Page 193 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

completely accurate system of weather forecasting, perhaps within a decade:
“I think it entirely probable that, in 10 years, your daily weather forecast will
read something like this: ‘Freezing rain, starting at 10:46 a.m., ending at 2:32
p.m.’ or ‘Heavy snowfall, seven inches, starting today at 1:43 a.m., continuing
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throughout the day until 7:37 p.m.’” This sort of accuracy of prediction, even
without weather control, would have major consequences for military opera-
tions. orville, like Krick, was echoing the surety of earlier determinists. orville
thought it was “conceivable that we could use weather as a weapon of warfare,
creating storms or dissipating them as the tactical situation demands” (25). A
more insidious technique would strike at the enemy’s food supply by seeding
clouds to rob them of moisture before they reached enemy agricultural areas.
orville wrote: “We might deluge an enemy with rain to hamper a military move-
ment or strike at his food supplies by withholding needed rain from his crops. . . .
But before we can hope to achieve all the benefits I have outlined, hundreds of
meteorological unknowns must be solved at a cost of possibly billions of dol-
lars” (25–26; emphasis added). Although speculative and wildly optimistic, such
ruminations from an official source helped fuel a weather race with the Russians
and the rapid expansion of meteorological research in all areas, but especially in
weather modification.
In December 1957, while Americans were still reeling from the psychologi-
cal impact of the launch of the Soviet Union’s first Earth-orbiting satellite, the
Washington Post and Times Herald informed its readers that there was a “new
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race with the reds” in the form of weather warfare. Newsweek picked up the
story in its next issue. Again, orville, whose final ACWC report was about to
be released, was quoted indicating that the need to keep ahead of the Russians
was more clear than ever: “If an unfriendly nation gets into a position to control
the large-scale weather patterns before we can, the result could even be more
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disastrous than nuclear warfare.” The article also quoted Teller, an expert on
hydrogen bombs but not on weather control, who told the U.S. Senate Pre-
paredness Subcommittee: “Please imagine a world . . . where [the Soviets] can
change the rainfall over Russia . . . and influence the rainfall in our country in
an adverse manner. They will say, ‘we don’t care. We are sorry if we hurt you. We
are merely trying to do what we need to do in order to let our people live’” (54).
Henry Houghton at MIT expressed the same concerns: “I shudder to think of
the consequences of a prior Russian discovery of a feasible method of weather
control. . . . An unfavorable modification of our climate in the guise of a peace-
ful effort to improve Russia’s climate could seriously weaken our economy and
our ability to resist” (54). At the time, by some estimates, the Soviet Union
employed some 70,000 hydrometeorologists, more than three times as many

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