Page 194 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

as the United States. Harry Wexler reported that the Russians seemingly had
unlimited access to funding. one of their leading academicians, K. N. Fedo-
rov, had wondered if the Soviet Union was engaged in an international “struggle
for meteorological mastery,” but paranoid cold warriors thought perhaps that
31
meant also meteorological mastery over the free world. The distinguished avi-
ator-engineer Rear Admiral Luis de Florez urged the U.S. government to “start
now to make control of weather equal in scope to the Manhattan District Proj-
ect which produced the first A-bomb.” He added the by-now-obvious militant
twist: “With control of the weather the operations and economy of an enemy
could be disrupted. . . . [Such control] in a cold war would provide a power-
ful and subtle weapon to injure agricultural production, hinder commerce and
slow down industry.” 32

Project Stormfury

In 1954 three damaging landfalling hurricanes, Carol, Edna, and Hazel, con-
vinced members of Congress that funding was needed for a National Hurricane
Research Project (NHRP), to be directed by the weather bureau using equip-
ment on loan from the air force. official histories claim that the NHRP was
established to measure and model the storms, but in 1958 the research group
employed silver iodide in an unreported and unpublicized attempt to modify
Hurricane Daisy off the coast of Florida—in spite of the public relations disaster
that had followed the Project Cirrus seeding of Hurricane King in 1947. Again,
in 1961 Hurricane Esther reportedly displayed some apparent weakening after
seeding. This encouraged meteorologists to develop a more aggressive hurricane
modification project called Project Stormfury, a collaboration, initially between
the weather bureau and the navy but later involving the air force, that operated
from 1962 to 1983. 33
Both Robert H. (Bob) Simpson and Joanne (Malkus) Simpson were early
directors of the project, which involved a team of scientists and technicians fly-
ing into mature hurricanes and seeding them using military equipment. Accord-
ing to an oral interview with Bob Simpson, Project Stormfury was conceived
after a high-altitude visual reconnaissance flight into Hurricane Donna made by
meteorologist Herb Riehl in 1960 that indicated a concentrated, perhaps super-
cooled, outflow region above the storm. Riehl called this feature the “chimney
cloud”; Simpson thought it was worth trying to seed it to attempt to cause the
eye of the hurricane to expand and perhaps weaken the storm. In 1967 one of the
directors of Stormfury compared hurricane hunting to big-game hunting: “For

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