ABSTRACT
There have been so many terrorist attacks in recent years on commercial, government and private buildings that a considerable bank of information exists on structural behaviour in the face of man made explosions. There have been spectacular gas and vapour cloud explosions in many countries of the world, all well documented and the subject of subsequent structural investigation. But a number of classic investigations of the effect of aerial bombing on civil buildings were made during the Second World War, and it is sensible to take as a starting point the papers by Thomas [8.1] and Baker, Leader Williams and Lax [8.2] that appeared in the Civil Engineers in War, published by the UK Institution of Civil Engineers in 1948. The diagrams and photographs look remarkably similar to those accompanying articles written in 1994 on the effect of terrorist bombing on the City of London.
