Fixing the Sky (32 page)

During this operation, Grushin, his crew, and his plane were heavily exposed to radiation. He recalls that after he landed at the airport, he was ordered to park far from the hangar and his plane was greeted by technicians wearing anti-radiation suits and carrying sensors. They approached from an upwind direction, but soon turned around and ran away from the highly contaminated plane. Grushin and others said they flew seeding missions as early as two days after the explosion and continued their operations for months.

The decision makers applied a dose of utilitarian ethics in their attempt to use the technology at their disposal to spare millions from the radioactive cloud, yet inbred secrecy, ethnic prejudice, and a horrendous and criminal lapse of judgment prevented them from trying to mitigate the effects of their actions by warning the population in advance to stay indoors and by distributing potassium iodide tablets. According to Flowers, “It is quite clear that these actions did not take place.” The high levels of radiation found in Belarus have led to the frequent occurrence of leukemia, thyroid cancers, and birth defects. His informant Pazniak said the area had been devastated, and he blamed Moscow:

This was truly a pathological situation.

Intervention in a weather system, any weather system, carries immense ethical considerations. One of the moral pitfalls could be that trying to modify the weather in one place could actually cause a disaster elsewhere. This is true in localand regional-scale situations (Lynmouth and Chernobyl) as well as in large-scale instances (intervening in hurricanes and synoptic weather). It may also be true of the Earth's climate in general. Weather and climate are essentially very chaotic systems, and although they may be somewhat predictable on short timescales, in many cases surprises will arise from non-linear interactions. There are all sorts of unknowns. As Irving Langmuir told his audience at the 1953 lecture on pathological science, when you are examining new or threshold phenomena in science, it means that you do not know—
you really do not know—
whether you are seeing something important or not. In such cases, it is much better to err on the side of caution than to try to operationalize what is unknown. Ironically, by his own criteria, Langmuir's final undertaking—his involvement in weather and climate control—must be judged a pathological obsession and somewhat of a scientific dead end. Pathological science may be bad enough, but pathological engineering can actually create disasters. Remember this as you analyze the odd mixtures of wild speculation, faulty logic, poor experimental design, passionate certainty, and appeals to authority that so often arise in the fields of weather and climate control.

WEATHER WARRIORS

—EDWARD TELLER, QUOTED IN CHRISTOPHER STONE, “THE ENVIRONMENT IN MORAL THOUGHT”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN
an interview conducted in 2008, Colonel Don Berchoff, chief of U.S. Air Force Weather Resources and Programs, denied knowledge, interest, or involvement in techniques for controlling the weather: “I personally don't believe weather modification is a good thing, and I don't think the military believes in it.... The military does not conduct any kind of experimentation, that I understand, to control the environment to become more advantageous on the battlefield against our enemies.... We don't do that.... As far as I know.”
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We might take this at face value, or we might assume that particular individuals, of whatever rank, however highly placed or seemingly well informed, simply have no knowledge of ongoing top-secret research projects.

Just what do we know? We know that throughout history, weather has been a crucial factor in the outcome of wars and battles, and we know that the military has been a major patron in the development of weather science and services, providing logistical support and leadership for scientific field campaigns and running large-scale, even national, weather services. We know that the military has supplied important equipment for meteorological research, in some cases through new research-and-development projects in aviation, electronics, digital
computing, and space and in other cases through dual-use or surplus hardware. We know that the emergence of modern meteorology is, in many ways, a product of two world wars and the cold war. We also know that in the Vietnam era, only a very few people knew about secret cloud seeding over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, originating as it did directly from the White House. This dynamic continues today. Geoscientists with high-level security clearances share associations, values, and interests with national security elites. Both groups agree on the necessity of preserving deniability in top-secret programs. We know with certainty that historically, weather and climate control have been portrayed as weapons that might be used against enemies without their knowledge—or the knowledge of lowerlevel operatives and the wider public.

The military roots of meteorology can be traced from the deep past through the history of the cold war and Vietnam eras. In addition to traditional goals of being able to function and prevail under all environmental conditions, weather warriors have attempted to weaponize weather control. In the early cold war era, they were particularly active in experimentation on cloud seeding, in hurricane modification efforts such as Project Stormfury, and in rainmaking efforts in Vietnam. The United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD), which entered into force in 1978, marks the end of this era and serves as a landmark treaty that may have to be revisited soon to avoid or at least try to mitigate possible military or hostile use of climate control or geoengineering. If, as has been recently asserted but not yet demonstrated, “[c]limate change has the power to unsettle boundaries and shake up geopolitics, usually for the worse,”
²
it is certain that the governments of the world will have their strategic military planners working in secret on both worst-case scenarios and technological responses.

