Square Leg was a 1980 British government home defence exercise that assessed the effects of a Soviet nuclear attack. It was assumed that 131 nuclear weapons would fall on Britain with a total yield of 205 megatons (69 ground burst; 62 air burst). This was felt to be a reasonably realistic scenario, although the report stated that a total strike in excess of 1,000 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.
Operation Square Leg was one of the exercises used to estimate the destructiveness of a Soviet nuclear attack in the 1984 BBC production Threads.
Famous quotes containing the words square and/or leg:
“If the physicians had not their cassocks and their mules, if the doctors had not their square caps and their robes four times too wide, they would never had duped the world, which cannot resist so original an appearance.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Farmers in overalls and wide-brimmed straw hats lounge about the store on hot summer days, when the most common sound is the thump-thump-thump of a hound’s leg on the floor as he scratches contentedly. Oldtime hunters say that fleas are a hound’s salvation: his constant twisting and clawing in pursuit of the tormentors keeps his joints supple.”
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)