Rugged, self-recording gauges had been developed for blast and thermal
radiation measurements by 1954 so that complete loss of data from a project would not occur
heavy fallout.
if
instrument recovery were delayed,
for example,
by
For nuclear radiation measurements, however, prompt data
recovery was still desirable because the gauges used might be thin foils
of material that would be made radioactive by the burst-time neutrons;
hence, early observation was necessary, before the information contained
in the induced radiation pattern decayed away.
The potential for radiation exposure of personnel responsible for environmental measurements in general depended on their proximity to the device and the time that elapsed between detonation and instrument recovery,
as was the case for weapon development experimentation:
the nearer in
space or time to the detonation, the greater the potential for exposure.
SYSTEMS RESPONSE EXPERIMENTS.
To document the response of systems to
the hostile environment, military hardware (such as aircraft or naval
mines)
was exposed to the effects of nuclear detonations.
The techniques used for ‘the systems response experiments were conceptually simple:
response.
exposure of the system of interest and observation of its
Actual conduct of the experiments was far more complex.
The
level of the threat to which the system was exposed almost always required
documentation so that the response could be properly understood, necessitating an environmental experiment along with the systems response experiment.
It was often not enough to know whether the system survived, but
rather, the response of the component parts and their interactions was
required, entailing the placement of sophisticated instrumentation and
recording devices.
While the potential radiological exposure for these systems response
experiments was governed primarily by the closeness in space or time, an
additional problem arose.
Often, when the subject of the exposure itself
was recovered for closer examination,
it could be contaminated by device
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