“SpaceCast 2020” has been superseded by the now infamous “Air Force 2025” series of White Papers, which made this same point, saying:
The influence of the weather on military operations has long been recognized. During World War II, Eisenhower said, “In Europe, bad weather is the worst enemy of the air [operations]. Some soldier once said, ‘The weather is always neutral.’ Nothing could be more untrue.
Bad weather is obviously the enemy of the side that seeks to launch projects requiring good weather, or of the side possessing great assets, such as strong air forces, which depend upon good weather for effective operations. If really bad weather should endure permanently, the Nazi would need nothing else to defend the Normandy coast!”
Clearly, weather control could have a marked effect on the outcome of military operations. The problem the military has is not whether weather control should be affected, but how it could be done, meaning technically, legally, and politically. Many researchers, myself included, believe that the DoD never truly gave up trying to find out.
Project Popeye reached broad public consciousness when syndicated columnist Jack Anderson revealed it under the code name “Intermediary-Compatriot” in his Washington Post column of 18 March 1971. U.S. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird was forced to testify before Congress about it in 1972. He told the U.S. Senate that Anderson’s wild tales were untrue and that the United States never tried to seed clouds in Southeast Asia. But, on 28 January 1974, a private letter from Laird was leaked to the press. By 1974, he had left Defense and was counsel to President Nixon who was fighting for his political life following the break-in at the Democratic Party’s National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972. In the letter, Laird privately admitted that his 1972 testimony had been false and that the U.S. did in fact use weather modification in North Vietnam in 1967–68.
On 20 March 1974, the United States Senate held a top secret hearing in which representatives of the military finally admitted to the existence of Operation Popeye. They conceded that the cloud seeding program had been conducted over neutral Cambodia and Laos (in violation of international law), as well as both North and South Vietnam. The testifying Pentagon officials stated that Popeye had been ongoing from 1966 through 1972 and that at least 2,600 flights had released over 47,000 units of cloud-seeding materials during the program, at a total cost for the operation of around $21.6 million.
These hearings also revealed that the U.S. military had attempted other environmental modifications as well. The U.S. had used massive spraying of chemical herbicides in the hopes of depriving its foes of both food supplies and shelter. According to analyst L. Juda (from “Negotiating a Treaty on Environmental Modification Warfare: The Convention on Environmental Warfare and Its Impact on the Arms Control Negotiations,” published in International Organization), the idea was simple:
If, as has been suggested, the guerrilla is to his base area as fish are to the sea, then the destruction of the sea would kill the fish and the elimination of the base area with its supports would destroy the guerrilla.
The implications of this operation staggered Senator Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island. In 1976, he said:
The U.S. and other world powers should sign a treaty to outlaw the tampering with weather as an instrument of war. It may seem far-fetched to think of using weather as a weapon, but I am convinced that the U.S. did in fact use rain-making techniques as a weapon of war in Southeast Asia. We need a treaty now to prevent such actions—before military leaders of the world start directing storms, manipulating climates and inducing earthquakes against their enemies. It may seem a great leap of imagination to move from an apparent effort by the United States to muddy the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos by weather modification to such science fiction ideas as unleashing earthquakes, melting the polar ice cap, changing the course of warm ocean currents, or modifying the weather of an adversary’s farm belt. But in military technology today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s strategic reality.
Senator Pell had conducted the Senate hearing in 1972, in which he was lied to by Defense Secretary Laird, and the secret one in 1974 that learned the horrible truth. After these, he became a leading advocate for what became the EnMod Convention. A subcommittee chaired by Minnesota Congressman Donald Fraser did the same in the House of Representatives in 1974 and 1975. Senator Pell did a lot of stumping and article writing to force the world to act. In one article he wrote:
Apart from the sheer horror of the prospect of unbridled environmental warfare, there is, I believe, another compelling reason to ban such action. We know, or should know by now, that no nation can maintain for long a monopoly on new warfare technology. If we can develop weather warfare techniques, so can and will other major powers. Experience has taught us that the weapons that make us feel secure today will make us feel very insecure indeed, when our adversaries possess the same capabilities.
In The Cooling[1], Lowell Ponte describes the events that led to the EnMod Convention:
During a summit meeting between President Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev on July 3, 1974, the nations agreed to conduct discussions toward a ban on environmental warfare. Before the first of these discussions, set for Moscow in November, got underway, the Soviet Union introduced a resolution before the United Nations General Assembly to ban environmental warfare. When revised, the resolution was passed by the body 102 votes to none. The United States and half a dozen other nations abstained from the vote. Senator Pell suspected that the president felt miffed by the surprise Soviet action, a move that made it appear that the Soviet Union, and not the United States, had taken the lead in trying to ban environmental modification. In fact, the Soviet resolution was similar to one passed by the North Atlantic Assembly in November 1972 and to another, authored by Senator Pell, and passed by an 82 to 10 vote by the United States Senate in July 1973.
