Page 196 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

In october 1962, just as Stormfury was getting under way, the Cuban missile
crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. A year later, Fidel Castro
accused the United States of having waged strategic weather warfare by chang-
ing the course of Hurricane Flora. Although Flora was not seeded, its behavior
was indeed suspicious. It hit Guantánamo Bay as a Category 4 storm and made a
270-degree turn, lingering over Cuba for four full days, with intense driving rains
that caused catastrophic flooding, resulting in thousands of deaths and extensive
crop damage. Nor was Cuba alone. Mexico denounced the United States for hav-
ing caused a protracted drought “resulting from cloud seeding.” The response to
these complaints, according to Bob Simpson, involved “restrictions of area and
of conditions in which seeding would be allowed, restrictions to such degree that
little hope remained to demonstrate statistically that hurricanes could be usefully
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seeded.” Meanwhile, plans were afoot to use operational cloud seeding in a real
war—over the jungles of Vietnam.

Cloud Seeding in indochina

Weather warfare took a macro-pathological turn between 1966 and 1972
in the jungles over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia when
the U.S. military conducted secret operations intended to generate rain and
reduce “trafficability” along portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which Hanoi
used to move men and matériel to South Vietnam. In March 1971, nationally
syndicated columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about U.S. Air Force
rainmakers in Southeast Asia in the Washington Post, a story confirmed sev-
eral months later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and splashed
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on the front page of the New York Times in 1972 by Seymour Hersh. These
reports confirmed that the U.S. government had tested its techniques in
Laos in 1966 and had begun a top-secret program of operational cloud seed-
ing in and around Vietnam in 1967. The code name of the field trial was Proj-
ect Popeye, and the much larger operational program was known to the air
force fliers as operation Motorpool, sometimes referred to in news reports as
Intermediary-Compatriot.
In october 1966, Project Popeye, a clandestine, all-service military/civil-
ian experimental program, seeded the skies over southern Laos to evaluate the
concept of impeding traffic on Viet Cong infiltration routes by increasing the
amount of rainfall and the length of the rainy season. It was hypothesized that
excess moisture would soften road surfaces, trigger landslides, wash out river

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