Page 199 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

was apparently used in Korea in 1950 to clear out cold fogs. In 1954 the French
High Command announced in connection with the besieged French forces
at Dien Bien Phu that “it will try to wash out Vietminh communication
routes from Red China with man-made rainstorms as soon as cloud condi-
50
tions permit.” Confirming this, a Vietnamese account of the battle reported
that the French had shipped 150 baskets of activated charcoal and 150 bags of
ballast from Paris “for the making of artificial rain aimed at impeding our move-
ment and supply.” Moreover, the Central Intelligence Agency seeded clouds in
51
South Vietnam as early as 1963 in an attempt to disperse demonstrating Buddhist
monks after it was noticed that the monks resisted tear gas but disbanded when
it rained. Cloud-seeding technology had also been tried, but proved ineffective,
in drought relief efforts in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, okinawa, and else-
where. All the programs were conducted under military sponsorship and had the
direct involvement of the White House. In 1967 St. Amand participated in Proj-
ect Gromet, a secret effort to employ weather modification in India to mitigate
the Bihar drought and famine and to achieve U.S. policy goals in this strategi-
cally important region. 52
operation Motorpool, made public as it was at the end of the Nixon era, was
called the Watergate of weather warfare. Some argued that environmental weap-
ons were more “humane” than nuclear weapons. others suggested that inducing
rainfall to make travel more difficult was preferable to dropping napalm; and the
Fifty-fourth Weather Reconnaissance Squadron was directed, in the jargon of the
era, to “make mud, not war.” St. Amand tried to put a benign spin on the project
when he claimed that “by making the trail more muddy and trafficability diffi-
53
cult, we were hoping to keep people out of the fight.” Philip Handler, president
of the National Academy of Sciences, represented the mainstream of scientific
opinion, however, when he wrote to Senator Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island):
“It is grotesquely immoral that scientific understanding and technological capa-
bilities developed for human welfare to protect the public health, enhance agri-
cultural productivity, and minimize the natural violence of large storms should
54
be so distorted as to become weapons of war.” Prominent geoscientist Gordon
J. F. MacDonald observed that the key lesson of the Vietnam experience was not
that rainmaking is an inefficient means for slowing logistical movement on jun-
gle trails but “that one can conduct covert operations using a new technology in
55
a democracy without the knowledge of the people.” The dominant opinion was
that seeding clouds—like using Agent orange or the Rome Plow, setting fire to
the jungles or bombing the irrigation dikes over North Vietnam—was but one of
many sordid techniques involving war on the environment that the military used
in Vietnam.

182 | WeatHer WarriorS