Simply for the sake of accuracy, fewer persons died in the bombing of Dresden than in either of the atomic attacks. The fire-bombing of Tokyo resulted in 80,000 - 100,000 civilian fatalities and perhaps double that number of injured.

Unlike the atomic attacks, that level of destruction required 300 bombing planes and half a million incendiary bombs.

During the Cold War, Soviet and East German sources circulated wildly inflated estimates of the number of casualties at Dresden. These are occasionally still encountered. But careful records compiled by the Dresden police in 1945 and analyzed by German historians show that about 35,000 died, somewhat less than the 40,000 who died in the fire-bombing of Hamburg, and far less than the numbers killed at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.