99% Invisible - 301- Making it Rain

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

The battlefield has always been at the mercy of the climate, but there was a time in U.S. military history when we did more than just pray for advantageous weather. We tried to create it. Making it Rain

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. August 24, 1814, marked the first and only time Washington DC was occupied by outside forces. The United States was two years into the war of 1812. They'd taken on Great Britain, which was then the greatest naval power in the world, and things weren't looking great for the American troops defending DC. That's producer Vivian Lee. British forces overtook the city and set fire to historic American landmarks including the Treasury building, the Capitol building, and even the White House. The siege became known as the burning of Washington.

But then a freak occurrence which in any other situation would have been a total disaster for DC, saved the city. Dark clouds began to form, which turned into thunder and lightning, which then turned into a full-blown tornado that headed straight for the British who were setting fires around the capital. A number of British soldiers were killed by fallen debris, and the fires were extinguished by the rain.

The British retreated back to their ships, which had been severely damaged by the storm. Thanks to a simple act of weather, the occupation of our nation's capital was over within a little more than a day. The storm that saved Washington was just one of countless times that weather played a crucial factor in war. Napoleon's army was not defeated by Russian forces, but by a Russian winter. During World War II, General Patton famously distributed 250,000 prayer cards to the army to enlist as many men as possible to pray for an end to the reign. The battlefield has always been at the mercy of the climate, but there was a time in US military

history when we did more than just pray for advantageous weather. We tried to create it. Fighting Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam continues a slow grind. Pictures from the swampy May Kong Delta show government troops trying to ferret out the Vietnam Kong in a situation whose issue according to U.S. Beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the 1960s and 70s, the U.S. became deeply entangled in a war between North and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist allies.

South Vietnam was supported by the U.S. and other anti-communist allies. And the Vietnam War, or as the Vietnamese called it, the American War, was unlike any the United States had ever engaged in. Our tradition and our heritage and our education in our history all prepared us for a different kind of war than we had to fight in the late 60s. This is General Merrill McPeak, former chief of staff of the Air Force. There wasn't a front line, and we weren't facing an enemy, at least to the beginning, that was equipped with tanks and flamethrowers and high speed computers and so forth. It was a total mismatch from that standpoint. It was us against a guerrilla army that showed up occasionally and

then disappeared, vanished. And we spent the next months looking for it and then it showed up suddenly and then was gone again. That guerrilla army was the Viet Cong, a communist force allied with North Vietnam, but fighting primarily in the South. One of the Viet Cong's greatest advantages was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a supply route that ran from North Vietnam through parts of Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops used it to infiltrate the south with weapons

and supplies. It traveled through an isolated region full of rugged mountains and dense jungles. The trail itself was made up of dirt paths and hand-made tunnels. Along the way, there were hidden bunkers, barracks, and even hospitals cleverly camouflaged from above. It was a engineering marvel, it wasn't a single road, it was a network of amazes of roads. The covert trail system dramatically shortened the journey from north to south Vietnam, meaning more troops, more weapons, and more North Vietnamese support could be made available to communist forces in the South.

And the key thing was that's how all their supplies, they supplied both the yet Kong and also their own forces, had to come down that trail. This is Lieutenant General Ed Soister. And in order to cut off the supplies, which are, of course, very important for military operation, we had to close this trail by various means. The US military tried disrupting the trail with bombing campaigns and by plowing the jungles

to strip the land. They also used deadly chemical defolence like agent orange. But none of these tactics seemed to work, at least not for very long. So whenever we punched a hole in one part of it, they simply moved over to a bypass. There was only one thing that significantly slowed

the flow of supplies and people on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Rain. The reality was that because of the nature of the trail, it was affected by heavy rainfall. So they had the same problem, of course, as we did in terms of trails that were very, very muddy with the rain. The mud would make the trails difficult to navigate, and so during one monsoon season in the middle of the war. Somebody, certainly not me, came up with the idea of,

let's see if we can increase the rainfall enough to stop vehicular traffic. The Department of Defense had decided that they should try to control the weather. This was the beginning of a top secret military project called Operation Popeye. The goal was to actually create more rain in Southeast Asia by artificially extending and intensifying

the naturally occurring monsoon season. The monsoon season typically lasted from April to October. The US military believed that if it could extend it by a month on either side, it would create a huge strategic advantage. Humans, especially military humans, have wanted to control the weather for a long time. It goes back to traditional rain making to ceremonies. This is Jim Fleming.

