Weaponizing the Skies: Weather Warfare, Cloud Seeding, and the U.S. Military

• In Event: War in Challenging Environments, 1854-2000: The Impact of Mud, Rivers, Swamps, and Weather

Abstract

From the 1940s to 1970s, the U.S. military tried to control the weather via cloud seeding, a technology in which humans put chemicals into clouds, in hopes of controlling rainfall, hurricanes, fog, and even the global climate. Drawing upon government documents, newspapers, and scientific reports, this paper examines the discourses and practices that animated these efforts. In particular, it focuses on changing ideas about violence and responsibility, war and ethics, in regard to the weather. In 1947, just months after three General Electric scientists invented cloud seeding, the Department of Defense initiated its first R+D program in weather modification. Known as Project Cirrus, the joint military-industrial effort lasted five years, seeding the skies from Schenectady to New Mexico to Puerto Rico. Many more projects followed, including Project Stormfury, an effort to modify hurricanes, and Operation Popeye, a highly classified campaign to weaponize the weather in Vietnam. These projects fit within broader environmental histories of the Cold War, in which the U.S., like the Soviet Union, tried to militarize and weaponize nature at nearly every scale, from the atom to outer space. By the mid-1970s, however, the military had all but abandoned weather control. It was too inconclusive, and it was too controversial. When Pentagon officials finally admitted to Congress that they had used cloud seeding in Vietnam (after years of public backlash and political scrutiny), they tried to defend it as more “humane” than other forms of war. Many people disagreed, arguing that weather modification could cause unpredictable, uncontrollable, and long-lasting destruction. Soon after, the United Nations passed an international ban on weather warfare, known as the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD). Though slower, less visible, and less spectacular than a bomb, climate change—they understood, at some level—was one of the least humane and most devastating forms of violence.

Author

• Adelaide Mandeville, Harvard University