Page 211 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

by the release of perfectly practical amounts of energy” or by “altering the absorp-
tion and reflection properties of the ground or the sea or the atmosphere.” It
was a project that neatly fit von Neumann’s overall agenda and philosophy:
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“All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.”
Zworykin’s proposal also contained a long endorsement by the oceanographer
Athelstan Spilhaus, then a U.S. Army major, who ended his letter of November 6,
1945, with these words: “In weather control, meteorology has a new goal worthy
of its greatest efforts.” 6

Popularizations

Complicating the picture at the time were suggestions about the use of atomic
weapons for climate control and announcements of new discoveries in cloud
seeding. In 1945 the prominent scientist-humanist Julian Huxley, then head of
UNESCo, had spoken to an audience of 20,000 at an arms control conference
at Madison Square Garden about the possibilities of using nuclear weapons as
“atomic dynamite” for “landscaping the Earth” or perhaps using them to change
the climate by dissolving the polar ice cap. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on
record as advocating the use of atomic bombs for “cracking the Antarctic icebox”
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to gain access to its known mineral deposits. “Sarnoff Predicts Weather Control”
read the headline on the front page of the New York Times on october 1, 1946.
The previous evening, at his testimonial dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, RCA
president Brigadier General David Sarnoff had speculated on worthy peace-
ful projects for the postwar era. Among them were “transformations of deserts
into gardens through diversion of ocean currents,” a technique that could also
be reversed in time of war to turn fertile lands into deserts, and ordering “rain or
sunshine by pressing radio buttons,” an accomplishment that, Sarnoff declared,
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would require a World Weather Bureau in charge of global forecasting and con-
trol (much like the Weather Distributing Administration proposed in 1938).
A commentator in the New Yorker intuited the problems with such control.
“Who,” in this civil service outfit, he asked, “would decide whether a day was to
be sunny, rainy, overcast . . . or enriched by a stimulating blizzard?” It would be
“some befuddled functionary,” probably bedeviled by special interests such as the
raincoat and galoshes manufacturers, the beachwear and sunburn lotion indus-
tries, and resort owners and farmers. or if a storm was to be diverted, “Detour
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it where? out to sea, to hit some ship with no influence in Washington?”
Recall that all this was just one month before the General Electric Corporation
announced the news of Vincent Schaefer’s cloud-seeding exploits and Irving

194 | fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control