Talk:Square Leg
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As for towns like Eastbourne being hit for no reason - once an all out nuclear war has reached that stage, I presume the authors of 'Square Leg' were assuming that the Soviets would target any and all population centres; after all, they had enough capacity to hit Britain with one gigatonne worth of strikes so in the end game virtually every town would become a target.
- Except population wasn't really the target. From what I remember, the Doomsday book points out that there were far more military targets in the UK than warheads, so wasting them on minor towns was crazy from a military standpoint: reliably knocking out a hardened military target might take four or five warheads. That said, 'Square Leg' wasn't intended for public consumption, so it was one of the more realistic British government exercises. Mark Grant 10:12, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
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- In densely populated Britain, "population" targets can't be separated from military ones because they're in such close proximity to each other, so there's no need to set aside warheads for civilians when they're going to get hit anyway. Also, groundburst nukes (used against hardened targets) make fallout, and this would blanket most of Britain--a "bonus" to quote Doomsday (think of the Buncefield smoke plume then times it by a million).
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- Yes and no. You're right that they didn't need to worry about targetting population centers because almost every one was in the blast zone or fallout zone from military targets, but that's a side issue as to whether some Soviet military planner would decide that dropping a multi-megaton bomb on Eastbourne was a good use of their resources; still, if I remember correctly one of the later exercises dropped a nuke on a mountain in Wales, so at least it's more realistic than that. BTW, you should sign posts so we know who's posting these comments. Mark Grant 12:41, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
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- The 1982 "Hard Rock" exercise, a home defence effort abandoned because of mass non-cooperation by local authorities, was even less realistic. "Hard Luck" included several near misses, maybe one was on a Welsh mountain - there's certainly a circle over Wales on page 104. - Some AOL user or another
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- "towns like Eastbourne being hit for no reason" -- Works like Warday and The Trudeau Papers (by Ian Adams) point out that it's reasonable to expect that some missiles will erroneously strike locations other than their intended targets, due to generic technical screwups, semi-effective anti-missile defenses, and the fact that the missiles are trying to navigate through a frikkin nuclear war. -- 201.50.251.197 13:53, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
