Is Weather the Next Weapon of Mass Destruction?

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The storms in rural Texas have been devastating, and the Trump Administration has acted swiftly. Last season’s hurricanes that blew through Florida, much of Georgia, parts of South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and certainly western North Carolina were catastrophic. The western part of North Carolina still faces a long roadback. The total square miles of damage that Hurricane Helene wreaked on North Carolina is equal to all of Rhode Island.

FEMA’s initial slow response under the Biden Administration has been well-documented, and the partisan waythat they provided assistance is reprehensible. Contrary to the agency’s mission of providing “emergency management,” many dayspassed before rescue and relief operations got underway.

What About the Weather

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, noting the early inaction, was incensed. She claimed that the weather was being used as a weapon. Where MTG got her information is still uncertain. It is, however, becoming clearer as time marches on that governments around the world have been exploring the potential for controlling the weather. This quest goes back many decades, and the doubting Thomases among us are being naive.

In 2006, author Jerry Smith wrote a book titled, Weather Warfare: the Military’s Plan to Draft Mother Nature. He cited a statement in April of 1997 by then U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Cohen said terrorists and rogue states are at work in attempting to perfect an eco-type of terrorism “whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, and volcanoes, remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”

Cohen was not one to make off-the-wall statements. Indeed, cloud-seeding to diminish the effects of hail on the U.S. Midwest or to increase snow packs in the Sierras is not new. Moreover, hundreds of weather and environmental technologies have been patented in the U.S., with hundreds, if not thousands, around the world.

A Field with Many Players

Who is involved in such research and development? The military, academia, and privately run organizations.

In April 2016, the publication The National Interest featured an articletitled Mad Science: the Us Military’s Obsession with Weaponized Weather. The article elaborated on how the U.S. could fight wars in the future using both lighting and fog to supplement bombs and guns.

As with all such research into lethal weaponry, the U.S. is not alone. Russia and China have long been exploring this realm. In mid-2023, China’s National Development and Reform Commission and the China Meteorological Administration held a meeting to explore how weather modification could be developed.

Years earlier, China announced that it had engaged in effective weather modification on a large scale. They claimed that such operations would enhance agricultural production while safeguarding forest and grasslands from fire, and support the country’s overall disaster preparedness. Naturally, any such news emanating from China means that huge military applications are also in the mix.

A Force Multiplier

This year, in a report titled, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather, our government pinpointed how U.S. aerospace forces could take control of the weather by exploiting emerging technologies. Such technologies would focus on developing military applications to “shape the battlefield in ways never before possible.”

The report stated that using weather as a weapon would enable U.S. military forces to enjoy a full spectrum of tools and applications for all possible conflicts.

Although it is a high-risk, high-reward undertaking, attempting to control the weather offers a potential bonanza. Weather control has been likened to the original work undertaken to split the atom and thus has it dangers.

While many people invariably will be opposed to exploring weather modification, the overwhelming military advantages that might ensue should be ignored only “at our own peril.” Reality often sucks and, as with the nuclear arms race, sometimes you have to keep up to simply not be vanquished.

Hurled Into the Future

Weather modification could present a broader range of potential options to our fighting forces when confronting an enemy. It could be used for beneficial purposes, especially in agriculture. Moreover, on a small scale, modifying natural weather patterns could have a significant impact on global communication.

To those who scoff at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s outcry, do so cautiously. Decades of research, accelerating with the use of AI, support the prospects of using weather as a weapon and, like it or not, we are all being hurled into a future in which such employment is inevitable.