Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  The commercial cloud seeder Irving Krick was a weather warrior, too. He was so sure that weather modification worked that he once testified before a Senate subcommittee, “The nation that first acquires control of the weather shall be the leading power in the world.” He envisioned wild strategic applications, such as enhancing artificial precipitation, increasing radioactive fallout over nuclear targets, and dispersing bomb plumes in case of an attack on our own cities. In his view, waging weather warfare by producing both droughts and floods was well within the realm of possibility.21

  Because of the terrifying implications of the new technology, Senator Clinton P. Anderson (D-New Mexico) proposed federal regulation of rainmaking and related weather activities and introduced a bill in 1951 to provide for studies of the possible use of weather control in military operations. The Department of Defense viewed this idea as a threat to its autonomy and categorically opposed any new laws or agencies. In this, the department found strong support from the American Meteorological Society and the U.S. Weather Bureau. Meteorologist Horace Byers pointed out how unfortunate the analogy between weather modification and atomic weapons was at the time, since the weather bureau “was in the midst of a difficult task of assuring the public that atomic explosions were not changing and could not change large-scale weather.”22 As the agency responsible for guiding public policy in such matters, “it was forced into the unpleasant position of trying to restrain Langmuir who, because of his high standing in the scientific community, had strong support from scientists and the general public alike” (13).

  Military Research

  Cloud-seeding technology seemed to have such great military potential that, at the urging of Langmuir and Teller, Vannevar Bush, an MIT-trained engineer and a Washington insider, brought the issue to the attention of Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall and General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This was in 1951. Bradley immediately convened a “cushion committee” consisting of an admiral, a general, and weather bureau chief Francis Reichelderfer, which in turn appointed the special scientific Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Cloud Nucleation (ACN), chaired by meteorologist Sverre Petterssen, director of scientific weather services for the U.S. Air Force. In his memoirs, Petterssen referred to the ACN as an innocuous-sounding name “that did not suggest interest in secret weapons.”23 To add camouflage (Petterssen’s words), Dr. Alan T. Waterman, director of the NSF, was appointed a member.

  At the direction of General Bradley, and with the hope that a secret weapon might emerge from this technology, Petterssen’s ACN conducted a brief survey of the state of the field and recommended a program of technology development and statistically controlled experiments “to clarify major uncertainties.” 24 The U.S. Air Force, working with the University of Chicago, tried to modify thunderstorms by bombing cold clouds in the Midwest with dry ice and bombing warm clouds in the Caribbean with liquid water to test Langmuir’s chain reaction theory. For what purpose? The navy seeded midlatitude storm systems in an attempt to evaluate Langmuir’s claim that large-scale weather systems could be controlled. Again, for what purpose? The army tried to cut holes in cold stratus clouds using dry ice seeding. These tests were done in strategically sensitive areas of West Germany, Greenland, and Ellesmere Island. An air force project, however, determined that the most likely cause of ice fogs at air bases in the Arctic regions was pollution from the military’s own motor vehicles and aircraft. The army contracted with the consulting firm Arthur D. Little to try to modify warm stratus and fog using electrical and chemical agents, but with little success. Other ACN-sponsored experiments involved documenting the meteorological effects of nuclear explosions, trying to suppress jet contrails, and, in accordance with Schaefer’s vision, developing small tactical seeding rockets.25

  This series of experiments, run by the air force, the navy, and the army, was every bit as military-oriented as Project Cirrus, with better scientific advice and much better statistical controls (Petterssen claimed the “meteorological lambs” could no longer be thrown to the “statistical wolves”). The experiments ended in 1954, but because of security requirements, the final report was not published until 1957, when it appeared in a limited-circulation monograph published by the American Meteorological Society. The report claimed that the experiments were inconclusive and did not produce any significant results and that more basic research in cloud physics was needed before attempts at weather modification could be justified.26 But did the military reveal all that it had learned? Could it?

