Weather As A Weapon:

OUT OF THE BLUE:

The invisible U.S. military offensives in weather as a weapon.

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. [1]

Sound like a sci-fi thriller?

The above excerpt from the recent techno-yuppie cult magazine WIRED 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. Global climatic mayhem is here, and it is happening now. On top of all this is the permanent state of war perpetuated by multinational corporations and their agents in western governments. Behind this threshold of climate chaos the military is manipulating our weather.

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.[2]

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. 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.[3] We do not know why the U.S. signed this treaty in 1977, but we can be at least 95 % certain that the Nixon/Ford administrations did not do so out of concern that “too many civilians could be harmed,” as reported in this ABC article.

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.[4]

Under a wave of devastating exposures about un-democratic US 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. Gen. 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.[5]

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 from 1890 to 1892, with a $10,000 research budget allocated to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).[6] Throughout the 1960s and1970s hundreds of programs in cloud-seeding, tornado and hurricane modifications took place under projects like Stormfury, Skyfire and Whitetop.

Circa 1971, the U.S. government viewed ENMOD research as having transitioned from the “basic research” stage to the “operational” stage. Experiments were occurring – or had occurred -- in 22 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Iran, Israel, Kenya, Italy, France, South Africa, Congo and the U.S.S.R. Airborne seeding programs were undertaken to combat drought in the Philippine Islands, Okinawa, Africa and Texas.[7]

It was an explosive subject, through the 1970s but, after 1977, ENMOD interest seemed to disappear almost overnight. In other words, after decades of intense research and development, after billions of dollars of investment, after major institutions and governmental bodies were created and charged with oversight of ENMOD and its many peripheral issues, and after the entire reorganization of the U.S. Government to channel and guide and map out the future of this new and promising military and civilian “technology” – said to be more important than the atom bomb -- everything stopped.

Or did it?

It was as if a huge curtain fell over the subject as all research, all institutional interests, huge salaries and thousands of jobs – vanished. And the mass media stopped reporting anything and everything as if struck by plague. That – sudden and total silence -- is perhaps the most telling and suspicious indication of the secrecy and denial that the ENMOD arena was shackled with.

Today, 2003, it is almost as if it never happened.

Early in 2002, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld added over $1 billion to the fiscal 2003 defense budget request to develop certain Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) programs. The DOD invested more than $3 billion in UAV development, procurement and operations between 1996 and 2001; it plans to invest $2.3 billion more by 2005 and is likely to spend $4.2 billion by 2010. According to the so-called UAV Roadmap, by 2010, the UAV inventory of all the military services is expected to grow to 290 vehicles.[8]

UAV development is slated to occur with complete transparency: the above designated budgetary appropriations do not account for expenditures on secret programs, or the decades of previous UAV research and developments, or for current and future ongoing UAV development under top-secret black programs. UAV’s will operate as sensors, scientific data and image collectors transmitting climate and weather data to ground stations, satellites and airborne platforms. They might also be deployed as the vehicles to deliver seeding agents, to facilitate or distribute other ENNOD inputs at the precise place and time. UAV’s are integral components for the facilitation of remote sensing, weather collection, climate and atmospheric data collection and analyses, and rapid information transfer – all crucial to offensive military ENMOD capabilities.

Note that major billion dollar government ENMOD research projects revolve around UAV development. One of these, for example, is the US Department of Energy/Department of Defense Atmospheric Radiation and Monitoring (ARM) UAV project. The ARM-UAV project involves numerous corporations, research institutions and US intelligence connected agencies entrenched in basic ENMOD research and development programs – long-standing programs by no means in their infancy.

The U.S. Army Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (TUAV) and the U.S. Air Force Global Hawk and RQ-1 Predator UAVs saw significant operational deployment in the war on Afghanistan, where they proved themselves indispensable, and they are part of a major array of weapons-bearing UAV-type systems slated to deploy various payloads sporting weather warfare enabling technologies.[9] RQ-1 Predator was also deployed over Kosovo.[10] Weather modification by the military took place in Vietnam, Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

It is through the proliferation of such popular cultural artifacts as sci-fi films (Star Wars) and techno-mags (WIRED) that the military will continue to acculturate the public to its agenda, and thereby facilitate the easy transitions of state-of-the-art technologies -- such as weather warfare capabilities -- into the unclassified (public) arena. Mass media plays a major role in acculturating the public to the DOD and intelligence warfighting agendas, and to further institutionalize the permanent warfare economy of the United States.

While his ties to the military industrial complex run to the deepest levels, Dr. Bernard Eastlund’s pursuit of ENMOD research and technologies ostensibly in the private sector can be gleamed from the web site of Eastlund Scientific Enterprises Corporation. The corporate product line includes such state-of-the-art ENMOD capabilities as:

· Ionospheric modifications

· Weather Modification

· Tornado modification

· HAARP Applications

Not coincidentally, Dr. Bernard J. Eastlund – whose ENMOD research and development has proceeded under the guise of private and supposed non-military pursuits -- was Vice President for Energy Technology with BDM Corporation from 1979 to 1984. For years BDM has operated as a major front company for the intelligence apparatus. There are numerous other highly secretive programs, corporations and agencies involved. As a consultant to Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO) from 1984 to 1987, Eastlund worked on the High Frequency Active Aural research Program (HAARP) – one of the openly acknowledged weather warfare projects.

