The Calculation of a Miracle: The Persian Gulf War, 1991
On January 17, 1991, a coalition of armed forces from 34 countries led by the United States started operation Desert Storm to liberate recently-conquered Kuwait from Iraq. Iraq began its retaliation the next day. Over a period of several weeks, 39 modified Scud B (Al Hussein) missiles were fired at Israel, with 14 exploding in highly-populated residential areas of Tel Aviv and Haifa. (The remainder of the Scuds were either duds, or landed in the wilderness, in the Mediterranean, or were intercepted by U.S. Patriot anti-missile missiles.) Two Israelis were directly killed by these Scuds, and 11 were seriously injured.
In 1993, a scientific paper written by Fetter, Lewis, and Gronlund, entitled “Why Were Scud Casualties So Low?” was published in the prestigious British scientific journal Nature.[1] An expanded and more detailed version of the paper appeared a few months later.[2] The low casualty rate had attracted professional scientific interest. The paper uses a standard mathematical formula to predict the number of casualties expected in a missile attack. The formula is an extrapolation from past missile attacks and takes into account three parameters that modify the extrapolation: a) the size of the warhead, b) the population density, and c) whether there was warning of the attack.
