Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and his colleagues Bernard Vonnegut and Vincent Schaefer pioneered
small- and medium-scale weather-control projects that appealed to both
military and civilian agencies. The discourse on weather and climate con-
trol quickly grew to involve both domestic and foreign policy interests and,
again, in both realms Cold War security was never far below the surface.
Domestically, weather control projects promised to tackle real problems
and, like most federal initiatives, to bring money to the states in which they
were conducted. Boosters claimed that Langmuir's method of cloud seed-
ing might disperse fog at airports, help alleviate droughts, or re direct dan-
gerous storms— all of which appealed to members of Congress, especially
those from the arid American West and the hurricane-prone Southeast.
In the 1940s and 1950s, most of the applied weather-modification research
in the United States was conducted with small-scale domestic projects in
mind.
39
In 1953, Congress created an Advisory Committee on Weather
Control to oversee these projects.
40
The military— and especially the air force— was also interested in local
and regional weather modification. Techniques that could benefit civilians
at home might also be put to effective military uses abroad. Fog disper-
sal could help create an all-weather air force, for example. Rainmaking
could slow an enemy's communications and supply routes— a strategy the
air force later secretly employed during the Vietnam War.
41
More insidi-
ously, the same techniques used to avoid drought could be used to create
it, wreaking havoc on an enemy's food supply— a great asset in a nonshoot-
ing war.
42
The possibilities seemed endless, for as Langmuir took pains to
point out, the energy available in cumulous clouds exceeded that of even
an atomic bomb.
43
In addition to these local and regional applications, larger-scale weather
modification also had military and foreign policy implications, especially
in terms of geophysical warfare more generally. In a paper presented to
Congress in 1958, retired navy captain Howard T. Orville enumerated the
ways in which humans might intentionally or unintentionally alter the
weather or climate.
44
Coincidentally, one of his first points involved the
unintentional warming of the earth through CO
2
. Carbon dioxide was
small potatoes compared to what might result from intentional weather
modification, however. The Russians might spread colored pigments over
the poles in order to absorb solar energy and ultimately melt the ice caps,
causing a drastic change in the local and even global climate. They might
