If we could control the weather …
These days we’re hearing a lot about geo-engineering — manipulating the weather — to help reverse some of the worst effects of climate change. No one really knows if this is a potentially planet-saving idea or if it’s as foolhardy as it sounds.
What we do know is that there have been attempts to control the weather for less noble purposes. During the Vietnam War, the United States hatched a plan to use a technique called cloud seeding to extend Vietnam’s monsoon season, which would flood rivers, destroy roads, and generally make it more difficult for the enemy to fight. They called it Operation Popeye. (I get such a kick out the names governments give to these secret programs.) A 1972 article in the New York Times that outed the plan described it as the first confirmed use of “meteorological warfare.”
But Operation Popeye was child’s play compared to what the US government contemplated a decade or so earlier.
John von Neumann was one of the most brilliant scientists the world has ever known. He helped construct the mathematical basis for quantum physics, helped develop game theory, made major contributions to computer science, and worked on the Manhattan Project that built nuclear weapons. In the years just after World War II, during the early days of the Cold War, he served on the US Atomic Energy Commission and was a key advisor to President Eisenhower on matters involving nuclear technology. But Von Neumann had an idea that would help the US defeat Russia without having to use nukes: weaponize the weather.
Von Neumann envisioned sending Russia into a new Ice Age. The upside? No need for nukes. The downsides? Too many to count. In the end, his attempt to engineer a model that would allow the US military to control the weather on such a scale was foiled by chaos science. It turns out that weather is not so simple as Von Neumann suspected. His hopes of freezing out the enemy died like roses in a Moscow winter.
The United Nations has since banned altering the weather as a form of warfare. That’s reassuring. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could just ban war?
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Until next time,
Avery