Governor Lee sure had a couple of beautiful! daughters.
Previous work had shown that such detonations @ffected ‘long range
communication seriously.
DASA therefore set up communication gear over
—
the entire pacific basin,
including granger sounders to observe the move-
ments of the ionésphere as they might be affected by the detonation.
|\t was recognized that one of the necessary inputs into the calculations
of radar attenuation would be the x-ray characteristics of the ouput of
the bombs.
!t was therefore clearly necessary to measure this quantity )
both the DOD thru The use of small
rockets from Johnston and the AEC using
small rockets from Kewin and Vandenberg tackled this experiment.
The AEC
because of the interest in remote detection, engendered through the Vela
program at the same timeTook on the job of measuring the neutron spectrum
by time of flights from detonation above Johnston Island to rocket-borne
detectors above
*
in Hawaii.
DASA also arranged for actual debris collection from high altitude balloons
at the southern conjugate point.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, consideration for the other parts of the
operation were taking place.
The AEC laboratories 2 had a few months
experience with underground testing in Nevada.
It was quite clear that
the larger devices that needed testing could not be tested there in any
reasonable length of time.
This was all
in the atmosphere of suspicion
on the part of the laboratories that a test ban@ treaty would be signed
fairly soon so there was urgency to get a number of warheads and possible
warhead designs tested.
Mrey
The very beginnings of the Meme possibilities were
showing up and both weapons laboratories wanted to test several! possible
designs of 100 kiloton and [00 Ib. devices.
rN
A few large devices had been put in