REVIEWS
“Few technological projects have been as bold and as bizarre as the mid-twentieth century attempts to control weather. Harper’s study—meticulously researched and clearly written—describes and analyzes all the multifarious projects in a compact text. This history of controversy and ignominious failure offers valuable lessons about how government in America behaves when it tries to impose its will, even upon nature itself.”
— Spencer Weart, author of The Discovery of Global Warming
“Make it Rain is a comprehensive history of American efforts to control the weather and the hubris of those who promised to tame hurricanes and conquer drought. Harper’s account not only tells this fascinating story, it offers valuable historical context for those who are grappling with the challenges of climate change today.”
— Brian Balogh, cohost of Backstory with the American History Guys
“Harper’s detailed history of weather control in the United States, reminds us that clouds have been objects of desire and frustration for some time. Her story of the messy interface between science and government policy unfolds across the twentieth century, but it reaches its emotional crest in the 1950s. In that decade, fears of Soviet domination and dreams of drought-busting rain catalyzed government weather control projects motivated by utopian, if not Promethean, desires to use science and technology to benefit the American people.”
— Science
“In Make It Rain, historian Kristine Harper treats weather control as a political agent in the hands of the American state. Politicians at local, state and national levels issued edicts in pursuit of their political ends to bring enhanced 'sky water' to their thirsty districts, or to mobilize the clouds for diplomatic or military ends; ‘entrepreneurial scientists’ took their money and produced technical reports. But in the long run, the weather did what the weather does.”
— Nature
“Harper provides a detailed analysis of government involvement in attempts to force or prevent rain, disperse fog, increase snowpack, etc., from the late 19th century through the 1980s. These attempts were regarded by many as ‘fringe’ science at best, engaged by crackpots or con artists. However, serious problems with foggy airfields, drought, flooding, and hurricanes led to interest and funding from some mainstream scientists, governmental agencies, and legislators. Harper divides her work into three sections, beginning with the development of serious scientific attention to the issue, continuing with efforts to develop and regulate weather control by federal and state agencies, and ending with efforts to use weather control as a weapon and diplomatic ‘tool.’ Recommended.”
— Choice
Winner of the 2017 ASLI Choice Award for History
— Atmospheric Science Librarians International
“Delivers a compelling history of weather control. . .[Harper] provides an excellent treatment of the literature on science and the state and their evolving relationship.”
— Isis
"...well-researched and fascinating...Harper has written a book that will appeal to many different constituencies, particularly those interested in new work on the role of technology in governance, the role of the government in controlling nature, and particularly the relationship between experts and governments."
— James Bergman, Technology and Culture
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Kristine C. Harper
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0001
[weather control;the state;science;technology;domestic policy;foreign policy;political agency]
The introduction presents an overview of weather control’s history in the United States since the nineteenth century, in particular how and why it made the transition from local area rainmaking to large-scale weather control as a tool of the American state, which used it for both domestic and foreign policy purposes. It provides a primer on the concept of the state, examining the many ways that the state has been defined, and adopts Margot Canaday’s definition of the state as “what officials do.” It discusses the connection between science, technology, and the American state, and how weather control ultimately came to exert political agency in the twentieth century. (pages 1 - 10)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part I. Weather Control: From Scientific Fringe to Scientific Mainstream (1890-1950)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0002
[control;efficiency;Progressive Era;management;scientific authority]
Part I introduces the concept of control, how by definition the state controls territory and the people residing therein, while science, and its fellow traveler, technology, control nature. In post-Civil War America, science and technology were driving all manner of inventions and innovations, and by the Progressive Era they were being put to work for the American state to solve problems ranging from the assimilation of immigrants to the management of forests, wildlife, and rivers. Simultaneously, scientific authority was carrying weight in the broader society, and scientific experts were called upon by the state to guide wide-ranging conservation efforts that would efficiently use the nation’s natural resources for the greater good. In a symbiotic relationship, science helped to build the American state, and the American state helped to advance the nation’s scientific standing.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. Ka-Boom!
