Page 216 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Throughout the cold war era, authors from at least nineteen research institutions
in the Soviet Union published numerous books, articles, and reports on weather
and climate modification. Several popularizations of this literature are notable
25
for their geoengineering fantasies. In Soviet Electric Power (1956), Arkadii Bor-
isovich Markin outlined the progress of electrification in the Soviet Union and
provided a forecast to the year 2000, when, he supposed, electrical power output
would be one hundred times greater than at present. Markin gave special empha-
sis to the future role of nuclear power, including using nuclear explosions for geo-
engineering purposes:

Gigantic atom explosions in the depths of the earth will give rise to volcanic activity.
New islands and colossal dams will be built and new mountain chains will appear.
Atom explosions will cut new canyons through mountain ranges and will speedily
create canals, reservoirs, and sea, carry[ing] out huge excavation jobs. At the same
time we are convinced that science will find a method of protection against the
radiation of radioactive substances. 26

Such ideas were derived from the Soviet program Nuclear Explosions for the
National Economy, which, like Edward Teller’s Project Plowshare, proposed
techniques to employ nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes.
Surely, Markin concluded, the Soviet power engineers can achieve “magnificent
results” when inspired by the “omnipotence of human genius” (135).
In Man Versus Climate (1960), Soviet authors Nikolai Petrovich Rusin and
Liya Abramovna Flit surveyed a large number of schemes for climatic tinkering.
Invoking a Jules Verne–style fantasy, the book’s cover is illustrated by the Earth
surrounded by a Saturn-like ring of dust particles intended to illuminate the Arc-
tic Circle, increase solar energy absorption, and ultimately melt the polar ice caps.
Chapters in the book are dedicated to mega-engineering projects such as dam-
ming the Congo River to electrify Africa and irrigate the Sahara, diverting the
Gulf Stream with a causeway off Newfoundland or harnessing it with turbines
installed between Florida and Cuba, and, of course, Petr Mikhailovich Borisov’s
proposal to dam the Bering Strait to divert Atlantic waters into the Pacific and
melt the Arctic sea ice. The authors’ ultimate goal was to convince the reader “that
man can really be the master of this planet and that the future is in his hands.” 27
In a much more politically oriented book, Methods of Climate Control (1964),
Rusin and Flit admitted that “we are merely on the threshold of the conquest of
nature,” attributing the nascent ability to control nature to the emergence of the
new Soviet man: “Before the Revolution, under the autocracy, nine-tenths of the
territory of Russia had not been studied at all. The Soviet man, taking ownership

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