Page 213 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

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dominate the globe.” He urged MIT to look into this, suggesting a multimillion-
dollar research program.
That spring, Martin Mann, an associate editor of Popular Science Monthly,
sent a draft of his article “War Against Hail,” to von Neumann for corrections.
The article began with a declaration of war against hail, announcing that the
army would soon be using Schaefer’s cloud-seeding techniques in its quest for
triggers—“With enough triggers, weather could be made to order!” Mann
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then highlighted the quest at the IAS to develop numerical “model experiments,”
which he said would reveal additional triggers:

once the weather equations are perfected [von Neumann and Zworykin] foresee
their use to control weather. . . . Figures corresponding to imaginary weather condi-
tions will be fed into the computer. It will then forecast what final weather would
have resulted from the imaginary starting conditions. For example, the machine
would show how a higher temperature over the Caribbean Sea would have affected
the weather in Miami. (10)

Mann had also interviewed Zworykin for the article, citing his opinion that
because of the vast energy generated by weather systems, the use of brute-force
methods, even nuclear bombs, to divert a hurricane was futile. Zworykin favored
smaller “trigger mechanisms” such as modifying the surface of an island in the
path of the storm to make it either darker or more reflective and to upset the
storm’s already shaky balance of forces. Covering an island with a thin layer of
carbon black would absorb heat, while generating a white smoke screen would
make it more reflective: “These reflecting-absorbing areas would have to be placed
in exactly the right spots and used at exactly the right times” (11)—a job for the
decision-making power of the digital computer. Pity the poor Caribbean island-
ers whose tropical paradises would be invaded and possibly brutalized each hur-
ricane season by paramilitary forces trying to save Miami. How could they clean
up all the soot? Mann concluded his article by juxtaposing the more proximate
goal of hail suppression and the distant goal of climate control. He also contrasted
Vincent Schaefer, the Edison-like everyman “who never even finished high school,”
and the Princeton eggheads working on a big military–industrial project.

Hurricane Control

over five decades later, Ross Hoffman, principal scientist with Atmospheric
and Environmental Research, used a little butterfly as a logo in his presentations

196 | fearS, fantaSieS, and PoSSibilitieS of Control