Eastlund’s connections sink deep into the classified military-industrial arena, but he is just one of many numerous and obvious players in the ENMOD endgame. The corporations, agencies and academic institutions involved are many and varied, and their areas of ENMOD interest are easily delineated from publications and corporate literature.

Through the ostensible independence of private sector actors, those who are otherwise deeply in tune with both overt and covert military goals, the DOD and its peripheral and supporting agencies are able to hide behind intelligence and defense “front companies” and thereby exercise their highly efficacious -- and deceitful -- constructs of plausible deniability.

How much climate change research is needed? Is it reasonable to believe that the billions of dollars that have been devoted to “global climate change research” in the recent past have been dedicated to that? While it is certainly true that “more research needed” has become the mantra behind which action to mitigate global climate change is stalled or suspended, it is also true that data collection, remote sensing, computer modeling, and platforms (for deployment) research and development for ENMOD purposes has been taking place. Indeed, the scale and magnitude of ENMOD related programs are astounding.

Recall that special operations and covert forces are accountable to no one; they perpetuate terror as a means of social control; they are amongst America’s most egregious examples of instruments of state power hostile to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.[11] While impossible to verify, most likely – if not certainly -- UAVs deploying hostile ENMOD technologies in various states of development have already been deployed on covert operations.

The cold warriors of the past five decades – and the corporations, agencies and bureaus they staff -- have revealed that they show very creative imaginations in their capacity to define and implement secret terrorist programs, and actual covert deployments, of unlimited scope, brutality and horror. They are experts at deception and the expropriation of the public trust. Further, they are accountable to no one. Their jobs secured by fellow insiders, their careers furthered by insider appointments and promotions, the budgets they have had at their disposal were obscene. Over time they have become increasingly more obscene, perverse and insane.

Supposing that weather modification has been clandestinely pursued on the regional or global scale, DOD secret programs would enjoy the benefits of the actual overt scientific research and modeling of weather and climate. Under this scenario, a massive propaganda campaign that denied and obfuscated the rising global climate chaos (perhaps as much a result of covert ENMOD operations and experiments as the deleterious toxic emissions from entrenched fossil fuel industries) would be highly efficacious. This is exactly what we are seeing. There is also the possible greater agenda of intentionally facilitating radical climate instabilities for scientific adventurism.

In 1967 Dr. Edward Teller – the father of the A-bomb -- told a U.S. Senate Military Preparedness Committee that the United States could become a second-class power without war if the Russians succeed in controlling weather to produce rain over their territory and deprive America of needed rain.[12] Teller has for decades urged the U.S. to adopt a more defensive nuclear policy: Star Wars fits his bill neatly and he has enjoyed an enduring and, certainly, intimate association with nuclear devastation directors Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.[13] It should be no surprise then to learn then that Dr. Teller “has promoted the idea of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to counteract global warming.”[14] Computer simulations on the use of aluminum oxide to counter global warming come from Lawrence Livermore Weapons Laboratory, and this is one of the national labs involved in contemporary ENMOD research and development programs. Director Emeritus at Lawrence Livermore Labs, by the way, is Dr. Edward S. Teller.

Over and above the obscene but ongoing tax breaks and expenditures for devastating energy industries, funded by the public, the military-industrial complex has invested billions of dollars into research and development of weather-as-weapon technologies. Perhaps the most devastating reality about climatic mayhem is the evidence that it is the desired state of affairs, and that climatic mayhem may actually be desired and facilitated by the U.S. military, aerospace, defense and intelligence establishment. ~ end.

[1] Tom Standage, “Activate Cloud Shield! Zap a Twister!” Wired, January 2000.

[2] Despite repeated requests, Amherst College Radio could not produce a copy of this PSA, and hence the sponsoring organization remains unidentified, although the Christian organization was named during the broadcasts.

[3] “U.S. Government Policy Regarding Weather Modification,” Enclosure C in CJCSI 3810.01A, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction, U.S. Department of Defense Memorandum, February 25, 1998.

[4] The U.S. hearings resulted in the document Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 1975. More broadly, the literature abounds with credible sources and publications detailing 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.

[5] See e.g., Strategic Assessment 1996: The Instruments of U.S. Power, National Defense University, 1996.

[6] Robert G. Fleagle, Weather Modification: Science and Public Policy, University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

[7] Ed. W.N. Hess, NOAH Labs, Weather and Climate Modification, John Wiley & Sons, 1974: 271.

[8] Roxana Tiron, “Despite Doubts, Airforce Stands by Predator,” National Defense Magazine, www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/article.cfm?Id=681; April 8, 2002.

[9] Jim Garamore, “Fly High After Afghanistan,” American Forces Press Service, April 2002.

[11] See, e.g., William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, 1995; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights (Volumes I & II), South End Press, 1979.

[12] Daniel S. Halacy Jr., The Weather Changers, Harper & Row, 1968: 157.

[13] Dr. Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger, The New Press, 2002.