Page 170 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

No one held the “hurricane busters” officially liable, but that would certainly
not be the case today. The storm’s unexpected turnaround following—if not
necessarily because of—seeding dampened GE’s hopes of making grandiose
claims about storm control. Schaefer participated in a press conference at which
evading questions was the order of the day, and he wrote in his official report:
“Change in plans of the publicity angles to the project caused considerable delay
and should be completely eliminated. This should be done by the assignment of a
[public relations officer] to the project if it’s again tried.” An unrepentant Lang-
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muir admitted, “The main thing we learned from this flight is that we need to
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know enormously more than we do at present about hurricanes.” Langmuir was
already looking ahead to future hurricane seasons—he hoped that the Project
Cirrus team could intercept hurricanes far out at sea, fly multiple tracks through
them, “and see if we cannot, by seeding them, in some way modify or shift their
positions. . . . The stakes are large and, with increased knowledge, I think we
should be able to abolish the evil effects of these hurricanes” (185).
Six decades later, the case of Hurricane King might serve as a warning to the
Department of Homeland Security, which, as of 2008, wants to fund a new wave
of research aimed at weakening the strength of tropical storms and steering them
“off course.” But, of course, hurricanes do not run on tracks or on a schedule, so
everyone damaged by a modified hurricane could sue for damages—unless the
government tried to place an embargo on such lawsuits. 52

silver iodide

The exciting news from GE about weather control took another step in Janu-
ary 1947 when physical chemist Bernard Vonnegut discovered that molecules
of silver iodide act as artificial nuclei and can “fool” cloud water droplets into
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crystallizing. During World War II, Vonnegut worked in the Department of
Chemical Engineering at MIT on projects related to gas warfare and with the
Department of Meteorology on problems of aircraft icing. He moved to GE in
1945 and worked closely with Langmuir and Schaefer. His brother, the famous
writer Kurt Vonnegut, also worked at GE as a publicist.
Following Schaefer’s cold box discovery, Langmuir asked Vonnegut to do
quantitative work “on the number of ice crystals produced by dry ice.” This led
Vonnegut to search for other agents that might initiate ice phase processes in a
cloud. As he told the story five years later, “It occurred to me that if I could get
something that was awfully close to ice in its crystal structure that might do the
job, and I looked up in the handbook to find out what substances were close. I

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