Fixing the Sky (35 page)

Operation Motorpool, which began on March 20, 1967, was conducted by air force fliers each year during the rainy monsoon season until July 5, 1972. This was done with the full and enthusiastic support of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and the U.S. State Department. General William Westmoreland was one of the few individuals privy to the details. The governments of Thailand, Laos, and South Vietnam were not informed, nor were the American ambassadors to those countries. After 1969, the administration of President Richard M. Nixon continued the program—and the secrecy.
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Operating out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand, the Fifty-fourth Weather Reconnaissance Squadron flew three WC-130 and one or two RF-4 aircraft in more than 2,600 seeding sorties, expending almost 50,000 flares over a period of approximately five years at an annual cost of approximately $3.6 million.
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Air force pilot Howard Kidwell told how, out of curiosity, he volunteered for a secret mission, code-named Motorpool, and once he was approved for a higherlevel security clearance, was involved in trying to make rain over the Ho Chi Minh Trail:

Although some claimed that Operation Motorpool induced from 1 to 7 inches of additional rainfall annually along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, no scientific
data were collected to verify the claim. General Westmoreland thought there was “no appreciable increase” in rain from the project. Even if the cloud seeding had produced a tactical victory or two in Vietnam (it did not), the extreme secrecy surrounding the operation and the subsequent denials and stonewalling of Congress by the military resulted in a major strategic defeat for military weather modification.
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Typical of the cover-up during this period was the Air Weather Service annual survey report on weather modification for 1971, which contained brief accounts of cold and warm fog dissipation experiments, one precipitation augmentation trial, and illustrations of its equipment; of course, there was no mention of the (still) top-secret Operation Motorpool.
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Even after the scandal broke, the official history of AWS weather modification in the period 1965 to 1973 contained no mention of military cloud seeding in Vietnam, admitting only, in vague and bland terminology, that “AWS's
current
operational weather modification capabilities include airborne and ground based cold fog dissipation and precipitation augmentation” (emphasis added).
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Under the heading “Precipitation Augmentation,” the report claimed that AWS efforts “have been few indeed” but did admit to having seeded over the entire Philippine archipelago in 1969 for drought relief for the benefit of agriculture. A short section titled “Other Activities” mentioned hurricane seeding in Project Stormfury and “participation” in several non-AWS weather modification projects, both as observers and as project workers, to keep abreast of the field and to find new techniques applicable to air force and army operations. Read between the lines.

In 1973 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report,
Weather and Climate Modification:
Problems
and Progress
(emphasis added). The panel, chaired by Thomas Malone, a cold war–era meteorologist with high-level security clearances, prefaced its report with this bald statement: “During the course of this study, no attempt was made by the Panel to examine ... or to ascertain the existence of classified experimental programs in weather modification.”
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Yet the field's largest
problem
at the time was the recently revealed militarization of cloud seeding in Vietnam. The prime example of stonewalling, however, came from President Richard Nixon's secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1972 that there was no cloud seeding going on over North Vietnam but never mentioned that Operation Motorpool was still functioning over Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.
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Project Popeye and Operation Motorpool were neither the first use of weather modification as a weapon of war nor the first use in Asia. Cloud seeding
was apparently used in Korea in 1950 to clear out cold fogs. In 1954 the French High Command announced in connection with the besieged French forces at Dien Bien Phu that “it will try to wash out Vietminh communication routes from Red China with man-made rainstorms as soon as cloud conditions permit.”
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Confirming this, a Vietnamese account of the battle reported that the French had shipped 150 baskets of activated charcoal and 150 bags of ballast from Paris “for the making of artificial rain aimed at impeding our movement and supply.”
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Moreover, the Central Intelligence Agency seeded clouds in South Vietnam as early as 1963 in an attempt to disperse demonstrating Buddhist monks after it was noticed that the monks resisted tear gas but disbanded when it rained. Cloud-seeding technology had also been tried, but proved ineffective, in drought relief efforts in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Okinawa, and elsewhere. All the programs were conducted under military sponsorship and had the direct involvement of the White House. In 1967 St. Amand participated in Project Gromet, a secret effort to employ weather modification in India to mitigate the Bihar drought and famine and to achieve U.S. policy goals in this strategically important region.
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Operation Motorpool, made public as it was at the end of the Nixon era, was called the Watergate of weather warfare. Some argued that environmental weapons were more “humane” than nuclear weapons. Others suggested that inducing rainfall to make travel more difficult was preferable to dropping napalm; and the Fifty-fourth Weather Reconnaissance Squadron was directed, in the jargon of the era, to “make mud, not war.” St. Amand tried to put a benign spin on the project when he claimed that “by making the trail more muddy and trafficability difficult, we were hoping to keep people out of the fight.”
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Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, represented the mainstream of scientific opinion, however, when he wrote to Senator Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island): “It is grotesquely immoral that scientific understanding and technological capabilities developed for human welfare to protect the public health, enhance agricultural productivity, and minimize the natural violence of large storms should be so distorted as to become weapons of war.”
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Prominent geoscientist Gordon J. F. MacDonald observed that the key lesson of the Vietnam experience was not that rainmaking is an inefficient means for slowing logistical movement on jungle trails but “that one can conduct covert operations using a new technology in a democracy without the knowledge of the people.”
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The dominant opinion was that seeding clouds—like using Agent Orange or the Rome Plow, setting fire to the jungles or bombing the irrigation dikes over North Vietnam—was but one of many sordid techniques involving war on the environment that the military used in Vietnam.

