Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
dam the Bering Strait and use nuclear power plants to pump warm Pacific
Ocean water into the Arctic Ocean, again melting the ice caps to provide
the Soviet Union with warm-water ports at the expense of American
coastal cities, which would be inundated. Finally, and perhaps worst of all,
Orville cited German doctor Hermann Oberth, who foresaw “a gigantic
mirror 'hung' in space” that would “focus the sun's rays as a giant magnify-
ing glass at any desired intensity and beam” in order to protect orchards
from frost, melt ice in ports, or serve any number of less innocent climatic
purposes.
45
Orville's paper— and the broader concern over weather and climate
modification— reflected extreme anxiety over Russian scientific superior-
ity in the wake of the 1957
Sputnik
launch. Both government science boost-
ers and congressional Democrats took advantage of this anxiety.
46
Lyndon
Johnson in particular began to attack President Eisenhower for the admin-
istration's insufficient support of American science. Weather and climate
control research was a prime area in which the United States must not get
caught sleeping. An obscure Russian manuscript that appeared in English
around 1961,
Man vs. Climate,
later revealed that by the late 1950s Russian
scientists had in fact begun to conceptualize large-scale climate modifi-
cation scenarios. Even so, hawkishness and hyperbole, rather than intel-
ligence, pervaded the rhetoric of climate control in Cold War America.
47
“From space,” declared Johnson at the Democratic Caucus in January of
1958, warning of the technologically and scientifically superior Russians,
“the masters of infinity could have the power to control the earth's weather,
to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the level of the
sea, to divert the Gulf Stream, and change temperate climates to frigid.”
48
Echoing his Democratic colleagues and the scientists who had their
ears, Johnson advocated for more government funding, both for weather-
modification research specifically and for science in general. Thus did
weather and climate modification, alongside forecasting, general circula-
tion modeling, and CO
2
monitoring, become central to the developing
agenda of Cold War atmospheric science in America.
Big science, Broad science
As American atmospheric scientists began to articulate their field's research
agenda in the late 1950s, they also began to think about what institutional
