All]

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UNDATED The death toll from the south Asian tsunami disaster could soon rival that of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.

An estimated 140-thousand people died when the United States dropped that bomb on August sixth, 1945, not including those who later succumbed to illnesses attributed to radiation.

The toll from last Sunday's disaster is more than 121-thousand dead, and climbing.

That's almost double the 74-thousand killed in the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, three days after Hiroshima.

And the toll well exceeds the more than 58-thousand Americans killed in the Vietnam war.

But it's far from the deadliest natural disaster on record. Some 24 (m) million people are said to have died in a 1907 famine in China.

More recently, a 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh is believed to have killed 300-thousand.

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