Page 203 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

are developing. In this case, a revised version of ENMoD may be the best hope
of providing the international community with sufficient diplomatic leverage to
stop any unacceptable collateral damage from geoengineering, or even to inter-
vene if rogue states or terrorist groups were to employ these techniques.
While purposeful military or hostile intent would be required to trigger the
existing convention, all climate-engineering schemes involve deliberate manip-
ulation of the dynamics, composition, or structure of the Earth, and all such
schemes carry the potential for “widespread, long-lasting and severe” harm on
national, regional, and possibly global scales. At a minimum, ENMoD will have
to be revisited under its provisions for consultation of the parties before any
large-scale climate engineering projects are field-tested or deployed and before
any human or environmental damage is either threatened or done. The present
war on global warming must be viewed as the outgrowth of a long historical pro-
cess in which military metaphors are much more than metaphors. They are hard-
nosed realities influencing the course of scientific research, military policy, and
perhaps most tellingly, our attitudes toward nature.

* * * * *

The history of meteorology and military history have many points of significant
overlap and mutual influence. Weather warriors have long sought to take advan-
tage of natural phenomena and, in the twentieth century, to manipulate them
for military advantage. The interaction of science and the military seems to be
well on its way to fulfilling a Faustian bargain struck in the early modern era if
not before. Weapons systems of the past and current centuries have increasingly
been based on science; they have also been increasingly lethal (especially to civil-
ians), increasingly toxic, and increasingly pathological. Physics, chemistry, and
biology have weaponized the atom, molecule, virus, and bacterium, while the
geosciences have militarized the global environment in the air, under the seas,
and in outer space. In the cold war era, it was presumed that clouds, storms, and
even the climate, like any other natural phenomenon, could be controlled and
weaponized. Nano-scale warfare meets geo-scale warfare. It was further pre-
sumed that a weather warfare race, analogous to the space race, was under way
and that the other side was probably ahead. All was fair in war, especially sur-
reptitious programs.
The cases presented here go beyond simple military support or patronage for
science. They clearly document the interpenetration of values and perspectives
among meteorologists and military officers. Project Cirrus, Project Stormfury,
and their kin were all too common during the cold war. When military cloud

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