Page 200 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

enmod: Prohibiting environmental modification as a Weapon of War

In 1972 Senator Pell, following the hearings, introduced a resolution calling on
the U.S. government to negotiate a convention prohibiting the use of environ-
mental or geophysical modification activities as weapons of war. Testifying to
the Senate, Richard J. Reed, president of the American Meteorological Society,
cited earlier bans on chemical and biological warfare and atmospheric nuclear
testing and urged the government to present a resolution to the United Nations
General Assembly that pledged all nations to refrain from engaging in weather
modification for hostile purposes. Citing a 1972 public policy statement of the
society, he referred to the primitive state of knowledge in the field and the diffi-
culties of controlled experimentation during military operations. The testimony
of other prominent atmospheric scientists stressed the need to protect open and
56
peaceful international scientific cooperation. Despite the opposition of the
Nixon administration, the Senate adopted the resolution in 1973 by a vote of 82
to 10. Representative Donald M. Fraser (D-Minnesota) led a parallel effort in
the House.
In May 1974, Senator Pell placed the formerly top-secret Department of
Defense briefing on cloud seeding in Vietnam into the public record. Less than
two months later, at the Moscow summit, President Nixon and Soviet General
Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the “Joint Statement Concerning Future
Discussion on the Dangers of Environmental Warfare,” expressing their desire
to limit the potential danger to humankind from the use of environmental
modification techniques for military purposes whose effects would be “wide-
spread, long-lasting and severe.” This wording of the communiqué, favored by
the National Security Council, presented the fewest constraints on the mili-
tary, since it seemed to indicate that only conjectural and highly impractical
techniques of climatic and large-scale environmental modification, such as
climate engineering, would be covered, while more or less operational tech-
niques of weather modification, including rainmaking and fog dispersal, whose
effects were considered limited in time and place, were to be excluded from
the discussion. 57
Within a month, the Soviet Union, realizing the weakness of the U.S. posi-
tion on cloud seeding in Vietnam and taking full advantage of the Watergate cri-
sis, seized the diplomatic initiative by unilaterally bringing the issue of weather
modification as a weapon of war to the attention of the United Nations. The
Soviet proposal did not limit the treaty to a bilateral agreement, nor did it limit
it to effects that were “widespread, long-lasting and severe.” According to Soviet
ambassador Andrei Gromyko, “It is urgently necessary to draw up and conclude

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