Square Leg
- Square leg is also a fielding position in cricket; see Fielding (cricket).
Square Leg was a 1980 British government "home defence" exercise that assessed the effects of a Soviet nuclear attack. 131 nuclear weapons were assumed to fall on Britain with a total yield of 205 megatons (69 ground burst; 62 air burst) [1]. This was felt to be a reasonably realistic scenario, although the report stated that a total strike in excess of 1000 megatons would not be unexpected.
Mortality was estimated at 29 million (53% of the population); serious injuries at 7 million (12%); short-term survivors at 19 million (35%).
Square Leg was criticised for a number of reasons: the weapons used were exclusively in the high yield megaton range--with an average of 1.5 megatons per bomb--whereas a realistic attack based on known Soviet capabilities would have seen mixed weapons yields, including many missile-based warheads in the low hundred kiloton range; no targets in Inner London are attacked (for example Whitehall, the centre of British government); towns such as Eastbourne are hit for no obvious reason [2].
Operation Square Leg was one of the exercises used to estimate the destructiveness of a Soviet nuclear attack in the 1984 BBC production Threads.
References
- Doomsday, Britain after Nuclear Attack, Stan Openshaw, Philip Steadman and Owen Greene, Basil Blackwell, 1983 ISBN 0-631-13394-1
- War Plan UK, Duncan Campbell, ISBN 0-09-150671-9
Footnotes
See also
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