Fifty two years ago, on this day, March 18th, 1971, a US investigative journalist digs up a weather modification scandal.
…in the jungles over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.32 Under operation POPEYE, the Air Weather Service conducted secret cloud seeding operations to reduce traffic along portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Flying out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand without the knowledge of the Thai government or almost anyone else, but with the full and enthusiastic support of President Johnson,33 the AWS flew over 2,600 cloud seeding sorties and expended 47,000 silver iodide flares over a period of five years at an annual cost of approximately $3.6 million.
In March 1971, nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about Air Force rainmakers in Southeast Asia in the Washington post; several months later the Pentagon papers confirmed his information.
Jack Anderson, Washington Post (18 Mar 1971) Weather modification took a macro-pathological turn between 1967 and 1972
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 326ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the American military machine had spent the last seven years trying to defeat a bunch of peasants sorry, that’s unfair to the North Vietnamese. And it had bombed the crap and defoliated the crap out of Vietnam and killed so, so many people and they also tried lots of weather modification too.
What we can learn from this is that weather and climate studies have been surprisingly, always been intimately related to military needs, whether it is forecasting the weather for the D-Day landings in 1944, or all sorts of demented schemes to send hurricanes at the “bad guys”. See James Rodger Fleming’s 2010 book Fixing the Sky.
What happens next
Nixon pulled the American troops out in ‘73, the Communists took over in 75. Vietnam became, after an economically ropey interlude, a prosperous and enormous nation. People forget how many people live there now…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
March 18, 1958 – Military man spots carbon dioxide problem