  Public Perceptions

  The ongoing debate over private, public, and military cloud seeding prompted Congress to pass a law establishing the Advisory Committee on Weather Control (ACWC) in 1953. Chaired by a presidential appointee, retired navy captain Howard T. Orville, the committee conducted no new experiments of its own but made site visits and collected testimony.27 Orville placed the military theme squarely before the public in a 1954 cover article in Collier’s that included scenarios for using weather as a weapon of war (figure 6.2). In one scenario, airplanes would drop hundreds of balloons containing seeding crystals into the jet stream and then return to their air bases. Downstream, when fuses on the balloons exploded, the seeding agents would fall into the clouds, initiating thunderstorms and disrupting enemy operations. The illustrations indicated that because of prevailing westerly winds, this technique might work as a unidirectional weapon for NATO nations confronting a tank column from the eastern bloc.

  6.2 Technocrat pulling the levers of weather control. Howard T. Orville’s article “Weather Made to Order?” focuses on weather warfare. (COLLIER’S, MAY 28, 1954)

  Although in Orville’s assessment total weather mastery would be possible only after four decades of intensive research, the spin-offs from this work, when combined with the maturation of electronic computers, would provide a completely accurate system of weather forecasting, perhaps within a decade: “I think it entirely probable that, in 10 years, your daily weather forecast will read something like this: ‘Freezing rain, starting at 10:46 A.M., ending at 2:32 P.M.’ or ‘Heavy snowfall, seven inches, starting today at 1:43 A.M., continuing throughout the day until 7:37 P.M.’”28 This sort of accuracy of prediction, even without weather control, would have major consequences for military operations. Orville, like Krick, was echoing the surety of earlier determinists. Orville thought it was “conceivable that we could use weather as a weapon of warfare, creating storms or dissipating them as the tactical situation demands” (25). A more insidious technique would strike at the enemy’s food supply by seeding clouds to rob them of moisture before they reached enemy agricultural areas. Orville wrote: “We might deluge an enemy with rain to hamper a military movement or strike at his food supplies by withholding needed rain from his crops.... But before we can hope to achieve all the benefits I have outlined, hundreds of meteorological unknowns must be solved at a cost of possibly billions of dollars” (25–26; emphasis added). Although speculative and wildly optimistic, such ruminations from an official source helped fuel a weather race with the Russians and the rapid expansion of meteorological research in all areas, but especially in weather modification.

  In December 1957, while Americans were still reeling from the psychological impact of the launch of the Soviet Union’s first Earth-orbiting satellite, the Washington Post and Times Herald informed its readers that there was a “new race with the reds” in the form of weather warfare.29 Newsweek picked up the story in its next issue. Again, Orville, whose final ACWC report was about to be released, was quoted indicating that the need to keep ahead of the Russians was more clear than ever: “If an unfriendly nation gets into a position to control the large-scale weather patterns before we can, the result could even be more disastrous than nuclear warfare.”30 The article also quoted Teller, an expert on hydrogen bombs but not on weather control, who told the U.S. Senate Preparedness Subcommittee: “Please imagine a world ... where [the Soviets] can change the rainfall over Russia ... and influence th
e rainfall in our country in an adverse manner. They will say, ‘we don’t care. We are sorry if we hurt you. We are merely trying to do what we need to do in order to let our people live’” (54). Henry Houghton at MIT expressed the same concerns: “I shudder to think of the consequences of a prior Russian discovery of a feasible method of weather control.... An unfavorable modification of our climate in the guise of a peaceful effort to improve Russia’s climate could seriously weaken our economy and our ability to resist” (54). At the time, by some estimates, the Soviet Union employed some 70,000 hydrometeorologists, more than three times as many as the United States. Harry Wexler reported that the Russians seemingly had unlimited access to funding. One of their leading academicians, K. N. Fedorov, had wondered if the Soviet Union was engaged in an international “struggle for meteorological mastery,” but paranoid cold warriors thought perhaps that meant also meteorological mastery over the free world.31 The distinguished aviator-engineer Rear Admiral Luis de Florez urged the U.S. government to “start now to make control of weather equal in scope to the Manhattan District Project which produced the first A-bomb.” He added the by-now-obvious militant twist: “With control of the weather the operations and economy of an enemy could be disrupted.... [Such control] in a cold war would provide a powerful and subtle weapon to injure agricultural production, hinder commerce and slow down industry.”32

