A new and potentially extremely deadly arms race could be heating up the Earth.
Three days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in Louisiana, George W. Bush gave a prophetic speech to the American people, describing the aftermath of the storm by saying, “It’s as if the Gulf Coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine.”
Weather may be the new nuclear bomb.
There is a rush by world powers, led by the U.S., to be the first to understand how to harness the weather as a weapon of war. The process, commonly referred to as weather modification, has in the past been ostensibly focused on the agricultural sector and the use of cloud-seeding techniques to promote rainfall.
But, the U.S. military is now exploring the use of weather modification as a tool in its arsenal of modern warfare.
In 1957, the presidential advisory committee on weather control warned modifying the weather “could become a more important weapon than the atom bomb.”
A research report commissioned for the U.S. air force in 1996 titled, “Weather as a Force Multiplier,” states that by the year 2025, the U.S. should have the capability to “own the weather” by taking advantage of new technologies and “focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications.”
Uses listed for combat include the ability to create drought and deny fresh water to enemies, create storms, fog and earthquakes and increase precipitation to cause flooding.
Standing in the way of experimenting with more deadly techniques is a 1977 United Nations’ resolution, to which the U.S. is a signatory, banning weather modification experiments affecting other countries and that are harmful to the environment.
This may not be a problem if a bill introduced to the U.S. Senate in March, by a Republican member from Texas, passes. Bill S.517 is a bill to establish a weather modification operations and research board and for other purposes, and will be voted on this month. The U.S. has a track record of acting unilaterally when it believes its interests are at stake, which it will no doubt claim is the case here, particularly after the incompetence in domestic security and government response displayed in the disastrous aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
There is no way of forecasting what will happen when experimenting with weather patterns. Meteorology is an extremely unpredictable science. Some say introducing foreign elements into the atmosphere to conduct warfare will produce unintended circumstances, not least of which is further pollution and heating of the planet.
The world needs to take renegade countries like the U.S. to task at the upcoming UN Conference on Climate Change in Montreal. The ecological imprint the militaries of the world are making is often ignored, but is clearly going to get a lot worse.