How Uncle Sam Employs Mother Nature
While citizens who try to control Mother Nature are often motivated by promoting human safety, the U.S. military has been known to modify the weather for tactical purposes.
Cloud seeding was used in the Vietnam War under code-name Popeye.
\"Project Popeye was intended to reduce the mobility on the Ho Chi Minh Trail on the west side of the Anateak mountains in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia by making it rain...so it would impede mobilization,\" said Geophysicist Pierre Saint-Amand, employed by the Navy at the time. \"This program was classified top secret.\"
The Ho Chi Minh trail was the main supply line through the jungle to the Viet Cong. In 1966, American forces began to seed the clouds across the route, hoping to flood rivers and make them impassable.
\"At the end of the first week of systematic seeding, you couldn't get across the fords anymore. You could look down and see these guys driving up by the river and stopping, and pretty soon, you'd see trucks in the river with water over the roof,\" said Saint-Amand.
The first successful project began with the U.S. Navy's seeding of Hurricane Esther in 1961. Project Stormfury was only one in a series of attempts to dissipate the strength of tropical cyclones.
\"The hypotheses upon which Stormfury was based was that if you seeded the right, forward quadrant of the storm, that you could cause it to dissipate its energy faster and wear it down,\" said Saint-Amand. \"This was the theory concocted by the people in the Weather Bureau.\"
However, the experiments were short-lived.
\"Everybody was afraid that if they seeded a hurricane and the thing came across Cuba, we would never be permitted to hear the end of it,\" said Saint-Amand. \"And if it came across the eastern United States, that the lawyers would have a feeding frenzy. And that's exactly what would have happened. So they decided to let it go. It was just too dangerous from a standpoint of liability.\"
So what does Uncle Sam have in the works for Mother Nature today? It happens that weather modification is now a taboo for the military. A 1978 United Nations agreement banned use of the tactic.
Source:
http://www.weather.com/newscenter/atmosphe...e.html#military
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