  Project Stormfury

  In 1954 three damaging landfalling hurricanes, Carol, Edna, and Hazel, convinced members of Congress that funding was needed for a National Hurricane Research Project (NHRP), to be directed by the weather bureau using equipment on loan from the air force. Official histories claim that the NHRP was established to measure and model the storms, but in 1958 the research group employed silver iodide in an unreported and unpublicized attempt to modify Hurricane Daisy off the coast of Florida—in spite of the public relations disaster that had followed the Project Cirrus seeding of Hurricane King in 1947. Again, in 1961 Hurricane Esther reportedly displayed some apparent weakening after seeding. This encouraged meteorologists to develop a more aggressive hurricane modification project called Project Stormfury, a collaboration, initially between the weather bureau and the navy but later involving the air force, that operated from 1962 to 1983.33

  Both Robert H. (Bob) Simpson and Joanne (Malkus) Simpson were early directors of the project, which involved a team of scientists and technicians flying into mature hurricanes and seeding them using military equipment. According to an oral interview with Bob Simpson, Project Stormfury was conceived after a high-altitude visual reconnaissance flight into Hurricane Donna made by meteorologist Herb Riehl in 1960 that indicated a concentrated, perhaps supercooled, outflow region above the storm. Riehl called this feature the “chimney cloud”; Simpson thought it was worth trying to seed it to attempt to cause the eye of the hurricane to expand and perhaps weaken the storm. In 1967 one of the directors of Stormfury compared hurricane hunting to big-game hunting: “For scientists concerned with weather modification, hurricanes are the largest and wildest game in the atmospheric preserve. Moreover, there are urgent reasons for ‘hunting’ and taming them.”34

  The NSF provided some initial funding for Stormfury, but it was the U.S. Navy that was most interested in modifying and hopefully controlling the air–ocean environment. The navy’s vision of weather control involved using fog and low clouds as screens against enemy surveillance, calming heavy seas, and redirecting violent storms both to enhance its own operations and to interfere with enemy plans and operations. The wish list included the capability to change the intensity and direction of hurricanes and typhoons; produce rain, snow, or drought as desired; and “mdify the climate of a specific area”—all for the sake of military operations. As the navy saw it, the military problem in the field of weather modification and control was “to alter, insofar as possible, the environment surrounding the task force or target area so that the success of the naval operation is enhanced.”35 The Navy Weather Research Facility in Norfolk, Virginia, was designated a center for weather control experiments aimed at better understanding and controlling a vast array of atmospheric phenomena. The Naval Research Laboratory was involved in developing the equipment and instrumentation, while the Naval Ordinance Test Station, in China Lake, California, led by atmospheric scientist Pierre St. Amand, specialized in pyrotechnic units for seeding clouds with silver iodide. The navy’s vast array of instrumentation for basic cloud physics and atmospheric research and the availability of aircraft and crews made it a logical partner for scientists seeking support for field studies.

  Frustration mounted as Stormfury scientists began to realize that their hurricane-seeding hypotheses were flawed. First of all, hurricanes contain very little of the supercooled water that is necessary for effective silver iodide seeding. Also, the effects of seeding were so small that they were impossible to measure. Morale plummeted when Stormfury scientists learned that the navy intended to weaponize their research. St. Amand, in particular, wanted to learn how to intensify and steer hurricanes, certainly for tactical advantage but also perhaps as weapons of war. Bob Simpson recalled, without specifying the details, that St. Amand did not share his scientific values and “succeeded in throwing monkey wrenches into the works.”36 In 2007 Joanne Simpson, then a retired NASA employee, recalled in an on-camera interview, “I thought it was terrible—I mean all my life I’ve tried to work for the betterment of the planet and the people in a small way—and to use what I have done as some kind of a military thing. I obviously am very concerned and not happy about it.”37

