Page 187 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

The importance of weather to war and weather science to the military is
reflected in the history of military interest in weather and climate control, a long-
term relationship that deepened and intensified after World War II.

Cold War Cloud Seeding

Early in 1947, the new cloud-seeding techniques developed at the General Elec-
tric Corporation led to crash military programs in weather control research.
Could there be a weather weapon that would release the violence of the atmo-
sphere against an enemy, tame the winds in the service of an all-weather air force,
or, on a larger scale, perhaps disrupt (or improve) the agricultural economy of
nations and alter the global climate for strategic purposes? At the time, Langmuir
was very interested in the idea of starting a “chain reaction” in clouds—using a
tiny amount of a “nucleating” agent such as dry ice, silver iodide, or even water—
that could release as much energy as an atomic bomb. If this technique could be
weaponized and controlled, it could be used surreptitiously and without radioac-
tive fallout; moreover, it would be unidirectional, in that clouds seeded upwind
(for example, west of the Soviet Union) would be carried to their targets by the
prevailing winds. This was an attractive idea for cold warriors, since the use of
weather modification as a weapon could easily be denied and any damage could
be blamed on natural causes. Given the military and economic implications of
the technique and the powers it promised its masters, meteorologists advised the
military to launch an “intensive research and development effort.” 13
Edward Teller—cold warrior extraordinaire, father of the H-bomb, and pos-
sibly the “real Dr. Strangelove”—recalled in his memoirs that Langmuir visited
him at Los Alamos in the summer of 1947 and that he was “mostly interested
in talking about cloud seeding; he talked so much about the amount of damage
done by a storm his seeding had caused that I began to wonder whether he saw
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the technique as competition to the atomic bomb.” Although the timescales
are different by many orders of magnitude, the total amount of energy released
by a single thunderstorm is equal to that of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb. Moreover,
a mature hurricane of moderate strength and size releases as much energy in a
day as that of about four hundred 20-megaton hydrogen bombs. Such impres-
sive numbers—despite the technical uncertainties involved in attempting to con-
trol storms—made Langmuir’s comparisons between weather modification and
nuclear weapons very popular in military circles. Langmuir and his GE team had
the security clearances needed to work on the Manhattan Project—but they had
not participated. Metaphorically, a seeded thunderstorm became Langmuir’s

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