Page 188 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

A-bomb, and like his nuclear peers, he tested his techniques in the desert of New
Mexico and bombed clouds with a B-29 aircraft, the sister of Enola Gay and
Bockscar, the planes that had delivered atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Naga-
saki. A seeded hurricane was, by analogy, Langmuir’s “Super” or H-bomb, and
he yearned to take his techniques to the South Pacific for basin-scale tests near
Bikini Atoll. 15
Langmuir talked openly to the press about the analogy. From a military per-
spective, he pointed out, cloud seeding could produce widespread drought and
thus play havoc with an enemy’s food supply and hydropower plants, or trigger
torrential downpours sufficient to cause flooding, immobilize troop movements,
and put airfields out of commission. In 1950 he claimed that weather control
“can be as powerful a war weapon as the atom bomb.” Invoking the famous let-
16
ter written by Albert Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 describ-
ing the potential power of an atom-splitting weapon, Langmuir recommended
that the government seize on the phenomenon of weather control as it did on
atomic energy. GE research director C. Guy Suits reinforced the nuclear analogy
in his Senate testimony of March 1951, pointing out the “many points of simi-
17
larity between the release of atomic energy and the release of weather energy,”
including the immense energies involved, the chain reaction mechanisms com-
mon to both, the trans-boundary problems and the need for international agree-
ments, and similar national defense and economic implications. Suits also high-
lighted key differences—such as the early stage of weather modification research,
its small-scale experimental needs, and its lack of top-secret processes—but he
ended up “placing his bets” on Langmuir’s scientific judgment and argued that
a central authority was needed, modeled after the Atomic Energy Commission.
Weather control had tactical dimensions as well. In Washington, D.C., on
August 28, 1947, Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer demonstrated cloud-seeding
techniques for the military’s top brass. Invited to the show were the chief of
naval operations, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz; the commander in chief of the
Army Air Forces, General Carl A. Spaatz; and the U.S. Army chief of staff, Gen-
eral Dwight D. Eisenhower. A total of sixteen generals, seven colonels, and two
GE vice presidents attended the demonstration. Among them were the deputy
chief of staff of the War Department, the chief of the Army Engineer Corps,
the chief of the U.S. Army Signal office, the head of War Department Intelli-
gence, and the chief of research and development for the Air Corps. The Penta-
gon’s Joint Research and Development Board had the task of examining all the
implications. 18
By october, GE was discussing plans to develop “bullets of compressed carbon
dioxide or silver iodide. Shot from the nose of a plane, these fifty-caliber tracer

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