In 1972 Senator Pell, following the hearings, introduced a resolution calling on the U.S. government to negotiate a convention prohibiting the use of environmental or geophysical modification activities as weapons of war. Testifying to the Senate, Richard J. Reed, president of the American Meteorological Society, cited earlier bans on chemical and biological warfare and atmospheric nuclear testing and urged the government to present a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly that pledged all nations to refrain from engaging in weather modification for hostile purposes. Citing a 1972 public policy statement of the society, he referred to the primitive state of knowledge in the field and the difficulties of controlled experimentation during military operations. The testimony of other prominent atmospheric scientists stressed the need to protect open and peaceful international scientific cooperation.
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Despite the opposition of the Nixon administration, the Senate adopted the resolution in 1973 by a vote of 82 to 10. Representative Donald M. Fraser (D-Minnesota) led a parallel effort in the House.

In May 1974, Senator Pell placed the formerly top-secret Department of Defense briefing on cloud seeding in Vietnam into the public record. Less than two months later, at the Moscow summit, President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the “Joint Statement Concerning Future Discussion on the Dangers of Environmental Warfare,” expressing their desire to limit the potential danger to humankind from the use of environmental modification techniques for military purposes whose effects would be “widespread, long-lasting and severe.” This wording of the communiqué, favored by the National Security Council, presented the fewest constraints on the military, since it seemed to indicate that only conjectural and highly impractical techniques of climatic and large-scale environmental modification, such as climate engineering, would be covered, while more or less operational techniques of weather modification, including rainmaking and fog dispersal, whose effects were considered limited in time and place, were to be excluded from the discussion.
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Within a month, the Soviet Union, realizing the weakness of the U.S. position on cloud seeding in Vietnam and taking full advantage of the Watergate crisis, seized the diplomatic initiative by unilaterally bringing the issue of weather modification as a weapon of war to the attention of the United Nations. The Soviet proposal did not limit the treaty to a bilateral agreement, nor did it limit it to effects that were “widespread, long-lasting and severe.” According to Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko, “It is urgently necessary to draw up and conclude
an international convention to outlaw action to influence the environment for military purposes.”
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The draft convention unveiled by the Soviet Union in September 1974 sought to forbid contracting parties from using “meteorological, geophysical or any other scientific or technological means of influencing the environment, including weather and climate, for military and other purposes incompatible with the maintenance of international security, human well-being and health, and, furthermore, never under any circumstances to resort to such means of influencing the environment and climate or to carry out preparation for their use.”
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The UN General Assembly, taking note of the Soviet draft convention, decided that the subject deserved further attention and, with the United States abstaining, voted to turn it over to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament. To avoid further embarrassment, the administration of President Gerald R. Ford (Nixon had resigned) insisted that the qualifiers “widespread, long-lasting and severe” be put back into the convention. The final treaty, Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, was a watered-down instrument that applied only to environmental effects that encompass an area on the scale of several hundred square miles, last for a period of months (or approximately a season), and involve serious or significant disruption or harm to human life, natural and economic resources, or other assets. Such language implicitly legitimized the use of cloud seeding in warfare, the diversion of a hurricane, and other, smaller-scale techniques. The convention, however, does not prohibit “the use of environmental modification techniques for peaceful purposes.”
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It was designed to be of unlimited duration and contains provisions for periodic meetings of the parties to assess its effectiveness and for emergency meetings to respond to perceived violations.

ENMOD was opened for signature in Geneva on May 18, 1977. It was signed initially by thirty-four states, including the United States and the Soviet Union, but did not enter into force until October 5, 1978—ironically, when the Lao People's Democratic Republic, where the American military had tested Project Popeye and had used weather modification technology in war only six years earlier, became the twentieth nation to ratify it. After a delay of more than a year, the convention entered into force for the United States on January 17, 1980, when the U.S. instrument of ratification was deposited with the United Nations Secretariat.
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When the wording of ENMOD was being negotiated, environmentalists were disappointed with the process and urged the United States not to ratify the treaty. They saw many flaws in the document, including its vague wording, its unenforceable nature, its overly high threshold for violations, and the fact that it
dealt only with intentionally hostile environmental modification. Moreover, it did not prohibit research and development in the field and applied only to parties that had ratified or acceded to the convention. Jozef Goldblat, vice president of the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, commented: “Evidently, certain powers preferred not to foreswear altogether the possibility of using environmental methods of warfare and sought to keep future options open.”
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This was precisely what the U.S. military wanted. The Air Weather Service was of the opinion that the treaty's language was so vague that it did not affect its program in weather modification at all, and the Military Airlift Command was instructed to retain its capabilities in this area. For the military, the deciding factor was not the ENMOD convention but the fact that weather modification technology had “little utility” or “military payoff” as a weapon of war. Federal funding for all weather modification programs was collapsing by this time, and by 1978 the Department of Defense claimed that its operational programs were directed solely at fog and cloud dispersal, while military research funding continued in cloud physics, computer modeling, and new observational systems. Dan Golden, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and an alumnus of Project Stormfury, observed in a 2008 interview that ever since ENMOD, “our defense department has, at least to my knowledge, not engaged in weather modification activities, and if you ever ask them if they are supporting weather modification activities, they strongly deny it. However, there have been recent workshops sponsored by the defense department on various types of weather modification.”
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