Dr. Graves: "In the case of testing weapons we try to avoid a situation where the device is detonated on the ground because we don't want to have this very heavy local fallout. we can. We would like to avoid this situation if We try therefore to use towers and make them as high as we.can, | or we use air bursts as in this chart, or we use balloons for holding the. device up. All of this is to avoid getting this mixture of dirt into the... cloud itself." So te While Dr. Graves was primarily talking about the Nevada site, the implications of his remarks are made graphically clear in the following passage from "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons": “Although the test of March 1, 1954 produced the most extensive local fallout yet recorded, it should be pointed out that the phenomenon was not. necessarily characteristic of (nor restricted to) thermonuclear explosions.” It is very probable that if the same device had been detonated at an appreciable distance above the coral island, so that the large fireball did not touch the surface of the ground, the early fallout would have been of insignificant proportions." (emphasis added) ‘ The Weather Sayings about the weather are usually connected with the inability of human beings to tell just what the weather is going to do next. For the average person, what kind of weather he will experience either adds to his comfort or discomfort. For those people responsible for the Nevada Proving Grounds, the whims of weather and wind conditions could cause more than just discomfiture--they could produce disease and death if they affected the fallout from an atomic weapons test. For this reason, weather monitoring and checking of wind directions and velocities was | of prime importance in Nevada, as shown by this passage from the Congressional hearings by Dr. Alvin C. Graves, of the Los Alamos Laboratory, who was test director for the Nevada Proving Ground. Dr. Graves: “Once we have finally come up with a plan whereby the total amount of fallout is minimized, then we have to come to face with the ‘problem of carrying on the tests such that even the fallout that does occur © will not hurt anybody. In order to do this, we have assembled in Nevada as competent a meteorological group as one can find anywhere, ‘his meteorological group tells us long in advance what the weather will be like, such that we Fos. ”