148

DASA 2019-2

DUNHAM: There were a couple of heroic efforts. One was to
actually sample with rockets to find out what was coming down into

the air shortly alter the explosions, but the rockets all failed or

something went wrong. There was also quite a lot of effort to collect
stuff on barges and things. The NRDL was involved in this.
EISENBUD: When you say "heroic", what people were trying ta do
was slipthings in. Then you remember the way we laid 400 rafts and
couldn't find them afterwards. But this was all stuff that was done in
a hurry trying to fit our requirements into a achedule that was already
laid down and couldn't be changed.
DUNHAM: One of the big problems was simply the old business of
trying to guess where the wind is going to he if you're talking about
surface collecting, and they tried to get around that by a whole program
of rockets. Dr. Alvin Graves of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
and Dr. Willard Libby, then one of the AEC Commissioners, were

promoting this and it just fizzied.

[I don't know what happened to the

rockets, but they never did get much data.,.

TAYLOR: I think the reason that the experiment just is not done is

there's no place te doit. If what one wants is to tire a few megatons
on the surface of the dry land somewhere where there isn't a lot of
water involved, the question is where do you do it?

BUSTAD:

You can do it in China! [Leuchter]

EISENBUD:
portant point.
AYRES:

Granted.

And, of course, this is an extremely im-

What is it that we don't know?

EISENBUD: Would you want to set national policy based ona single
set of observations which yielded data which at best were just scavenged?
AYRES: Which types of data ace you referring to specifically? There's
much more than one set of data on this.
TAYLOR:

Not a megaton.

AYRES: There's a lot of kiloton data that's very different and some
megaton data (Reference 34).

Select target paragraph3