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 would like to avoid this situation if
we can,
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."
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
» dl
“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 earlyfallout would have
oor
Effects of Nuclear Weapons":
we =
been of insignificant proportions." (emphasis added)
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.
“Once we have finally come up with a plan whereby the total
Dr. Graves:
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
In order to do this, we have assembled in Nevada as
will not hurt anybody.
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The Weather