Is The U.S. Waging Weather Warfare?

Could decades of U.S. government and military tampering with the weather be one of the hidden causes of erratic and violent weather in Michigan and elsewhere?

Since the United States was forced by public opinion to abandon convenlional ground warfare in Southeast Asia, the conduct of America 's running battle against socialism and self-determination in the Third World has become increasingly covert and increasingly anonymous. In Vietnam, the electronic battle field replaced ground troops, with American pilots night-bombing electronically-targeted populations they couldn't even see. In Chile, the U.S. and Western Europe used the withholding of international credit and the promotion of labor disorders to wreck the economy under Allende. When ground troops are still necessary, as in Angola, agencies like the CIA now use mercenaries whose paychecks are funneled through friendly nations to make them untraceable.

The obvious conclusion is that there is almost nothing, from sex to shellfish toxin, that the U.S. is unwilling to consider as a weapon in its all-out effort to keep world markets safe for corporate imperialism and maintain its supplies of vital raw materials, held largely by the Third World countries. The controversy over wheat sales to the Soviet Union raises the spectre of the U.S. starving out food-poor nations through its lopsided control of world food production.

Now it appears the U.S. is willing to go even further—to modify the weather of "enemy" nations in order to ruin their planting seasons, destroy harvests, and bring on famine. The U.S. government, led by the Department of Defense, has been developing weather modification technology for some time, has applied it in Southeast Asia, and may have experimented with it elsewhere.

The American military—and that of numerous other nations to whom this knowledge has been exported—now has the ability to produce intensified local rainfall by cloud seeding; to cause drought by over-seeding; to regulate fog, snow. hail, lightning, and cloud formations; and possibly to divert the courses of tropical storms.

When activity of this sort is combined with the extensive international use of weather modification for more benevolent purposes, it's not too difficult to imagine that the constant tampering with the ecosphere may be at least partially responsible for the changeability, severity, and violence of day-to-day weather in Detroit and almost anywhere else these days. Typically, however, only after years of tampering has the government finally begun to study the possible long-range effects of weather modification on local and worldwide climatic conditions.

Among the most important centers of weather mod research are Cambridge Research Laboratories at Hanscom Field outside Boston and the Navy's China Lake Base near Los Angeles. At least ten other nations have asked China Lake for assistance, and private weather modification concerns in the U.S. have contracted with at least 60 countries.

Although rainmaking experiments in the U.S. go back 80 years, weather warfare began to be taken seriously during World War II. Directly after the war, to the infinite disgust of Texas cattle farmers, the Air Force managed to repeatedly produce drought conditions in the Southwest. As private weathermaking corporations began to spring up, and the government showed increasing interest, Cold-War generals of course insisted that the U.S. should stay ahead of the Russians in the field.

As a result, the CIA first used weather fare over Hue in 1963, and according to disclosures before Sen. Claiborne Pell's subcommittee in 1974, the Pentagon spent $21.3 million flying over 2600 rainmaking sorties over Indochina tween 1967 and 1972. They succeeded in increasing rainfall as much as 30 percent in some areas, softening roads, A causing landslides, wash ing out river crossings, and generally worsening poor traffic conditions.

House hearings last September disclosed that the Thai government has also modified weather against liberation forces in its northeast sector.

In 1972, Radio Havana charged that the CIA had modified Cuba 's rainfall in order to ruin its sugar crop. In the following year, Rhodesia's neighbors accused the lan Smith regime of modifying their weather. And last year. Dr. Jorge Vivo, Director of the Geographic Research Center of the University of Mexico, charged that the U.S. artificially detoured Hurricane Fifi into the Honduras in order to save Florida's tourist industry.

The Air Force, Navy, and NASA all have a number of weather satellites aloft, collecting and computerizing information on cloud formations, temperature, and so forth, night and day, on a global basis.

Weather modification experts from the Air Force's Air Weather Service and other branches of the military frequently move on to private industry or to civilian government agencies involved in weather tampering research, including the Departments of Transportation, Interior, culture, and Commerce; the U.S. Weather Service and its parent organization, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration; the National Science Foundation; and the Atomic Energy Commission. Between 1961 and 1971, Commerce worked with the Defense Department to affect the course of four hurricanes.

The U.S. has done considerable work with missiles, whose exhaust materials can change atmospheric temperature and electron density, thus affecting rainfall. The military has also looked into altering the ozone layer around the globe, which could lower temperatures and cause wind shifts—subsequently affecting rainfall, desert belts, and sea levels.

Weather mod expert Cordon MacDonald explains (in Unless Peace Comes) how droughts can be brought about: "Preliminary analysis suggests that there is no effect 200-300 miles downrange, but that continued seeding over a long stretch of dry land clearly could remove sufficient moisture to prevent rain 100 miles downwind. This extended effect leads to the possibility of covertly removing moisture from the atmosphere, so that a nation dependent on water vapor crossing a competitor country could be subjected to years of drought. The operation could be concealed by the statistical irregularity of the atmosphere. A nation possessing superior technology in environmental manipulation could damage an adversary without revealing its intent."

Pierre St. Amand, Director of the Navy's China Lake Base, elaborated to the Pell subcommittee:

"Strategic use would be use that tended to upset set the economy of another country for a long period of time, or to cause extensive damage to the crops of that country . . . It might, to take a negative viewpoint, be advantageous to cause heavy rain during planting season to preclude sprouting and growth, and then to cause severe and protracted drought during the growing season in a country dependent on certain crops tor food and foreign exchange."

Hoping to avert such a genocidal scenario, the Senate two years ago passed a resolution calling for an international ban on weather modification. The House has yet to act on the resolution, but its international Relations Subcommittee is reportedly getting little cooperation from the Ford administration.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union have presented a draft treaty to the United Nations, but many arms control experts consider it weak, since it bans only long-term catastrophic use of weather modification and probably would not have outlawed the U.S. activities in Vietnam.

Until we have strong international controls on weather warfare and a government that can be expected to live up to them, we would be wise to think twice before attributing tragic weather developments, especially in the Third World, to the whims of "Mother Nature." And the larger question remains: If the U.S. can drown a country's planting season, scorch its harvests, and send a hurricane to devastate it, how long will it be before the ecosphere is totally out of whack and the forces loosed by weather warfare come home to haunt us?

Information for this article was drawn from Mark Looney's article, "Is the U.S. Waging Weather Warfare'", in the November 20, 1975 issue of WIN magazine. Box 54 7, Rifton, NY 12471. Used by permission.

"A nation dependent on water vapor crossing a competitor country could be subjected to years of drought. The operation could be concealed by the statistical irregularity of the atmosphere. A nation possessing superior technology could damage an adversary without revealing its intent."