Page 198 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

data were collected to verify the claim. General Westmoreland thought there
was “no appreciable increase” in rain from the project. Even if the cloud seed-
ing had produced a tactical victory or two in Vietnam (it did not), the extreme
secrecy surrounding the operation and the subsequent denials and stonewall-
ing of Congress by the military resulted in a major strategic defeat for military
weather modification. 45
Typical of the cover-up during this period was the Air Weather Service
annual survey report on weather modification for 1971, which contained brief
accounts of cold and warm fog dissipation experiments, one precipitation
augmentation trial, and illustrations of its equipment; of course, there was no
46
mention of the (still) top-secret operation Motorpool. Even after the scan-
dal broke, the official history of AWS weather modification in the period 1965
to 1973 contained no mention of military cloud seeding in Vietnam, admit-
ting only, in vague and bland terminology, that “AWS’s current operational
weather modification capabilities include airborne and ground based cold fog
47
dissipation and precipitation augmentation” (emphasis added). Under the
heading “Precipitation Augmentation,” the report claimed that AWS efforts
“have been few indeed” but did admit to having seeded over the entire Phil-
ippine archipelago in 1969 for drought relief for the benefit of agriculture. A
short section titled “other Activities” mentioned hurricane seeding in Proj-
ect Stormfury and “participation” in several non-AWS weather modification
projects, both as observers and as project workers, to keep abreast of the field
and to find new techniques applicable to air force and army operations. Read
between the lines.
In 1973 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, Weather and
Climate Modification: Problems and Progress (emphasis added). The panel,
chaired by Thomas Malone, a cold war–era meteorologist with high-level
security clearances, prefaced its report with this bald statement: “During the
course of this study, no attempt was made by the Panel to examine . . . or to
ascertain the existence of classified experimental programs in weather modi-
48
fication.” Yet the field’s largest problem at the time was the recently revealed
militarization of cloud seeding in Vietnam. The prime example of stonewall-
ing, however, came from President Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense, Mel-
vin Laird, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1972 that there
was no cloud seeding going on over North Vietnam but never mentioned
that operation Motorpool was still functioning over Laos, Cambodia, and
South Vietnam. 49
Project Popeye and operation Motorpool were neither the first use of
weather modification as a weapon of war nor the first use in Asia. Cloud seeding

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