Discussion between U.S. and Soviet negotiators resumed in Washington, D.C., on February 24, 1975. On August 21, 1975, the two nations presented their jointly produced draft treaty banning environmental modification as a weapon of war to the thirty-one-nation Geneva Disarmament Conference.
The EnMod Convention was later passed by the United Nations General Assembly and opened for signature in 1977. It came into effect 5 October 1978, when it was certified by the required total of 20 nations. It prohibits the use of techniques that would have widespread, long-lasting or severe effects through deliberate manipulation of natural processes and causing such phenomena as earthquakes, tidal waves and changes in climate and in weather patterns. The treaty was warmly received by most of the international community, the exception being a coalition of American environmental groups who thought that its threshold level of a violation needing to be widespread, long-lasting, or severe was too high. Another complaint was that it does not ban the development of this technology, leaving it open for beneficial techniques to be discovered and employed in the service of mankind. The environmentalists (correctly) believed that the failure to ban research in this field would allow the military to develop technologies that adhered to the letter of the law while violating its spirit, as blatantly detailed in the Air Force White Paper entitled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” Unfortunately for us, the EnMod Convention is a total failure with only 70 nations thus far signatory to it, and it is unenforceable in any realistic sense.
Secret Weather Wars
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski, a Polish-American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, wrote in his 1970 book, Between Two Ages:
It is ironic to recall that, in 1878, Friedrich Engels, commenting on the Franco-Prussian War, proclaimed that “weapons used have reached such a stage of perfection that further progress which would have any revolutionizing influence is no longer possible.” Not only have new weapons been developed, but some of the basic concepts of geography and strategy have
been fundamentally altered; space and weather control have replaced Suez or Gibraltar as key elements of strategy.
After events like the Christmas 2004 Asian tsunami and 2005’s record-shattering Atlantic hurricane season, many people have wondered just how “natural” those natural disasters were. Has “weather control” really become a key element of national strategy?
In the post-EnMod U.S. of the 21st century, weather control is an activity mainly confined to local governments and privately owned commercial enterprises (“civilian contractors”) like Weather Modification, Inc. (WMI) of Fargo, North Dakota. WMI provides services to universities, governmental agencies and private sector entities across the country and around the world. These services include hail suppression in Argentina, snowpack augmentation in Idaho, and cloud seeding in Nevada. Interestingly, one of the senior scientists at WMI went on Art Bell’s Coast To Coast AM radio show in 2005 to “out” himself as having been one of the scientists involved in Operation Popeye!
Intentional hostile control of the weather and other environmental processes is collectively called geophysical warfare. Dr. Gordon J. F. MacDonald wrote: “The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy.” This was in “Geophysical Warfare: How to Wreck the Environment,” a chapter he contributed to Nigel Calder’s book, Unless Peace Comes: A Scientific Forecast of New Weapons.[2]
In the 1960s, Dr. Gordon J. F. MacDonald was a distinguished geophysicist and climatologist. He was Associate Director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. MacDonald was also a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee and the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, as well as being a senior member of NASA’s first Physics Committee. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the JASON’s, a military think-tank at the top of the military-industrial-academic pyramid.
Dr. MacDonald wrote many articles on future weapons. In “Space,” an article for the book Toward the Year 2018,[3] Dr. MacDonald elaborated on the possibilities of geophysical warfare, writing:
… technology will make available to the leaders of the major nations a variety of techniques for conducting secret warfare… Techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm, thereby weakening a nation’s capacity and forcing it to accept the demands of the competitor.
Elsewhere he wrote:
Such a secret war need never be declared or even known by the affected population. It would go on for years with only the security forces involved being aware of it. The years of drought and storm would be attributed to unkindly nature, and only after a nation was thoroughly drained would an armed takeover be attempted.
He warned that these geophysical weapons systems, should they in fact be developed, would produce long-term upsets in the climate.
Business Week magazine reported on 24 October 2005:
China has 35,000 people engaged in weather management, and it spends $40 million a year on alleviating droughts or stemming hail that would damage crops.
North Korea, downwind of China, has been ravaged by droughts for a decade. It is entirely possible that China has been intentionally stealing North Korea’s rain so as to force North Korea to follow China’s political dictates and buy Chinese food. Reports from North Korea make not just the nation’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, but the whole country sound crazy. Could their seeming mass insanity be induced?
HAARP
One much discussed project that embodies both civilian and military geophysical applications is HAARP—the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program.
