Fixing the Sky (31 page)

Langmuir retired from GE on January 2, 1950, after a forty-year career with the company. The press release referred to him as a “world-famous scientist who is regarded as the greatest of modern times,” a man “who continually embarks upon mental voyages in regions so nearly airless that only the mind can breathe in comfort.” He invented the gas-filled incandescent lamp, the high-vacuum power tube, atomic hydrogen welding, a highly efficient smoke screen generator, and methods for artificial production of snow and rain from clouds, and received
the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932. GE also announced that he would continue working in a consulting capacity, primarily with Project Cirrus.
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Even in retirement, Langmuir continued to make increasingly outrageous claims. He was a featured speaker at the National Academy of Sciences annual meeting held in Schenectady in October 1950. There, on the occasion of receiving the John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, presented by NAS president D. W. Bronk, he reiterated his claim that silver iodide seeding in New Mexico on July 21, 1949, had produced 0.1 inch of rain over an area of 33,000 square miles and could have led to unusually heavy rains and flooding in Kansas a few days later, 700 to 900 miles downwind. Suits must have been in the audience, and he must have been seething.
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Distinguished meteorologist Charles Hosler tells of an encounter with Langmuir at a symposium at MIT in 1951 where the seventy-two-year-old scientist was again describing how cloud seeding had apparently changed the course of a hurricane off the coast of Florida, causing it to veer westward and hit Savannah, Georgia. When the twenty-seven-year-old Hosler, with a newly minted doctorate in meteorology, pointed out that forecasters had attributed the change in the hurricane's direction to steering currents in the larger-scale circulation, and that the small amount of ice generated by cloud seeding would have been overwhelmed by naturally occurring ice in the storm, Langmuir, in essence, replied that Hosler “was so stupid that [he] didn't deserve an explanation and that [he] should figure it out.”
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During a meeting break, Henry G. Houghton, the chair of the Department of Meteorology at MIT, took Hosler aside and explained to him that Langmuir's attitude stemmed from his belief that cloud seeding was his greatest scientific discovery and he had no time or patience to listen to objections—yet another characteristic of pathological science.

Langmuir had made such claims early and often. He spoke about how Project Cirrus had redirected Hurricane King at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in November 1947, only a month after the event. He made similar claims on national television on the
Today Show
when it broadcast from Schenectady, the hometown of host Dave Garroway.
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Throughout his life, Langmuir made claims for weather control that could not be substantiated by meteorologists. Storms of controversy raged for years between Langmuir and the U.S. Weather
Bureau, although the bureau, too, had a vested interest in the techniques (chapter 8). When the weather bureau's cloud physics experimenters failed to produce significant precipitation from either summer cumulus or winter stratus, they concluded that the findings of Project Cirrus were largely unsubstantiated and the redirection of Hurricane King was a “colossal meteorological hoax.”
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They found no evidence to show spectacular precipitation effects and filed a conservative assessment of the economic importance of cloud seeding.
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Although Langmuir remained enthusiastic about the potential benefits of large-scale weather and even climate control, he changed his tactics in 1955 by warning of possible dangers of experiments gone awry and suggested that the cloud-seeding trials be moved to the wide-open spaces of the South Pacific. In a speech presented in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he expressed his personal belief that widespread and devastating droughts, such as the Southwest had experienced in 1949, could be triggered by trying to make it rain elsewhere, and that the floods in Kansas in 1951, in which forty-one people had died, were caused by a military cloud-seeding experiment. “We need research, much more research,” he said, and it would be best to move the experiments to the South Pacific, “where there is less population” (and less likelihood of litigation).
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In his 1955 report to the congressionally mandated Advisory Committee on Weather Control, Langmuir said that experimenters look for “big effects,” extending over continental distances, and interactions between seeding and planetary circulation patterns, including hurricanes and especially typhoons in the South Pacific: “There are obvious reasons for not experimenting with hurricanes near the coast of North America, but it would seem very important to learn how such storms can be controlled. This would require experimentation with typhoons far from any inhabited lands.”
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Langmuir recommended three types of Pacific experiments: (1) intervention in mature storms, as Project Cirrus had done with Hurricane King, but with no one living in the way; (2) large-scale experiments across the entire region to see if regular seeding with silver iodide could trigger typhoons to start prematurely, perhaps producing more-frequent storms of lower intensity; and (3) intervention in nascent storms, not necessarily to stop the storm or prevent it from forming, but to “
control its path
” (emphasis added).
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Langmuir wanted to go to Bikini Atoll to redirect typhoons or possibly slosh the entire Pacific basin circulation, as El Niño is now known to do. In doing so, he was expanding the nuclear analogy from “chain reactions in cumulus clouds” (with energy similar to the detonation of an A-bomb) to control of typhoons on and even beyond the energy released by H-bomb tests.
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While researchers were struggling for verifiable results, an uncritical, determined, and enthusiastic band of private meteorological entrepreneurs, operating primarily in the West and Midwest, had appropriated the new technology and succeeded in placing nearly 10 percent of the land area of the country under commercial cloud seeding. The annual cost of this plan to farmers and municipal water districts was $3 million to $5 million. The spread of this practice generated numerous public controversies that pitted weather control entrepreneurs and their clients against weather bureau officials. Third parties often claimed damages purportedly caused by cloud seeding. In 1951, for example, New York City was facing 169 claims totaling more than $2 million from Catskill communities and citizens for flooding and other damages attributed to the activities of a private rainmaker, Dr. Wallace E. Howell. The city had hired Howell to fill its reservoirs and, at least initially, claimed that Howell had succeeded. When faced with the lawsuits, however, city officials reversed their position and commissioned a survey to show that the seeding was ineffective. Although the plaintiffs were not awarded damages, they did win a permanent injunction against New York City, which terminated further cloud-seeding activities; further litigation stopped just short of the Supreme Court. As discussed earlier, this prompted Colonel John Stingo to comment on the incivility of it all.
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“State Farmers Wage Fight For, Against Rain,” reported the
Seattle Times
on June 14, 1952: “Cloud formations moving toward the Yakima and Wenatchee Valleys are being bombarded daily in secret, opposing experiments financed by wheat-growers who want rain and fruit growers who don't. One set of attacks is designed to punch holes in the clouds to bring rain. The other seeks to disperse the clouds without rainfall.” Both “wet” and “dry” campaigns were being waged with competing ground-based silver iodide generators. One array was deployed by the Water Resources Corporation of Denver, which was attempting to make rain for the wheat growers; the other array, deployed by Olympia meteorologist Jack M. Hubbard, was run continuously to “overseed” the clouds and ward off rain for the fruit growers—a domestic version of cloud wars (figure 5.4).

