Square Leg

'Square Leg' target plot

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. It was assumed that 131 nuclear weapons would 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 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.^[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.

See also

• Nuclear weapons and the United Kingdom
• World War III
• The Warsaw Pact operation Seven Days to the River Rhine
• RAF Greenham Common airfield

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

1. ^ Doomsday, Britain after Nuclear Attack, p. 102
2. ^ Doomsday, Britain after Nuclear Attack, p. 105