This is the infamous British calculator which doesn't add up.
At 30 psi peak static overpressure:
85% killed 25% trapped 3% untrapped but seriously injured
total: 113%
The error comes from the way these data were produced in 1959 for a U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch civil defence exercise called "Operation Arc".
They used conventional high explosive blast casualty data from WWII (German conventional air raids on London, plus V1 and V2 attacks, etc.), where the blast pressures hitting houses were worked out from the measured distance of the bomb crater to the house, while the bomb crater radius indicated the yield.
Something went wrong in the curves around 30 psi.
The calculator No 2 version was designed to correct the arithmetic.
In 1986, the Home Office finally replaced the empirical data for blast from WWII with an analysis based on nuclear test results and including the effect of the longer blast durations from nuclear weapons.
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This is the infamous British calculator which doesn't add up.
At 30 psi peak static overpressure:
85% killed
25% trapped
3% untrapped but seriously injured
total: 113%
The error comes from the way these data were produced in 1959 for a U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch civil defence exercise called "Operation Arc".
They used conventional high explosive blast casualty data from WWII (German conventional air raids on London, plus V1 and V2 attacks, etc.), where the blast pressures hitting houses were worked out from the measured distance of the bomb crater to the house, while the bomb crater radius indicated the yield.
Something went wrong in the curves around 30 psi.
The calculator No 2 version was designed to correct the arithmetic.
In 1986, the Home Office finally replaced the empirical data for blast from WWII with an analysis based on nuclear test results and including the effect of the longer blast durations from nuclear weapons.
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