Fixing the Sky (33 page)

During the War of 1812, U.S. Army Surgeon General James Tilton, motivated by prevailing environmental theories of disease that linked illness and epidemics to weather and climate, issued a general order directing all the medical personnel under his command to prepare quarterly reports as part of their official duties
and to “keep a diary of the weather.”
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For the next six decades, the Army Medical Department continued its support for meteorology by observing, recording, and analyzing airs, waters, and places for the protection of the health of the troops. In the 1830s, the U.S. Navy also initiated a program to collect meteorological data at navy yards and aboard its ships. As discussed earlier, the army and navy supported James Espy's storm studies in the 1840s and 1850s while simultaneously downplaying his weather control eccentricities. Not long after, Charles Le Maout and Generals Edward Powers and Daniel Ruggles developed their notions about cannonading leading to disturbed weather and enhanced rainfall.

Between 1870 and 1891, the U.S. Army Signal Office administered the national weather service, providing daily weather reports and forecasts for the benefit of commerce and agriculture. Linked to Washington by military and commercial telegraph networks, the weather service served as a national surveillance force reporting to the government on a variety of threats to the domestic order, such as striking railroad workers, Indian uprisings on the frontier, locust outbreaks, and natural hazards to transportation, commerce, and agriculture.
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In World War I, meteorology took on new roles in warfare. Knowledge of lift, lob, and loft was needed for planes, shells, and poison gas, all of which rode the air currents. Meteorologists developed principles of battlefield climatology as they advised on how to launch and possibly survive poison gas attacks. In the newly minted field of aeronomy, or the study of conditions in the upper atmosphere, data collection from balloons, airships, and airplanes supported reconnaissance flights, the siting of aerodromes, and computations of the ballistic wind needed for long-distance artillery shelling. One proposal suggested using wind currents to carry balloons over enemy territory so that they might drop propaganda leaflets. As discussed earlier, with the rise of aviation, a desire to alter the weather, especially fogs, for the benefit of pilots got under way under military patronage.
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During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy trained approximately 8,000 weather officers, who were needed for bombing raids, naval task forces, and other special and routine operations worldwide. Personnel of the army's Air Weather Service (AWS), an agency that was nonexistent in 1937, numbered 19,000 in 1945. Even after demobilization, the AWS averaged approximately 11,000 soldiers during the cold war and Vietnam eras. In 1954 a National Science Foundation (NSF) survey of 5,273 professional meteorologists in America revealed that 43 percent of them were still in uniform on active duty, 25 percent held Air Force Reserve commissions, and 12 percent were in the Navy Reserve. Thus almost a decade after World War II, 80 percent of American meteorologists still had military ties. Postwar meteorology also benefited from new tools such as radar, electronic computers, and satellites provided by or pioneered by the military.
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The importance of weather to war and weather science to the military is reflected in the history of military interest in weather and climate control, a long-term relationship that deepened and intensified after World War II.

