Page 179 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

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 meteorol-
ogy. [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. 76
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 Mos-
cow, 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 mate-
rial 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. 77
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 Cher-
nobyl and Moscow. In 1992 Dr. Allan Flowers, a British ecologist studying radio-
activity 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

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