Page 176 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Bureau, although the bureau, too, had a vested interest in the techniques (chap-
ter 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
69
the redirection of Hurricane King was a “colossal meteorological hoax.” They
found no evidence to show spectacular precipitation effects and filed a conserva-
tive assessment of the economic importance of cloud seeding. 70
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 experi-
enced 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). 71
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 hur-
ricanes 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.” 72
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,
73
but to “control its path” (emphasis added). 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. 74

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