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Into the Blue: Weather as a Weapon - Part 1
by keith harmon snow
Picture a South American cartel of the mid-2090s. It
maintains hundreds of fighter planes, thwarting attacks by launching a dozen
Russian- and Chinese-made aircraft for every one of ours. Our sole advantage
comes from a piece of military intelligence: cartel pilots won't fly in harsh
weather. But this doesn't mean waiting around for the skies to turn-because by
then, thunderstorms will be made to order ...
First we launch uninhabited aerospace vehicles
(UAVs), which, through advanced cloud-generation technology, disseminate cirrus
clouds to block enemy surveillance. Next we seed any one of the daily rain
showers passing through the region, intensifying it precisely over the target.
Then we snuff out our blinded enemy.
Sound like a sci-fi thriller? The above excerpt from the techno-yuppie cult magazine Wired (Tom Standage, "Activate a Cloud Shield! Zap a Twister," January 2000) is designed to do just that-hence the projection of global insecurity into the distant 2090s and the ubiquitous specter of fear inculcated by reference to hoards of Chinese and Russian warplanes. In reality, however, it's a waking nightmare: U.S. military offensives in weather warfare have already arrived. Indeed, they have been here all along. Adherents of weather warfare prefer to call it "environmental modification"-or ENMOD. The corporate media has reported almost nothing about these aerospace and defense programs.
Throughout April, 2002, Amherst College (MA) radio (WAMH) ran a series of public service announcements (PSAs) sponsored by a Christian church organization declaring the existence of weather modification technologies, and advocating that listeners contact the U.S. government to demand that these technologies be deployed to moderate the extreme weather and drought we are seeing. According to these PSAs, the government use of these existing technologies to mitigate hostile weather "is a fundamental right" of every U.S. citizen.
On February 17, 2002, ABC News ran a very brief "news" clip titled "Weather as a Weapon?" The inquisitive title infers that this is some not-yet-certain possibility, contributing to the democratic ideal that supposes weather warfare might be something we-the public-ought to at least be thinking about, and possibly debating. But ABC would never have run the story without some greater purpose than simply "to keep the public informed." The United States is party to an arms control treaty known as the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD Treaty), ratified in 1978. We do not know why the U.S. signed this treaty in 1977, but we can be at least 95% certain that it was not because of concern that "too many civilians could be harmed," as reported in this ABC story.
In the wake of the 1970s U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearings on covert actions (known as the Church Committee hearings), the broad spectrum of political assassinations, bloody coups, secret operations and technology developments deemed essential to the U.S. national security apparatus were driven underground in highly classified programs. The U.S. hearings resulted in the document Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 1975.
Under this wave of devastating exposures about un-democratic U.S. intelligence activities, "front" companies were established and, like numerous corporations already active in the various arenas, they were funded and tasked with maintaining the otherwise illegal, forbidden or secret programs and activities. Just as the assassinations, coups and covert operations never stopped, the programs to develop weather warfare continued. ABC quotes Air Force Director of Weather Brig. General Fred Lewis to say: "We want to anticipate and exploit the weather, not modify it." It is a curious statement in the context it is in, because it is defensive at its core. It is a direct lie. Significant evidence suggests that somewhere in the national security apparatus there are ongoing, intensive programs in ENMOD technologies.
The entire subject of weather warfare revolves around "plausible deniability" and the capacity of elite decision-makers to "plausibly deny" that such technologies exist. The statement by Brig. General Fred Lewis is contradicted, in its most simple form, by the obvious fact that all branches of the U.S. military and security apparatus rely on sophisticated technologies whose entire mission and purpose can be, and often has been, compromised, neutralized or entirely defeated by hostile (but natural) weather conditions in the battlespace environment. (See e.g., Strategic Assessment 1996: The Instruments of U.S. Power, National Defense University, 1996.)
There is a long and well-detailed history of efforts to control and modify the weather. The U.S. government's first ENMOD efforts occurred over a century ago, from 1890-92, with a $10,000 research budget allocated to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (Robert G. Fleagle, Weather Modification: Science and Public Policy, University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) Throughout the 1960s and 1970s hundreds of programs in cloud-seeding, tornado and hurricane modifications took place under projects like Stormfury, Skyfire and Whitetop.
To be continued ...
Author's
note:
Although not widely quoted by the
corporate media, the literature abounds with credible sources and publications
detailing U.S. government covert actions and secret programs and the means by
which these are perpetuated.
One of the best
is:
+ William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and
CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, 1995
See also:
+ Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras
and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, Seven Stories Press, 1999
+ Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair,
Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, Verso, 1998
+ David N. Gibbs, "Academics and Spies: The
Silence That Roars" (Opinion), L.A. Times, January 28, 2001
+ Chris Mooney, "For Your Eyes Only: The CIA will
let you see classified documents-but at what price?" Lingua Franca, November
2000, pp. 35-43
+ Leonard G. Horowitz, Emerging Viruses: Aids
& Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional? Tetrahedron, 1996
+ Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The
Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End Press,
1979
+ Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be
Done: The Conquest of the Amazon, HarperCollins, 1996
+ Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in
Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Books, 1999
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