  In October 1962, just as Stormfury was getting under way, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. A year later, Fidel Castro accused the United States of having waged strategic weather warfare by changing the course of Hurricane Flora. Although Flora was not seeded, its behavior was indeed suspicious. It hit Guantánamo Bay as a Category 4 storm and made a 270-degree turn, lingering over Cuba for four full days, with intense driving rains that caused catastrophic flooding, resulting in thousands of deaths and extensive crop damage. Nor was Cuba alone. Mexico denounced the United States for having caused a protracted drought “resulting from cloud seeding.” The response to these complaints, according to Bob Simpson, involved “restrictions of area and of conditions in which seeding would be allowed, restrictions to such degree that little hope remained to demonstrate statistically that hurricanes could be usefully seeded.”38 Meanwhile, plans were afoot to use operational cloud seeding in a real war—over the jungles of Vietnam.

  Cloud Seeding in Indochina

  Weather warfare took a macro-pathological turn between 1966 and 1972 in the jungles over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia when the U.S. military conducted secret operations intended to generate rain and reduce “trafficability” along portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which Hanoi used to move men and matériel to South Vietnam. In March 1971, nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about U.S. Air Force rainmakers in Southeast Asia in the Washington Post, a story confirmed several months later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and splashed on the front page of the New York Times in 1972 by Seymour Hersh.39 These reports confirmed that the U.S. government had tested its techniques in Laos in 1966 and had begun a top-secret program of operational cloud seeding in and around Vietnam in 1967. The code name of the field trial was Project Popeye, and the much larger operational program was known to the air force fliers as Operation Motorpool, sometimes referred to in news reports as Intermediary-Compatriot.

  In October 1966, Project Popeye, a clandestine, all-service military/civilian experimental program, seeded the skies over southern Laos to evaluate the concept of impeding traffic on Viet Cong infiltration routes by increasing the amount of rainfall and the length of the rainy season. It was hypothesized that excess moisture would soften road surfaces, trigger landslides, wash out river crossings, and in general maintain saturated soil conditions longer than would normally be expected. Af
ter seeding about sixty-eight cloud targets, the Popeye experimenters concluded, using their own techniques of analysis, that their interventions had caused “significant” increases in both cloud growth and precipitation and the operational feasibility of the technique had been clearly established.40 St. Amand, who had designed the seeding flares and was leading the project, claimed that “the first [cloud] we seeded grew like an atomic bomb explosion and it rained very heavily out of it and everybody was convinced with that one experiment that we’d done enough.”41 General Dyrenforth would have concurred.

  Operation Motorpool, which began on March 20, 1967, was conducted by air force fliers each year during the rainy monsoon season until July 5, 1972. This was done with the full and enthusiastic support of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and the U.S. State Department. General William Westmoreland was one of the few individuals privy to the details. The governments of Thailand, Laos, and South Vietnam were not informed, nor were the American ambassadors to those countries. After 1969, the administration of President Richard M. Nixon continued the program—and the secrecy.42

  Operating out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand, the Fifty-fourth Weather Reconnaissance Squadron flew three WC-130 and one or two RF-4 aircraft in more than 2,600 seeding sorties, expending almost 50,000 flares over a period of approximately five years at an annual cost of approximately $3.6 million.43 Air force pilot Howard Kidwell told how, out of curiosity, he volunteered for a secret mission, code-named Motorpool, and once he was approved for a higherlevel security clearance, was involved in trying to make rain over the Ho Chi Minh Trail:

  During the rainy season each crew flew once a day, on the average, in addition to regular missions. A “scout” plane (WC-130) would call back and “scramble” us—giving us a flight level, which was usually 19,000 [feet]. We would go into the roll cloud (or whatever you WX guys call it) by the side of each thunderstorm. When it got to raining like crazy we would pickle off a cart [fire a rack of silver iodide flares], count to 5, pickle off another one, and then you were out in the blue, made a 360 degree turn and, like magic, another thunderstorm had usually formed and you did the same thing again.44