Political Science 378

Use Of KP Program And Excel Spreadsheet

In order to do assignment, you must use the program KP to calculate kill probabilities, and the Excel spreadsheet emts10.xls to calculate surviving EMT. If you would like, bring me a diskette and I will give you copies of each.

You can also e-mail a request for the program and the spreadsheet. I will send them as attachments to my returning e-mail message.

How To Use KP and the Spreadsheet

  1. To use KP, just type kp. It would be very helpful if you had access to a printer.

  2. To calculate the kill probabilities first reply "y" for use of the printer, then press the ENTER key. You will be asked to enter the following information: the yield of the weapon, the CEP of the weapon, the reliability of the weapon, and the hardness of the target. Reply "y" if you need to do another calculation. When you reply "n," the program will end and your output will be printed.

  3. After you have finished planning your attack, to calculate the total amount of EMT, start up Excel and read in the spreadsheet. Enter the surviving number of each weapon type in the Post Attack column with the heading # of SNDV. You know you are in the right column if it is shaded. Do not change any other columns in the spreadsheet.

Some Hints

I recommend that you proceed as follows.

  1. First, use KP to calculate all the Pk2,2 values.

  2. For each attack, rank the attacker's missiles from high to low on Pk2,2 value, also noting the number of pairs of each warhead for each type of missile. This will tell you the maximum number of silos you can attack.

  3. Rank the defender's missiles from most to least dangerous. Also note the number of silos for each missile type; this is the number of targets you must hit.

  4. Then start to allocate warheads to silos. Start by going best to best (best attacking warheads against best -- most dangerous -- missiles). Calculate how many defender silos are destroyed and how many warheads you have remaining. Proceed down your lists in this manner. When you are done, you now know how many missiles remain on each side. For the attacker, this is the number of missiles that were not fired. For the defender, this is the number of silos that survived the attack, plus the number of silos that were not attacked.

  5. Now go use the Excel spreadsheet to calculate the surviving EMT for each side.

If you have any problems, contact me.

Richard J. Stoll
Professor of Political Science
email:stoll AT rice DOT edu