The weather has often been called the most violent variable in human affairs; that characterization could also apply to military affairs. Generals “mud” and “winter” and admiral “storm” have always had a big influence on the outcome of battles. Historians attribute the devastating defeat of the Roman general Varus and three of his legions in Germany in 9 C.E. to a combination of treachery, poor strategy, rough terrain, and bad weather; the kamikaze (divine winds), legendary protectors of Japan, destroyed Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's invading force not once but twice, in 1274 and 1281; and British history teaches that favorable winds and gales contributed mightily to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Military history is filled with weather lore. The Revolutionary Army's successful retreat from Long Island in August 1776 was said to have been enabled by night fog and favorable tides; five months later, General George Washington crossed the Delaware River by boat in a driving snowstorm and surprised the Hessian troops in New Jersey; and the ambush of General Nicholas Herkimer's volunteers in upstate New York in August 1777 was interrupted by the onset of a violent thunderstorm. Napoleon's attack on Russia, like those of generals before and after him, was thwarted by winter weather, while his battle plan at Waterloo was interrupted by heavy rains. In World War I, it was all quiet on the western front during mud season. In World War II, the miracle at Dunkirk took place under the cover of heavy fog, the Japanese carrier fleet skirted Pacific storms to launch its attack on Pearl Harbor, and the outcome of the Battle of Midway hinged on the ability of American dive-bombers to shield their approach behind the clouds.
³
The D-day invasion of Normandy in the unusually stormy month of June 1944 proceeded on the basis of the most critical set of forecasts in history.
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Of course, there are many more examples, with the winning side often considering a favorable outcome as an act of Providence.

A mutually supportive relationship has long existed among science, engineering, and the military. According to engineering legend, long before the birth of modern science, Archimedes designed and built a series of machines to keep the Romans at bay during the siege of Syracuse. Leonardo da Vinci's Renaissance drawings of war engines are also legendary. And in 1638, Galileo's
two
new sciences were astronomy and the strength of materials as applied to military engineering.
⁵

In later centuries, scientists often “hitched a ride” with army and navy exploring expeditions; scientists utilized military scope, organization, and discipline to collect data during field campaigns; and military institutions forged their identities in part around scientific and engineering agendas, leadership, and training. As the prestige of scientists grew, linked as it was to their power over nature, whether actual or perceived, military planners took note and became major patrons. Scientists gained state funding, approbation, and political power through governmental channels with direct links to the military. The French Academy had long supported scientific research for national interests, and the Russian Academy, founded in 1724, served the interests of the tsars and, after 1917, the technical needs of the Communist Party. The National
Academy of Sciences was established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art” whenever called on to do so by any department of the government. In the twentieth century, the task-oriented National Research Council coordinated scientific research during America's brief involvement in World War I; and during World War II, the National Defense Research Committee, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and the Manhattan Project demonstrated convincingly the absolute importance of promoting and supporting scientific research, development, testing, and evaluation of new weapons systems. In the cold war era, science became a prominent and permanent component of all modern militaries.
⁶

Links between science and the military—in perspectives, personnel, values, budgets, scale—have grown inexorably over the years. This “pursuit of power” in modern states, however, has come at a steep price. As was the case in Irving Langmuir's pathological enthusiasm for weather control, and in many other instances of what has come to be called “big science,” the military can act as a distorting force in the ongoing development of natural and engineering knowledge, specifically by imposing secrecy on new discoveries in the name of national security and seeking to weaponize every new technique, no matter how new or speculative, such as James Van Allen's discovery of the magnetosphere (chapter 7).
⁷

In the relationship between scientists and the military, it is safe to say that scientists seek support from the state and access to political power, while the state (especially the military) seeks power over nature as promised (and sometimes delivered) by scientists. Of course, transcending this dichotomy is the coproduction of the military-scientific-industrial state in which the various components are by no measure independent of one another. As geoscientists pursue knowledge of the Earth, they tend to focus their investigations on those areas in which technology and military interests have made resources readily available. In doing so, they go far beyond availing themselves of commercial, state, or military patronage; they actually contribute to the commodification, nationalization, and militarization of the natural world.
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