Early in 1947, the new cloud-seeding techniques developed at the General Electric Corporation led to crash military programs in weather control research. Could there be a weather weapon that would release the violence of the atmosphere against an enemy, tame the winds in the service of an all-weather air force, or, on a larger scale, perhaps disrupt (or improve) the agricultural economy of nations and alter the global climate for strategic purposes? At the time, Langmuir was very interested in the idea of starting a “chain reaction” in clouds—using a tiny amount of a “nucleating” agent such as dry ice, silver iodide, or even water—that could release as much energy as an atomic bomb. If this technique could be weaponized and controlled, it could be used surreptitiously and without radioactive fallout; moreover, it would be unidirectional, in that clouds seeded upwind (for example, west of the Soviet Union) would be carried to their targets by the prevailing winds. This was an attractive idea for cold warriors, since the use of weather modification as a weapon could easily be denied and any damage could be blamed on natural causes. Given the military and economic implications of the technique and the powers it promised its masters, meteorologists advised the military to launch an “intensive research and development effort.”
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Edward Teller—cold warrior extraordinaire, father of the H-bomb, and possibly the “real Dr. Strangelove”—recalled in his memoirs that Langmuir visited him at Los Alamos in the summer of 1947 and that he was “mostly interested in talking about cloud seeding; he talked so much about the amount of damage done by a storm his seeding had caused that I began to wonder whether he saw the technique as competition to the atomic bomb.”
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Although the timescales are different by many orders of magnitude, the total amount of energy released by a single thunderstorm is equal to that of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb. Moreover, a mature hurricane of moderate strength and size releases as much energy in a day as that of about four hundred 20-megaton hydrogen bombs. Such impressive numbers—despite the technical uncertainties involved in attempting to control storms—made Langmuir's comparisons between weather modification and nuclear weapons very popular in military circles. Langmuir and his GE team had the security clearances needed to work on the Manhattan Project—but they had not participated. Metaphorically, a seeded thunderstorm became Langmuir's
A-bomb, and like his nuclear peers, he tested his techniques in the desert of New Mexico and bombed clouds with a B-29 aircraft, the sister of
Enola Gay
and
Bockscar
, the planes that had delivered atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A seeded hurricane was, by analogy, Langmuir's “Super” or H-bomb, and he yearned to take his techniques to the South Pacific for basin-scale tests near Bikini Atoll.
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Langmuir talked openly to the press about the analogy. From a military perspective, he pointed out, cloud seeding could produce widespread drought and thus play havoc with an enemy's food supply and hydropower plants, or trigger torrential downpours sufficient to cause flooding, immobilize troop movements, and put airfields out of commission. In 1950 he claimed that weather control “can be as powerful a war weapon as the atom bomb.”
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Invoking the famous letter written by Albert Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 describing the potential power of an atom-splitting weapon, Langmuir recommended that the government seize on the phenomenon of weather control as it did on atomic energy. GE research director C. Guy Suits reinforced the nuclear analogy in his Senate testimony of March 1951, pointing out the “many points of similarity between the release of atomic energy and the release of weather energy,”
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including the immense energies involved, the chain reaction mechanisms common to both, the trans-boundary problems and the need for international agreements, and similar national defense and economic implications. Suits also highlighted key differences—such as the early stage of weather modification research, its small-scale experimental needs, and its lack of top-secret processes—but he ended up “placing his bets” on Langmuir's scientific judgment and argued that a central authority was needed, modeled after the Atomic Energy Commission.

Weather control had tactical dimensions as well. In Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1947, Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer demonstrated cloud-seeding techniques for the military's top brass. Invited to the show were the chief of naval operations, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz; the commander in chief of the Army Air Forces, General Carl A. Spaatz; and the U.S. Army chief of staff, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. A total of sixteen generals, seven colonels, and two GE vice presidents attended the demonstration. Among them were the deputy chief of staff of the War Department, the chief of the Army Engineer Corps, the chief of the U.S. Army Signal Office, the head of War Department Intelligence, and the chief of research and development for the Air Corps. The Pentagon's Joint Research and Development Board had the task of examining all the implications.
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By October, GE was discussing plans to develop “bullets of compressed carbon dioxide or silver iodide. Shot from the nose of a plane, these fifty-caliber tracer
bullets might cover a range of two miles in 30 seconds, change supercooled moisture in the path of the plane to ice crystals, and thus continuously dissipate an icing condition as the plane travels”—sort of shooting your way through the clouds.
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Remington Arms was the initial contractor, but the Army Ordnance Department soon took over the task.
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Schaefer sketched pseudo-military schemes to barrage the clouds with seeding agents, an array of armaments for battling the clouds that would have made General Robert Dyrenforth jealous (figure 6.1).

6.1 “Possible Methods for Seeding Supercooled Clouds and Ground Fog with Ice Crystal Nuclei,” February 6, 1947: Vincent Schaefer's military-inspired diagram for barraging the clouds. Techniques include delivery of seeding agents silver iodide (AgI), zinc oxide (ZnO), carbon dioxide (CO
₂
), and gas using aircraft, rockets, smoke generators, projectiles, and captive balloons. (SCHAEFER PAPERS)

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.
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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.”
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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).

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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