On this day, 64 years ago the New York Times had a front page story with the title “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1
Written by one John Finney it begins…
WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 — A special advisory committee recommended to President Eisenhower today an expanded and vigorous Government research program into how to control or modify the world’s weather
This was of course peak-Cold War. A few months previously the Russians, having captured better Nazi rocket scientists than the Americans had managed to paperclip, had aput a small metal ball into orbit, causing panic and despair.
It was also in the middle of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) ( at topic to which we will return).
Given the general paranoia and offense to the Uncle Sam’s amour propre, it’s surprising we didn’t end up with a “cloud gap” to match the illusory-but-useful bomber gap and missile gap…
Why this matters: we need to remember that the early history of understanding the climate is wrapped up in military needs (think about the British Navy and the Met Office) and computational models – see Edwards, 2010). It’s all part of the whole “give me absolute control over every living soul” thing that is steadily dooming us.
There is a strand of conspiratorial thinking, and fiction, which has ‘weather wars’ successfully being fought (I have a bunch of these novels, and should write about them. They’re fun, while bonkers).
What happened next? The IGY yielded a great findings (though the Pentagon briefly baulked at continuing to fund the C02 measures on Mauna Loa – that’s for another time). Weather modification experiments continued, but came up against the limits of human power.
References
Edwards, P. (2010). A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press
Finney, J. (1958) “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1
Further reading
Fleming, J. (2012) Fixing the Sky: the Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Columbia University Press.
Hamblin, J. (2013) Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Oxford University Press
Harper, K. (2008). Climate control: United States weather modification in the cold war and beyond. Endeavour, Volume 32, Issue 1, pp. 20-26.