He's studied the history of human attempts at weather and climate modification. He doesn't think very highly of our abilities. It turns out that if you do a rain dance for up to two weeks, it'll probably rain, and then you could take credit for that. I mean, if you do anything long enough, and consistently enough, it'll rain, and you can claim responsibility. Flaming says that in the 19th century, after the Civil War, a theory began to develop, that major military operations were somehow disrupting the clouds and causing big rainstorms.

And so the theory was that we could shoot cannon fireworks, set off hydrogen balloons. We could sort of imitate battle. Imitate battle in order to create rain. The federal government actually attempted this in Texas in the 1890s during a drought. The actual Department of Agriculture funded it, and they had a weather bureau observer there. And the locals loved it. They loved the fireworks.

They loved the spectacle. They loved to go out on the hillside and watch the cannonating. But it was during the monsoonsies. And so there was a really good chance it was going to rain anyway. This kind of experimentation continued from the 1890s into the early 20th century, and it only accelerated after 1945. We'd enter the Cold War era, and we'd just invented

the bomb. And that technology made people think they had power over nature. It also heightened our paranoia that other countries were trying to develop their own nature controlling technologies like the Russians. Before the space race with the Soviet Union, there was a kind of weather race. We thought that they might get ahead of us and if they had a nefarious purpose, they might be able to change our weather and climate and possibly cause another dust bowl or drought or something if they really could do it.

So there was a great rush to get into this field. Again, it was driven by military concerns. There was a lot of money being poured into scientific research on weather control. And while many of these experiments didn't yield very promising results, one actually did in 1946. Well, the first time in all history, there is now open demand, actually did in 1946. This remarkable achievement happened in Sconnected the New York at the offices of General Electric. Yep, the same company that made your dishwasher

also invented weather control. GE was where a scientist and Nobel laureate named Irving Langmier was working in collaboration with a colleague named Vincent Schaeffer. Who developed a technique of dry ice put into a cloud that would make it super cool and force it to be conditions to go wavelose freezing and a little bit of ice in the cloud could cause a cloud to glaze shade or create snow. In case you didn't quite get that, here's a quick lesson in eighth grade cloud physics.

Clouds are essentially just tiny droplets of water suspended in the atmosphere. When the right conditions occur, water molecules in these clouds will condense together and become heavy enough to fall to earth as rain or snow. And that's what there was another guy doing instrumental work at GE. His name was Bernard or Bernie Vonnegut, the brother of author Kurt Fonegott, who also worked at GE in the PR department. And it's interesting. You can actually see the ways that GE influenced some of Fonegott's writing. Kurt was on staff at GE writing his reports, but he was also working on novels, you know,

like Cats' Cradle, in which the mad, kind of like an Irving Langmer person, develops ice-nine, which messes up the environment. Ice-nine was kind of like cloud seeding on steroids. It's clear that Bernie and Kurt, these two brothers, were uneasy about some of the breakthroughs they were involved with. And I think you'll see some of Bernie's concerns reflected in Kurt Vonnegut's novels,

which are pretty much against militarization of nature. But Bernie's work at GE actually helped lay the groundwork for that militarization. Along with Langmier and Schaefer, he made another critical discovery. He found a new weather-related use for a compound called silver iodide. It had a hexagonal structure, like a snowflake. And he found that if you sprayed it into a cloud, it would trick the cloud into glaciating. And so armed with a Nobel Prize winner, a technique to super cool a cloud with dry eyes, and a technique to trick a cloud with silver iodide, they really felt they had the basis for chemical cloud seeding. GE was understandably very proud of their discovery.

And so they issued a great big press release that said we can control the weather. But shortly after claiming responsibility for a storm that caused eight inches of snowfall in upstate New York, GE suddenly realized that they might not want to be known for controlling the weather, especially if that weather was destroying people's property. With it several months, their lawyer says, no, you better keep that quiet because there could be too many lawsuits.

Given the risk of negative public reaction and liability, weather modification research continued quietly. Scientists explored how it could be applied to hurricane intervention and drought relief, and of course warfare. Langmur himself was excited about the military applications of his research. And I think he wanted to have a kind of a gigantic role

by using weather as a militarized weapon. A hurricane is multiple H bombs and incredible destructive power if you could direct it against an enemy. So lightning was making these kind of claims. And so were our political leaders. With nuclear weapons now in play, the US was looking forward

and imagining how we could give ourselves an edge in future wars. This is from a speech that Vice President Lyndon Johnson gave in 1962. It lays the predicate in the foundation for the development of a weather satellite. That will permit man to determine the world's cloud layer. And ultimately, to control the weather, and he who controls the weather will control the world.

LBJ, or Bondvillen, you decide. By the time Rainmaking had made its way to the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Southeast Asia, it wasn't a new technology, but it was still a closely held secret. Operation Popeye was a Navy program and missions were flown by Air Force pilots and those pilots were given limited information about what they were doing. I never I never even imagined that that group was doing until we got over there and showed up for the briefing and then they told us what this project was about.

This is Brian Heckman, a former Air Force pilot. He belonged to the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. They contributed to the 2,602 cloud-seating missions flown during Operation Popeye. We just went around looking for clouds to seed. Once they found a cloud to fly through, they'd flip a switch to ignite silver or lead iodide flares, then they'd wait to see if the cloud produced rainfall. There were times when we left an area that we had been working and it was obvious that there was a lot of rainstorms going on.

Operation Popeye had four main objectives to turn the roads to mud, to cause landslides along roadways, to wash out river crossings, and to keep roads muddier for longer than usual. It seemed to heckman that Operation Pop-I was working, but it's really hard to know for sure. Cloud seating at the time and even today is far from an exact science. At best the military could measure three things, what the average rainfall for that area was, what the estimated rainfall would have been and what actually fell after a seating mission.

But they couldn't collect that much data, like enough to really rigorously analyze the outcomes. Here's Fleming again. The rain is completely variable. You have tremendous temporal variability, spatial variability, and that means the statistics are not robust about what your particular intervention did to that particular rainfall. And even if they could make it rain, they couldn't precisely control where that rain landed. One official described accidentally dumping a ton of rain on an American Special Forces camp. Still, the program was deemed effective enough to continue for five years, from 1967 to

1972. But the biggest problem with Operation Popeye wasn't so much the lack of quantifiable success, it was the many ethical concerns. Whether modification, especially in the context of war, raises a lot of thorny questions. The military justified the program by arguing that increasing rainfall to great mud and wash out roads was preferable to more bombing. But the reality is, the US military still dropped a lot of bombs on Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

Over 7 million tons of them, so many in fact, that to this day, the government of Laos is still trying to clean up all of the undetnated bombs scattered across the country. Here's General Merrill McPeak again. So we dropped more bombs on Laos than we did on Germany and Japan all together in World War II. So the tonnage of bombs dropped was enormous, and the heavily used parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail looked like the face of the moon. It was just a lunar landscape, nothing but dust. But just as it's unclear how much rain was generated by Operation Pah-Pai, it's also unclear if Pah- Popeye actually prevented the military from dropping more bombs, or if they just did both.

And messing with another country's weather system, that has potentially big and unpredictable consequences. You don't necessarily know what the long-term consequences are going to be of rainmaking. This is Jacob Hamlin, a historian at Oregon State University. Especially if you're doing it on a long-term basis. And there are documented cases in which weather modification may have caused harm.

The silver iodide sprayed into clouds can be toxic to humans and concentrated doses, but it hasn't been shown to have negative health effects when used for cloud seeding. Nevertheless, cloud seeding may have caused other problems. In 1947, Irving Langmuir's research team at GE tried to break up a hurricane by dumping a lot of dry ice into it to see if it would collapse, but instead it changed trajectory, became stronger and hit the Georgia coast.

One death was reported as a result of the hurricane. And in 1952, the British Royal Air Force was conducting cloud-sitting tests in Lin-Mith, England and may have accidentally caused a devastating flood that killed 35 people. It was this kind of ethical ambiguity that ultimately ended the US military's entire weather weaponization program.

In 1971, Jack Anderson, a reporter for the Washington Post, published an article revealing that the US was engaged in covert weather warfare in Vietnam. This report was corroborated by information leaked in the Pentagon papers. The following year in July of 1972, Seymour Hirsch reported in the New York Times about Operation Popeye. Within two days of the story's publication, the entire program was officially ended, and all cloud-seating missions stopped.

When the program was finally declassified, and it came out that the U.S. had been secretly engaging in hostile weather manipulation in Vietnam, it was dubbed the Watergate of Weather Warfare. But they really should have called the Watergate of Weather Warfare. But they really should have called it Weathergate. This led to an embarrassingly embarrassing moment for the US. Here's Jim Flemingen. It's perceived as a big mistake. It's just an embarrassment that you would try to intervene in a nation's weather like

that. Research money for weather control rapidly disappeared. And in 1977, the U.S. signed an international agreement called the Environmental Modification Convention Treaty, or INMOD for short, along with the Soviet Union and many other nations. They agreed to ban modification of the environment for hostile purposes. The treaty outlawed causing earthquakes and tsunamis, steering hurricanes or tampering with the ionosphere. It also banned any other widespread long-lasting

and severe damage to the environment. But there are questions about whether the end-mod treaty was even that relevant. It was very easy to ban environmental warfare. And the reason it was easy to ban is because you're not giving up anything. Because those things no longer were considered warfare. And the reason it was easy to ban is because you're not giving up anything, because those things no longer were considered to be important parts of the arsenal. They were developed during a time when the US wanted to develop lots of different weapons systems.

But by the time you get to the 1960s, if there was going to be a war with the Soviet Union, it was going to be a nuclear war. It was going to be a war in which thermonuclear weapons were used, intercontinental ballistic missiles were probably going to be a nuclear war. It was going to be a war in which thermonuclear weapons were used, intercontinental ballistic missiles were probably going to be used. And so, Hamlin believes that giving up environmental warfare was more a gesture of global cooperation rather than an actual step towards its disarmament. After all, it's hard to find something that can cause more widespread, long-lasting, or severe damage to the environment than nuclear weapons.

Those certainly were not banned. So the Enmont Treaty, you could argue, yes, sure, it's progress, but I would encourage us all to take a more cynical view of that and see that it was signed for very political purposes and really gave virtually nothing up. The military interest in weather control had run its course, but cloud seating is something that still takes place all over the world for another reason. Money. A major percentage of the economy is weather sensitive, from agriculture to energy to insurance

to the travel industry. More than 50 countries openly have some form of weather modification program. China attempted to use cloud seating to clear skies over the Beijing Olympics. There's even a company in the UK that offers a wedding package that includes cloud seating, which can be used to burst rain clouds and make them disappear. The company claims they can guarantee a rain-free wedding day. And that will only set you back about $150,000. free wedding day. And that will only set you back about $150,000.

As the conversation shifts away from the Cold War to the present day threat of climate change, people are starting to talk about the use of geoengineering to fix the problem. Suggestions have been thrown around like brightening the clouds to reflect radiation back into space, or spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere to cool down the planet. People have proposed giant space umbrellas, or even trying to change the orbit of the Earth so that it's slightly farther from the sun. Changing the weather is one thing, but changing the climate on a permanent scale is next-level meddling.

Many people are highly doubtful that geoengineering can be used effectively to stop the warming of our planet. Anything we try would be extremely experimental with unknown consequences. That's the main issue. Do we have a right to mess around? Do we have a right to tinker with things and allow things just to happen? Whether it's the free market or some geoengineer who wants to try some new trick. Do we have a right to do that when we know it's gonna have global consequences? Whether systems are so complex, that it's pretty much hubris to think we can intervene in predictable ways.

But as long as the stakes are high, whether it's a war, or you know, the fate of the planet, people will probably keep trying. People will probably keep trying. Kurt Coles did and I talk about the unintended reuse of bomb fragments in Southeast Asia. After this. So as we mentioned in the story, the US military has described their efforts at cloud-seeding in and around Vietnam as this alternative to bombing, a way to muddy up the trails with

rain instead of dropping deadly explosives. But in reality, US airplanes dumped tons and tons of bombs in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era, many exploded on impact. But Colstad is here to talk about the ones that didn't, and the unexpected ways they were reused and incorporated into the built landscape. In the 1960s and 70s, the US covertly dropped hundreds of millions of bombs over Louse. More bombs that were dropped in Europe during World War

2. And in the wake of this conflict, which came to be called the secret war, this small Asian nation gained the morbid distinction of being the most bomb country per capita in world history, and it still holds that record. It's hard to rub my mind around the concept of hundreds of millions. How is that even possible? Well, a lot of the devices that got dropped were cluster bombs. Basically, these consist of hollow metal shells that open up on their way down and deploy hundreds of smaller explosive bomblets,

which are about the size of tennis ball. And the US flew over 500,000 missions into Laos to drop these and other types of explosives. So the larger shell, the big bomb, is really just the casing and it's those little bomblets inside the bigger shell that would spread out and explode when they hit the ground. Well, they were designed to at least, but they actually had a really high failure rate. As many as a third of those bomblets didn't detonate on impact, leaving the country littered with close to 100 million unexploded devices. And when the bombing finally stopped in 1973,

lay oceans were left to deal with the aftermath. So they began cleaning the landscape, but they also started collecting the shells and the scraps they found, and putting them to use in other ways. And do you mean the bigger, outer shell casings or these little bomblets? Well, it's a bit of both, and other types of bombs too, but those big hollow metal shells in particular, yeah, they turned out to be really useful, at least the ones that were relatively intact. Some of the larger ones have been turned into things like canoes. Other mid-sized ones have been lined up to form the walls of buildings or used as spilt

to lift up houses off the ground or cut open to make pots for plants. And even the really small scrap can be melted down for other purposes, like making jewelry or silverware or cowbells or other things. And over time, finding and recycling these shelves and scraps has actually grown into this unlikely national industry. So around the lay ocean countryside, you can see tons of bombshells baked into the built environment. This story has this patina of this uplifting swords to plowshare story, but really,

it's this horrifying legacy that they have to deal with these deadly devices that we dropped on them in the first place. Yeah, it's really very sad. And aside from the people who died initially when those bombs were dropped, tens of thousands of people have actually died due to detonations in the decade since. And even now hundreds of people are injured or killed

each year from explosions, sometimes while attempting to gather up bombs for reuse. So they've been cleaning up since 1973, are they anywhere close to cleaning up all the you know, since 1973, are they anywhere close to cleaning up all the bombs? Not really. Non-profit organizations that are working on this problem actively still estimate that it will take decades or even a century to clean up the rest of these. And it's this legacy in part that has caused over 100 nations to get on board with this convention of cluster munitions, which is an international agreement

not to make or use or transfer cluster bombs. And I take it the United States is not one of the countries that signed on to the convention on cluster munitions. Correct. The US military clearly didn't take away some of the same lessons that other countries did from what happened in the Vietnam War.

And while it's fascinating to see how people in the last have managed to make something useful out of these devices, they're still this really tangible sort of pervasive reminder of the horrors of war. A few years back, photographer Mark Watson encountered this phenomenon on a journey through LAS. You can watch a video of the reuse samples that he found on our website at 99pi.org 99% invisible was produced this week by Vivian Lee edited by Delaney Haugh mix in tech production by sheriff

Youssef music by Sean Riel Kurt Colstad is the digital director Katie Mingle is our senior producer The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Trufflement, Terran Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best most innovative shows in all of

podcasting. We are supported by our listeners, just like you. You can find 99% of this won't enjoy discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI or we're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But do you know what's better than all of those things? Our website. It's 99pi.org.

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