Although cloud seeding has never been proved to cause or augment precipitation directly, it has been implicated in weather-related disasters. On the night
of August 15, 1952, a sudden and appalling tragedy struck the little seaside resort of Lynmouth in Devonshire, England, when 6 to 9 inches of torrential rain drenched the area and a flash flood ripped through the town's main street, killing thirty-five people outright and injuring many others. A contemporary newsreel called it the “most destructive storm in British history,” but was it a natural one? Within days of the catastrophe, there were rumors of governmentsponsored experiments being conducted nearby, which the Meteorological Office and the Ministry of Defence flatly denied. Decades later, requests for weather control documents and research in the archives revealed only one thing: a gap in the records for that year. In preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) obtained Royal Air Force flight records and interviewed one of the participants in the experiment, glider pilot Allan Yates, now deceased, who described the secret cloud-seeding trials going on at the time, called Operation Cumulus, alternatively known as Operation Witch Doctor.

5.4 Cartoon emphasizing commercial applications of weather control, accompanying Vincent Schaefer's lecture for the meeting of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (SCHAEFER PAPERS)

Yates recalled, “We'd assembled in Cranfield in Bedfordshire in mid-August 1952 studying clouds. On the day I'm recalling, the weather was superb, but the cotton ball cumulus clouds were going everywhere, and it was decided to make
them rain.” After he and his team had sprayed “salt” into the clouds, he was told that it had rained heavily some 50 miles away: “I circled down between the clouds, still doggedly noting temperature, height, time and the rest. Eventually far below I saw a sodden-looking countryside. Toasts were drunk to meteorology. [We] certainly had made it rain.” But when he and his colleagues heard the news of the flood, he recalled, “a stony silence fell on the company.” More than fifty years after the event, it is impossible to say if cloud seeding really did trigger the flooding, or if it was just an unfortunate coincidence. What is clear is that the British government, anxious not to be blamed, closed down the project and denied that it had ever taken place.
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Other cases where cause and effect cannot be proved include Langmuir's claims that seeding redirected Hurricane King in 1947 and could have caused the Midwest floods of 1949 and 1951. So, too, was a famous flood disaster in 1972 in Rapid City, South Dakota, where, at the time, large-scale weather modification trials were under way. In that case, there was widespread official state and public support for the experimentation. A much more sinister case, however, occurred in 1986 in the Soviet Union.

For decades, the Soviet Union had seeded clouds before they reached Moscow, hoping to prevent rain from falling on big military parades. This seemed both harmless and foolish, like hail shooting or the weather control promised by the Chinese for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Evidence has recently come to light that the Soviet authorities also used cloud-seeding technology to clear the air after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine exploded in 1986, melted down, and caught on fire, spewing hundreds of tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere. It was the most horrific nuclear power plant accident in history. Again, the BBC took the lead in uncovering the links to cloud seeding.
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Following the incident, there was a buildup of heavily radioactive rain clouds above Chernobyl. The prevailing winds were blowing toward Russia and its major cities, like Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the rain never reached that far. Instead, very heavy rains fell in rural Belarus, in a region located between Chernobyl and Moscow. In 1992 Dr. Allan Flowers, a British ecologist studying radioactivity patterns downwind of the reactor, discovered that extremely high levels of fallout had been deposited in the Gomel area of Belarus, some 60 miles north of the power plant. Many children were showing the effects of internal radiation poisoning, but how was that possible more than 100 miles from the reactor? One possibility was Soviet cloud seeding.

Eyewitnesses told Flowers of experiencing very heavy rain after the incident and noticing airplanes in the sky trailing colored smoke. After the planes had passed, the black rainfall started. Dr. Zianon Pazniak, a Belarussian scientist and
politician, is convinced that to save Moscow, the Soviet authorities deliberately rained down radioactive material on Belarus without notifying local inhabitants. After issuing this accusation, he feared for his life and decided to live in exile. Authorities in Moscow denied such allegations, but in 2006, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Major Alexsei Grushin, a former military pilot who received an award for cloud-seeding operations during the Chernobyl cleanup, shared his testimony: