provide essential data to weapon designers.

This task entailed a large

commitment of Air Force equipment and personnel in an important and inherently high-radiation-exposure activity (Reference 29).

There was, finally,

the contribution of all the services to the weapon design experiments of
the joint task force as a whole through providing the support services ne~
cessary to conduct these experiments.

EFFECTS EXPERIMENTS
DOD effects experiments were conducted by

the Armed Forces Special

Weapons Project (AFSWP), a Joint Defense agency.

AFSWP solicited service

requirements for weapon effects information, assisted DOD laboratories in
the design of experiments, and coordinated planning and execution with the
AEC during the planning of the weapon design experiments

(Reference 7).

During test preparations, special construction requirements for the effects experiments were coordinated with the AEC base-support contractor
(TG 7.5).

The following guidelines were established as preselection cri-

teria for proposed experiments

(Reference 40, p.

15):

1.

Each project must be justified on the basis of a mil-

2.

Each project must be such that its objectives could
not be attained except by a full-scale test, and not
at NTS; furthermore, its objectives must be attainable at the PPG without unreasonable support
requirements

3.

Each project had to conform to the shot schedule
(yields, locations, burst heights) established for
the developmental program of the AEC.

itary requirement

The DOD effects program was organized as TU 13 and subdivided into
programs for the execution of experiments with functionally similar
objectives.

Blast and Shock (Program 1)
The blast and shock program was designed to investigate blast wave
propagation through the air, ground, and water.

168

A description of the

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