Although HAARP proponents claim it is nothing more than a simple civilian research station designed to investigate the properties of the upper atmosphere, few investigators buy that explanation.
HAARP does have the appearance of a civilian project with open access and the work being done by civilian scientists. However, the project is managed by a joint U.S. Air Force and Navy committee and is funded out of the Department of Defense (DoD) budget.
Most recently, the heart of the program, the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), was completed by one of the world’s largest defense contractors working under the direction of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a top research and development (R&D) organization for the DoD.
DARPA manages and directs selected basic and applied R&D projects for the DoD pursuing research and technology “where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions.”
Under construction since 1990, the HAARP IRI is a field of antennas on the ground in southeast Alaska. The facility was probably completed late in 2005 with the announcement of same added to the DARPA website in March of 2006. It is now the world’s largest radio frequency (RF) broadcaster, with an effective radiated power of 3.6 million watts—over 72,000 times more powerful than the largest single AM radio station in the United States (50,000 watts).
The IRI uses a unique patented ability to focus the RF energy generated by the field, injecting it into a spot at the very top of the atmosphere in a region called the ionosphere. This heats the thin atmosphere of the ionospheric region by several thousand degrees. HAARP, then, is a type of device called an ionospheric heater. This heating allows scientists to do a number of things with the ionosphere. Controlling and directing the processes and forces of the ionosphere is called “ionospheric enhancement.” An early HAARP document stated:
The heart of the program will be the development of a unique ionospheric heating capability to conduct the pioneering experiments required to adequately assess the potential for exploiting ionospheric enhancement technology for DoD purposes.
What might those DoD purposes be? Something about winning wars, eh? How might those purposes be achieved? What technologies will be needed to win the wars of the future? Researchers trying to answer those questions have come up with a vast number of possibilities, most bordering on science fiction. But then again, good science fiction is about recognizing the problems of the future and suggesting solutions to them before they happen.
On 23 March 1983, President Ronald Reagan called upon “the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
This quest for the creation of a technology, of a weapon or weapons system that would make atomic war impossible, was officially named the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The press lost no time in dubbing it “Star Wars” after the George Lucas movie.
That initiative sent the United States military-industrial-academic complex on the greatest and costliest weapons hunt in human history. Thousands of ideas were floated, hundreds of those were funded. While SDI research has since been officially abandoned, some ideas are still being actively pursued to this day.
Not all of these ongoing developmental programs are taking place in laboratories of the military and its contractors. Some of these ideas involve technologies or applications that, as weapons, violate international treaties and/or would be repugnant to the ethical and moral values of the majority of Americans. In an effort to avoid public outcry (and international condemnation), some of these programs have been disguised as civilian science. One of those may be HAARP.
As Dr. Bernard Eastlund, the putative inventor of HAARP, put it: “The boundary between science fiction and science comes with can you actually make the thing that you’re proposing.”
Bernard J. Eastlund is a physicist who received his BS in physics from MIT and his PhD in physics from Columbia University. He led a team of scientists and engineers working for Advanced Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), a wholly owned subsidiary of ARCO.
Eastlund’s team developed
the concept of a massive antenna array that could produce the kind of shield called for by President Reagan.
The APTI patents that HAARP is probably based on openly discuss manipulating the weather by moving the jet stream and using other techniques to create floods and droughts at will. These patents also describe a way to raise the ionosphere, sending it out into space as an electrically charged plasma capable of destroying anything electronic (like an incoming ICBM or a spy satellite) passing through it. HAARP certainly looks like a ground-based “Star Wars” weapons system, a relic of the Cold War. But unlike most such relics, this one is up and running and stays fully funded.
In August of 2002, the Russian State Duma (their version of Congress or Parliament) expressed concern about HAARP, calling it a program to develop “a qualitatively new type of weapon.” A joint commission of the State Duma’s International Affairs and Defense Committees issued a report that said:
Under the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) the USA is creating new integral geophysical weapons that may influence the near-Earth medium with high frequency radio waves. The significance of this qualitative leap could be compared to the transition from cold steel to firearms, or from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons. This new type of weapon differs from previous types in that the near-Earth medium becomes at once an object of direct influence and its component.
The report further claimed that the USA’s plan to carry out large-scale scientific experiments under the HAARP program, and not controlled by the global community, would create weapons capable of jamming radio communications, disrupting equipment installed on spaceships and rockets, provoke serious accidents in electricity networks and in oil and gas pipelines and have a negative impact on the mental health of people populating entire regions. An appeal, signed by 90 deputies, demanding that an international ban be put on such large-scale geophysical experiments, was sent to President Vladimir Putin, to the United Nations and other international organizations, to the parliaments and leaders of the U.N. member countries, to the scientific public and to mass media outlets.
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