Make It Rain

Front matter

State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America

Kristine C. Harper

Make It Rain

Conclusion to Part II

PART 111 Weather Control as State Tool (1957-1980)

Weather Control as State Tool on the Home Front Weather Control as State Tool on Military and Diplomatic Fronts

Conclusion to Part III Conclusion: Weather Control and the American State 235 Abbreviations 247

Notes 249 Index 297

19 49

87 109 129 153

165 201 230

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been helped along by several organizations and a larger number of individuals. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support I received while undertaking the research for and the writing of this monograph from the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which awarded me a postdoctoral fellowship for the 2004-5 academic year; the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded me a year-long fellowship (FB-53252-07) during the 2007-8 academic year; and the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah, which also awarded me a residential fellowship for the 2007-8 academic year.

I very much appreciate the efforts made by the many archivists and librarians who helped me find and obtain needed materials, including those at the Library of Congress Manuscript Room; the National Archives in Washington, DC, and National Archives II in College Park, Maryland; the Harvard University Archive; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archive; the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming; the Dwight David Eisenhower Presidential Library; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library (especially Allen Fisher); the National Center for Atmospheric Research Archive (Diane Rabson); the National Academy of Sciences Archive (Janice Goldblum); M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, State University of New York, Albany (Geoff Williams); the State of Washington Archive; the University of Washington Archive; the Utah State Archive; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Central Library, Silver Spring, Maryland (Doria Grimes); the Skeen Library at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology; and the Florida State viii Acknowledgments

University Libraries. A very special thank-you to the family of Captain Howard T. Orville, which so generously shared Captain Orville’s personal papers related to his chairmanship of the Advisory Committee on Weather Control in the 1950s, and to Michael Brown, son of George Brown, pilot of one of the Cessnas involved in the secret GROMET seeding project in India in 1967, who reached out to share information about his father’s experience. I am also indebted to the late Willard S. Houston, Captain, US Navy, who shared his diaries with me during an oral history interview, thus leading me to the GROMET project. Thanks also to Maureen MacLeod for indexing several stacks of archival documents.

For assistance with the images contained herein, I thank Doria Grimes, who rooted through stacks of photos for me at the NOAA Central Library; Chris Hunter of the Museum of Innovation and Science, Schenectady, New York; Eisha Leigh Neely, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; David Delene, editor, Journal of Weather Modification, and his assistant, Wanda Seyler; Liz Lyons, Sandra Licata, and Lucinda Whitehorse of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology; and Devin Soper of Florida State University’s Strozier Library for technical assistance with permissions.

I also appreciate the insights of those who commented on oral or poster presentations I made at meetings of the American Society for Environmental History; the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations; the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; the American Geophysical Union; the American Meteorological Society; and the First World Conference of Environmental History, and at the following institutions: Leiden University; Aarhus University; the University of Manchester; Wolfson College, Oxford; the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen; the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm; New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology; Oregon State University; the University of Oregon; and Florida State University’s Departments of History, Meteorology, Geography, and Scientific Computing. A special thank-you to my history department colleagues Robin Sellers, who read, proofed, and commented on the entire manuscript before it was trimmed down to amanageable number of pages, and Anne Marsh, who solved my last-minute imaging problems. In addition, I also benefited greatly from comments and suggestions received from my colleagues while I was in residence at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah, particularly center director Robert Goldberg.

At the University of Chicago Press, I am indebted to my editor, Tim Men-

Acknowledgments ix nel, for keeping me moving in the right direction, and to Rachel Kelly, for answering numerous questions and helping me to get all the details right as the manuscript moved into production. I am particularly indebted to the three anonymous reviewers, whose detailed, spot-on suggestions were critical to the successful completion of this manuscript. In addition, I greatly appreciate Jo Ann Kiser’s expert copyediting.

Throughout the research and writing of this book I have received steadfast encouragement and support from my husband and colleague, Ron Doel. He spotted relevant archival material in unexpected places, remembered arcane bits of information from articles I had overlooked, pulled me out of archives when it was time to hunt for food instead of tasty historical tidbits, commented on several drafts of each chapter without a single complaint, and took on the task of cleaning up images. Thank you, Sweetie! Any remaining mistakes are strictly my own.

Introduction

You have to figure out how to guide that cloud...

SENATOR GEORGE SMATHERS (D-Florida), 1951

Weather control. Juxtaposing those two words is enough to raise eyebrows in a world where even the best weather models still fail to nail every forecast and the effects of climate change on sea-level height, seasonal averages of weather phenomena, and biological behavior are being watched with interest, regardless of political or scientific persuasion. But between the late nineteenth century, when the United States first funded an attempt to “shock” rain out of clouds with cleverly deployed explosives, and the late 1940s, rainmaking (as it had been called earlier) became weather control. Methods then under development intrigued people in the highest reaches of the American state. Clear fog for landing aircraft? Check. Punch large holes in clouds to allow departing aircraft to leave and returning aircraft to spot their landing field? Check. Gentle rain for strawberries? Sufficient rain in semi-arid regions for grain production? Enhanced snowpacks for hydroelectric utilities? Drying up clouds so that precipitation would not damage ripe cherries? Check, check, check, check. By the late 1950s, proposed uses and the money to undertake them continued to increase. Enhance agriculture at home and dry up the land of our enemies? Trigger precipitation from clouds to put out forest fires? Put an end to “evil” hurricanes? All that and more. Weather control was not a pie-in-the-sky concept. It was a water-in-the-sky, sun in the upper Midwest in winter, fog-free runway, and nontraceable weapon of war concept. It was designer weather on demand.

How might one tell a story about the history of weather control, given the surfeit of jaw-dropping pieces of correspondence, newspaper accounts, scientific articles, government reports, and legislative hearings? The challenge is greater than one may at first imagine, for the options are many. I could focus on the engineering behind the seeding devices, and how and why they changed over time—that is, a history of technology. A history of science could examine the theoretical constructs underpinning weather control and various internal and external events shaping their development. A social history of weather control could answer questions like, How did people think about weather and climate, and the ways to adapt to them? Or, How did religious beliefs fit into these ideas? A legal history of weather control is a possibility—there have been enough lawsuits aimed at weather controllers to develop conclusions about how it fits in with other environmental cases; when these were added to laws that were proposed and passed, or proposed and shot down, one could find more than enough material to support such a study. A study of the many ideas related to environmental control? That would be intellectual history. How were weather control ideas and claims treated in newspapers large and small, and in popular literature? A history of popular culture would do the trick. Alternatively, one could connect weather control to geoengineering writ large or to inadvertent weather modification, the approach taken by James Rodger Fleming in Fixing the Sky, in which he reminds would-be geoengineers that they are following in a long line of mythical beings, fictional characters, scientists, and engineers who have long sought to change the atmosphere.’ A military history focused on the tactical and strategic uses of the weather weapon, or a diplomatic history examining the state’s use of weather control to win friends and influence allies during the Cold War along the same lines as Atoms for Peace, Food for Peace, and Water for Peace—both are options. Taking a different route, one could narrate the weather control story as a case study examining the role of expertise in making high-level decisions, or as a history of moral decision making, or as a history of conspiracy theories.”

But instead of going narrow, I decided to step back and look at the weather control story from as many angles as possible. All those viewpoints led back to the same starting point: weather control in the United States reached dizzying heights in the 1960s because it was heavily funded and adopted as a foreign and domestic policy tool by the federal government, and then plunged into virtual oblivion on the public stage in the 1970s as the funding dried up.’ Since the whole is greater than the sum of these already intriguing parts, Make It Rain thus weaves together the story of how federal officials—politicians, bureaucrats, military leaders, or diplomats—pursued their goal of producing designer weather on demand, even as meteorologists were struggling to figure out how the atmosphere functioned, how to model it, and how to make viable weather and climate forecasts. For while state officials knew what they wanted—weather on demand—the meteorologists knew what they did not know: under what circumstances clouds produced rain, snow, drizzle, or any other hydrometeor, to use the all-purpose scientific term. And no matter how proponents of weather control spun it, weather control was really about controlling only one weather element: water. Not atmospheric circulation, not temperature, not atmospheric pressure. Just water. Water for drought-stricken areas, the US West, and increasingly crowded urban areas. Water for hydroelectric power, for irrigation, for transportation, and for recreation. Water for life for our friends and allies. Too much or no water for our enemies.

What we know now, and what observers could have discerned at the time, was a very large disconnect between weather control advocates and meteorological experts. Decision makers in the early 1950s were being enticed to consider weather control as a real possibility for whatever weather problem ailed them by prominent scientists whose reputations screamed out “elite experts”: Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir of the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York; famed computer architect and mathematician John von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University; physicist Vladimir Zworykin (known for his invention of the scanning television camera) at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Laboratory, also in Princeton, New Jersey; and thermonuclear bomb creator Edward Teller. But while all of these men were convinced that controlling the weather was just a matter of lab time and money, meteorologists—whether members of the US Weather Bureau or academics in research universities— understood that controlled laboratory conditions had little relation to the wild, chaotic atmosphere and its interactions with Earth’s varied surface, where one did not get to select the initial conditions before an experiment began nor get to control the many variables that influence what we call weather. Consequently, mid-twentieth-century meteorologists were loath to get involved with anything smacking of weather control other than the microscale controls available to farmers who chose to save their crops from freezing temperatures by smudging, spraying water on plants, or circulating air with large fans. They knew, at a time when it was still difficult to make a good forecast thirty-six hours in advance, that controlling the weather over hundreds of acres of grassland or mountain ranges, much less continents, was out of the question. And bringing massive hurricanes and tightly wound tornadoes to heel? As New Yorkers might say: fuhgeddaboudit! But our distinguished nonmeteorologist experts had sufficient clout to make federal leaders take notice and, in turn, dismiss the concerns of atmospheric scientists who were attempting to explain the difficulties involved.

Dazzled by promises of water in the sky becoming “gently falling” water on the ground, members of the US Congress have been holding hearings on Capitol Hill about weather control for more than fifty years even though humans’ ability to control the weather—which was “just a few years away” in the 1950s, and then the 1960s, then the 1970s—remains elusive. The reasons behind supporting weather control—drought, floods, famine, wars, fires—change with the decades, but the tantalizing idea of controlling the uncontrollable remains firmly entrenched. Now . . . with the global temperature rising, larger and larger chunks of ice calving from Antarctica’s ice sheets, glaciers melting at a faster clip, sea level rising, weather appearing wildly erratic—although when one gets hit by nasty weather it generally seems wildly erratic whether it is within norms or not—people will start itching for their leaders to do something, preferably quickly, painlessly, and cheaply. Such was the reasoning in the late nineteenth century when the first federal appropriations were granted for explosives to shock water out of the sky over the dry Texas plains. It continued through the twentieth century, and it will likely continue through the twenty-first and beyond. And that is why and how “weather control: a grand idea” turned into “weather control: a state tool.”

CONSIDERING THE “STATE”

But what do we mean by the state? It seems deceptively easy, yet “speaking coherently about the state,” writes sociologist Patrick Carroll, “is far more tricky than it might at first appear.”* No kidding. And even trickier is doing so without resorting to jargon-laden, head-scratching prose unique to the academic tribes who think and write about the state. Nevertheless, we cannot discuss weather control as a state tool without first engaging with the question, what is the state?

A typical starting point is Max Weber’s early twentieth-century argument that a state is a coercive organization that controls territories and those who reside therein.” That sounds an awful lot like a “government,” but political scientist Alfred Stepan argues, “The state must be considered more than the ‘government.’ It is the continuous administrative, legal, bureaucratic, and coercive systems that attempt not only to structure relationships between civil society and public authority in a polity, but also to structure many crucial relationships within a civil society as well.” And political scientist Stephen

Skowronek describes a “sense of the state” in American politics that “is the sense of an organization of coercive power operating beyond our immediate control, and intruding into all aspects of our lives” even though “the absence of the sense of the state . . . has been the great hallmark of American political culture.”

The rise of weather control efforts took place against this “absence of the sense of the state” as the United States’ bureaucratic underpinnings began to flower during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, helped along by the reform movement of the Progressive Era, by World War I, and by the New Deal Era that accompanied the Great Depression. The further expansion of the federal bureaucracy (also termed “state building”) picked up steam during World War II and continued on at full speed during the Cold War, not only due to the expansion of national security concerns but also due to responses to civil rights and environmental concerns that had been simmering below the surface for decades. Throughout the twentieth century, the state bureaucracy had been building upon its capacity to take action through various agencies’ efforts to use science and technology to control nature on a variety of fronts via, for example, dam and levee building, modification of river channels, insect control, and forest management in addition to weather control. In all of these instances, we are seeing the federal government bureaucracy expand and “mold institutional capacities” as it responded to domestic and international crises, class conflicts, and the increasing complexity of daily life.* Historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists have used many terms to describe this emerging state, including administrative, bureaucratic, welfare, industrial, post-industrial, capitalist, regulatory, warfare, garrison, national security, proministrative, scientific, technology, and engineering. But the pithiest way to look at those who sought to use weather control harkens back to economist and labor historian John R. Commons’s “The state is . . . officials-in-action.” Or, as historian Margot Canaday writes, “What officials do”? I prefer this definition, particularly for the weather control story, because it is essentially all about officials in action.

Those officials—elected, appointed, civil servants—may only take action to regulate growing seasons or to control the weather if the state has both the autonomy and the capacity to act. Let’s consider autonomy first. Sociologist Theda Skocpol argues that in the United States, state autonomy has been historically in short supply because state power is “fragmented, dispersed, and everywhere permeated by organized societal interests.” However, she also notes that Stephen Krasner, in Defending the National Interest, uses state autonomy to explain US foreign policy, arguing that the president and secretary of state are relatively insulated from “specific societal pressures” and hence act in “furthering the nation’s general interests.” Political scientist Daniel P. Carpenter argues that bureaucratic autonomy depends on bureaucracies being politically differentiated from those who seek to control them, able to solve problems and create plans, and seen as legitimate organizations."

But aren’t all federal agencies tasked with furthering the nation’s general interests? And if that is the case, aren’t all of these federal officials acting on behalf of the state at least somewhat removed from special interests? Certainly in the case of weather control, agencies that were actively promoting its development (Departments of Defense and Interior) and those that were not (Weather Bureau) were acting under their own volition and thereby autonomous. What of Carpenter’s conditions for autonomy in the weather control case? That is a little bit tougher, particularly for the Weather Bureau. It certainly had interests and a worldview that diverged from the politicians who were trying to influence it, but it lacked the power to successfully push back against them. It had the ability to solve problems, if by that we mean the ability to efficiently provide appropriate weather forecasts and warnings throughout the nation. What it didn’t have, primarily due to budgetary constraints, was the ability to create new programs. And what it completely lacked was a strong organizational reputation, perhaps because before World War II ended, meteorology wasn’t considered much more than a “guessing science.”!! The Departments of Defense and Interior were in much better positions to fulfill the first two conditions, although Interior suffered from organizational problems in the early twentieth century. So while the Weather Bureau, the agency most likely to be involved in weather control, had little autonomy, the military services, backing the initial experiments, had considerably more.

And what of state capacity? Skocpol writes that, to be effective, a state needs to have control over its territory, loyal, skilled officials, and adequate financial resources. But even a state that possesses all three of these attributes will not necessarily be able to successfully enact and carry out policies in every area under its jurisdiction. Some of those policies, Skocpol points out, may be stronger or weaker than others.'? In the US case, we have territorial integrity, the financial means, and the staffing to fulfill the requirement for state capacities. How does that play out for the relevant agencies in the fights, some secret, some in the public view, over implementing weather control? The Weather Bureau, in particular, had an extremely dedicated workforce, which before World War II included almost every meteorologist in the country. Similarly, the military services and the Department of the Interior’s Geological Survey had significant numbers of highly qualified scientists. Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, focused on practical undertakings such as building dams, tended to have less scientific strength and significant organizational problems early in the twentieth century, but had significantly enhanced its engineering staff by midcentury. Financially, the Weather Bureau was always in the worst shape, invariably operating on a shoestring budget compared to other units and consistently lacking research funding.”

In any event, for our purposes the state encompasses the actions of officials in all branches of the federal government from the president on down, and in all relevant departments, agencies, and bureaus. Some of those actions were taken directly; others were made possible by government contracts with universities and private companies. But the entity exerting control via funding and policy decisions was the American state, which was being legitimized by its “instrumental uses of science and technology.”

SCIENCE AND THE STATE

So how are science and the state connected? This, too, seems deceptively easy. Science and the state have been intertwined since sixteenth-century English natural philosopher and courtier Francis Bacon suggested using the power of science to control nature for the benefit of the state, and for the state to fund science to fulfill that purpose. Some scientists think their work is unaffected by anything outside of their laboratories or field sites, whether politics or patronage. But scholars who have examined this relationship present a very different story: science has been political for centuries and is integral to modern states’ political systems. Science and the state are about control—the former controls nature and the latter controls territory and people. And since the control of territory also involves controlling the environment in which we all live, the practices of science and the state are effectively joined at the hip. With the rapid technological revolution of the last couple of centuries, science, technology, and the state are so closely intertwined that it is almost impossible to tease them apart.’ As sociologist Sheila Jasanoff puts it, “there cannot be a proper history of scientific things independent of power and culture. . . . Science and technology operate, in short, as political agents.”'®

In Make It Rain, I view weather control as a political agent: politicians, with the aid of entrepreneurial scientists, were (and are) attempting to use it for their own political ends, be that domestic (bringing home water to their states) or foreign (as a weapon or diplomatic tool). But those entrepreneurial scientists and their scientific and technological expertise were not playing on the same level as the state officials calling the shots: they were subordinates, taking the funding and producing the science, but not in a position to determine how it would be used.” The scientists, who received state funding to conduct research in the many facets of weather control, particularly during the Cold War, may have naively considered their research as basic as opposed to applied, but the eventual uses of their discoveries about atmospheric behavior were not going to be under their control, or even under their influence. Weather control was in the hands of the American state.

Make It Rain unfolds in three parts. Part I, “Weather Control: From Scientific Fringe to Scientific Mainstream,” opens the story in 1891 with the earliest federal appropriation for weather control (at the time, most often termed “rainmaking”) and its less-than-scientific explosive techniques (chapter 1) to its post-World War II introduction into the scientific mainstream due to research conducted at the General Electric Research Laboratory (chapter 2).

Part II, “Coming to Grips with Weather Control (1950-1957),” takes a look at what happened as weather control took its first tenuous steps out of the laboratory into practical application as seen by federal lawmakers, state lawmakers, and meteorologists—essentially their stories are told independently and then folded together at the end of this section. Chapter 3 examines how federal legislators’ belief that weather control would become the equivalent of atomic energy for both domestic and military purposes led them to propose the creation of a massive bureaucracy modeled on the Atomic Energy Commission, which would keep weather control under control. As they saw it, controlling weather control was critical for the nation’s defense posture during the Cold War. Failure to impose federal control, moreover, could lead to massive domestic problems (states stealing precipitation from downwind states, floods in some places, droughts in others), and worse, it might allow the Soviet Union to perfect weather control first and thus be able to control the world. Chapter 4 moves away from Washington, DC, to the Desert Southwest and the Pacific Northwest to examine what happened when commercial cloud seeders started selling their “rain enhancement” services across the country, leaving unprepared state governments to sort out the disputes among competing customers of designer weather. Unlike congressmen who anticipated using weather control as a state tool, state legislators and bureaucrats found themselves gobsmacked by piles of irate letters from constituents who were convinced that their excess rain (State of Washington) or lack of rain (states in the Intermountain West and Desert Southwest) was directly due to the actions of “rain enhancers” who operated under the regulatory radar.

Exactly how were they to regulate a service when they knew neither how nor when nor where it was taking place, nor if it even worked? How could they keep all their constituents happy when different parts of their states had different concepts of “ideal weather”? Moving from the realm of government to the realm of gun-shy meteorologists, chapter 5 follows the efforts of meteorologists within and outside the United States who were attempting to sort out the weather control “problem.” And a problem it was for members of a scientific discipline that had managed to scrape up some professional credibility during World War II and did not intend to lose it as the weather control controversy played out in scientific journals, on the front pages of national newspapers and covers of major popular magazines, and in congressional hearing rooms. Just as meteorologists seldom are in total agreement over a weather forecast, the meteorologists of the 1950s were not in total agreement over weather control. They generally agreed on the need to conduct a lot more basic research on cloud physics and precipitation mechanisms—and were happy to take the proffered funding to do so—but they fell into multiple camps when it came to efforts to clear fog, enhance rain, mitigate hail, snuff out hurricanes, eliminate droughts, and any of the other possible uses of weather control. Commercial meteorologists whose firms were offering weather control services wanted to press forward with practical applications before the basic theoretical work was solidly in place, academic meteorologists generally leaned toward doing the research first and maybe applying what they learned later, and the Weather Bureau meteorologists . . . well they were aghast that anyone would try to make money from the weather, much less promise to solve weather problems with a single pellet of dry ice.

Could they work out their differences and still look professional while they were doing so? Would they hunker down in their respective camps waiting for the weather control storm to blow over? Or would they be able to wrest control of their research agenda back from federal lawmakers who knew little about the atmosphere other than they wanted it changed? Part III, “Weather Control as State Tool (1957-1980),” begins in the late 1950s as President Eisenhower’s Advisory Committee on Weather Control submitted its final report just two months after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and heated up the Cold War’s space race. Amid concerns that the Soviets would control the world’s weather before the United States, funding for weather control research kicked into high gear, followed by even more funding for weather control applications. Chapter 6 examines efforts to use weather control techniques for domestic purposes by discussing three such cases. The first sought to reduce lightning strikes, thus reducing the number of lightning-caused fires—and if the fires started anyway, to extinguish them with induced precipitation (US Forest Service: Project Skyfire). The second sought to tap water from the atmosphere to fill existing reservoirs that fed irrigation and hydroelectric power systems (Bureau of Reclamation: Project Skywater). And the third sought to snuff out hurricanes while they were small or, alternatively, steer the bigger ones “harmlessly out to sea” (Weather Bureau/ Air Force/ Navy: Project Stormfury).

Skyfire started in the early 1950s, while Skywater and Stormfury began in the 1960s, but by the 1970s they all lost their funding and were discontinued. Why was that? There were a variety of reasons (all explored in the conclusion of Part II), but the fallout from the military’s weather control efforts was not helpful. Those efforts are discussed in chapter 7. While the domestic programs were being touted in the press with the help of black-and-white glossy photos and breathless press releases, the military and diplomatic programs were very much SECRET even though the same (military) personnel behind the Project Stormfury hurricane-control project were using classified versions of the same techniques to attempt to secretly break the devastating mid-1960s Bihar drought in India (Project GROMET) and simultaneously to wash out the Ho Chi Minh trail and North Vietnamese military emplacements during the Vietnam War (Project Popeye and Project Compatriot). Although the story of weather control efforts in Vietnam was broken in the Pentagon Papers, detailed by columnist Jack Anderson and journalist Seymour Hersh in the early 1970s and then disclosed more fully in hearings led by Senator Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island), much of the material on both the India and Vietnam weather control efforts has only been declassified in the past ten to fifteen years. I examine what members of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration were thinking when they ordered the execution of these projects, and how using weather as a weapon jibed with using weather to improve agricultural output and keep the home front strong. The Conclusion draws the story to a close, examining why weather control faded as a state tool in the 1980s, but never really died completely . . . and how it may return as an “answer” to the weather that ails us and the problems with the natural resource none of us can live without: fresh water.