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0003
[meteorology;rainmaking;federal funding;experiments;explosives;electrified sand;aviation;cloud physics]
This chapter discusses the US government’s initial forays into weather control in the late nineteenth century, which were based less on meteorological science—which was distinctly lacking at the time—and more on wishful thinking. It examines two federally sponsored rainmaking and cloud altering experiments. The first used explosives to shock rain out of the sky in an effort to increase land values and agricultural output in the Texas plains, and the second used electrified sand in an effort to clear fog and low clouds for Army aviators in the 1920s. While these attempts were in play, a variety of charlatans were busy peddling their secret chemicals and other rainmaking devices to anyone looking for additional water. Skeptical meteorologists spoke out against all of these attempts, but gained little ground because no one considered theory-deficient meteorology a real science. By the 1930s, however, European scientists were pushing ahead with cloud physics research that offered up hope of artificially triggering rainfall.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Weather in an Icebox: Scientific Weather Control
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0004
[technological fix;Irving Langmuir;General Electric;Project Cirrus;Cloud Physics Project;US Weather Bureau]
This chapter examines the post-World War II euphoria that embraced technological fixes for all of America’s problems, natural or man-made, as a backdrop to the creation of scientific weather control in the late 1940s. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir of the General Electric Research Laboratory had done wartime research on cloaking smokes and aircraft icing, which led to a very important question: why do some clouds precipitate and others do not? Experiments in a GE freezer with dry ice as a nucleating agent led to airborne experiments and then military funding for a fog and cloud dispersion research program (Project Cirrus). US Weather Bureau meteorologists, who were having a difficult time forecasting the weather, much less controlling it, found themselves backed into a corner when they questioned such work. While they successfully steered funds to their Cloud Physics Project, their experimental results—that cloud seeding did not produce economically viable amounts of precipitation—was not accepted by Langmuir, nor by congressional leaders who wanted to bring home water to their districts. Once the latter decided that weather control should be a state tool, the race was on to make it happen.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part II. Coming to Grips with Weather Control (1950-1957)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0005
[Cold War;national security;state building;drought;weather control;government patronage;state control]
Part II introduces how the Cold War’s national security concerns—a crisis on the same scale as the Great Depression and World War II—contributed to the continued building of the American state, and drove the United States to use all available science and technology to build an offensive and defense arsenal to preserve the American way of life. Weather control, which appeared to have possibilities as a new, relatively inexpensive, non-traceable, radiation-free weapon, that could simultaneously be used to mitigate ongoing drought conditions, looked like a good target for government patronage. As the 1950s opened, three disparate groups sought answers to questions about weather control: federal lawmakers, state lawmakers and agencies, and atmospheric scientists. Federal lawmakers wanted to exploit and control weather control activities. State lawmakers were trying to get ahead of inter- and intrastate conflicts over weather control. And atmospheric scientists, the subject matter experts, were arguing among themselves over whether weather control worked or not. The next three chapters explore how the state and science influenced each other as both sought to control weather control.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. US Congress: Controlling Weather Control
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0006
[Clinton P. Anderson;regulation;legislation;Weather Control Commission;Atomic Energy Commission;military;meteorologists;Advisory Committee on Weather Control]
This chapter discusses how US congressmen, especially Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico, attempted to regulate weather control as a potential weapon to use offensively against enemies, diplomatic tool to keep allies within and bring non-aligned nations into the West Bloc, and domestic tool to keep the nation secure and its economy strong. Starting in fall 1950, Anderson and others introduced a variety of legislation that would have placed weather control firmly in the hands of the American state and kept it there with a Weather Control Commission modeled on the Atomic Energy Commission. But major stakeholders—military services, commercial meteorologists, and academic meteorologists—pushed back. The military wanted total control, the commercial meteorologists wanted no control, and the academics thought there was no control possible. Ultimately, Congress settled on the creation of a temporary Advisory Committee on Weather Control that would assess experimental and operational results and recommend further action to the president. The recommendation: continue conducting research on weather control. The day-to-day regulation of weather control? That was left to individual states.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. State Governments: Averting “Weather Wars”
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0007
[weather wars;cloud seeding;overseeding;New York City;lawsuits;State of Washington;agricultural interests;power companies;licensing]
This chapter discusses the disputes that erupted in the early 1950s as city leaders and farmers, ranchers, utility companies, and others across the country worked with weather control providers to increase or decrease the amount of precipitation that fell on their land. But it was not long before cloud seeding and overseeding created massive discontent among residents. New York City’s attempts to fill their depleted water reservoirs with induced rainfall led to lawsuits from those who claimed that seeding had ruined their crops and sent rising streams into their houses. In Washington State, ground zero for the weather wars, wheat farmers hired seeders to produce rain and cherry farmers hired seeders to stop rain. In both cases, hearings uncovered the tensions between different groups and their desires for perfect weather for their purposes. States in the middle were not immune, and soon state legislatures were passing bills to establish weather modification boards to license cloud seeders and keep the disputes to a minimum.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. The Meteorologists: Corralling the Research Agenda
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0008
[meteorologists;science policy;regulation;weather control;research agenda;Advisory Committee on Weather Control;National Science Foundation;US Congress]
This chapter addresses the work of meteorologists during the 1950s as they focused on understanding the underlying physics of precipitation processes. The weather control juggernaut, however, threatened to discredit the scientific reputation that meteorologists had earned during World War II, and so these scientists were pulled from their data and equations into science policy. The American Meteorological Society, for example, produced a policy statement and attempted to influence congressional efforts to regulate weather control. But meteorologists were not in agreement; some supported weather control research and others considered it a waste of time and money. Consequently, the weather control research agenda—within and outside the United States—took two separate paths: one attacked cloud physics and precipitation mechanisms while developing viable theoretical underpinnings, while the other looked for practical methods of controlling the weather. The Advisory Committee on Weather Control then took those results and recommended that the National Science Foundation become the overseer of US research efforts and that the US Congress fund them to do so.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion to Part II
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0009
[weather control;lawmakers;regulation;scientists;expertise;research;Soviet Union;Cold War]
The conclusion to Part II ties together the threads of chapters 3, 4, and 5, with the release of the Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Weather Control, which serves as an appropriate dividing line between weather control’s developmental period and the all-out federal attempt to control domestic and international weather. Because federal lawmakers failed to reach consensus on regulating weather control, states were left to fend for themselves as lawsuits were filed and complaints jammed the mailrooms of governors and legislators. By late 1957, thirteen states were regulating weather control and nine more states were investigating the possibility of doing so. On the federal level, professional science and the state developed a symbiotic relationship. The state needed the scientists’ professional expertise and research skills to move weather control forward, and the scientists needed state patronage to fulfill their research agendas. But even concerns about the Soviet Union’s weather control efforts—which many were convinced far outstripped US efforts—failed to guarantee consistent federal patronage for weather control research during the Cold War.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part III. Weather Control as State Tool (1957-1980)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0010
[Soviet Union;People's Republic of China;weather control;Sputnik;meteorological warfare;crop damage;drought]
The introduction to Part III discusses a major influence behind state control of the weather in the late 1950s: the Soviet Union was thought to be ahead in the race for weather control. That the Soviets had gotten an artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit before the United States, added to the pressure to meet and exceed Soviet scientific and technological capabilities. In truth, the United States had no solid idea of what the Soviets were doing in weather control, but if the claim could be made that they were ahead, that was a plus for meteorological research and state agencies that were behind weather control. Soviet meteorologists argued that Americans were out to exploit weather control for business purposes and to promote meteorological warfare, while the Soviet Union was using weather control to reduce crop damage so it could feed its people. The People’s Republic of China got a late start in weather control, but once the Communist Party made meteorologists understand that drought conditions required artificial precipitation, they quickly got on board, abandoning theoretical work for practical applications that would boost their economy. The United States was not about to be left behind.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Weather Control as State Tool on the Home Front
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0011
[Project Skyfire;lightning suppression;fire suppression;US Forest Service;Bureau of Reclamation;Project Skywater;reservoirs;Project Stormfury;hurricanes]
This chapter examines efforts to use weather control techniques for domestic purposes and discusses three such cases. Project Skyfire, a US Forest Service project, sought to reduce lightning strikes, the number of lightning-caused fires, and the cost of suppressing them. It also sought to trigger rainfall to put out fires in hard-to-reach terrain and to reduce the cost of fire suppression. Bureau of Reclamation’s Project Skywater sought to tap water from the atmosphere to fill its reservoirs that fed irrigation and hydroelectric power systems. Project Stormfury, a combined US Weather Bureau, Navy, and Air Force project, sought to snuff out hurricanes while they were small, or, alternatively to steer the larger ones away from populated areas.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7. Weather Control as State Tool on Military and Diplomatic Fronts
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0012
[classified weather control;pyrotechnics;Project Stormfury;Vietnam War;India;Project GROMET;Project Popeye;Project Compatriot;Lyndon Baines Johnson]
This chapter examines classified weather control techniques used for diplomatic and military purposes. The pyrotechnic delivery methods used in Project Stormfury had classified equivalents scheduled for use in the Vietnam War. However, the US Department of Defense wanted to try them in other parts of the world as well, and the devastating mid-1960s Bihar drought in India provided the opportunity to do so. Dubbed Project GROMET, US civilians flew unmarked planes in a mostly failed attempt to encourage pre-summer monsoon clouds to rain on the parched earth. But as the monsoon clouds appeared, the program was shut down to keep from inadvertently exposing the use of this same technology in Laos as a weapon of war in Project Popeye (the experimental phase) and Project Compatriot (the operational phase). During the Vietnam War, cloud seeding was used to wash out the Ho Chi Minh trail, disrupting the movement of men and materiel into South Vietnam, and North Vietnamese military emplacements. This chapter examines what members of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration were thinking when they ordered the execution of these projects, and how that jibed with domestic programs to keep the home front strong.
Conclusion to Part III
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0013
[Project Skyfire;Project Skywater;Project Stormfury;Pentagon Papers;Jack Anderson;Seymour Hersh;Claiborne Pell;fragmentation of leadership]
The conclusion to Part III discusses why state weather control slid as quickly to a stop in the 1970s as it had started its upward trajectory in the late 1940s. On the domestic side, the US Department of Agriculture pulled funding from Project Skyfire, insufficient hurricanes passed through safe seeding zones in the Atlantic Ocean and international opposition to seeding hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean doomed Project Stormfury, and when natural precipitation ticked upward in the 1970s, Project Skywater lost its reason for being. On the military side, the exposure of the secret weather weapon in the Pentagon Papers and by journalists Jack Anderson and Seymour Hersh prompted hearings led by Senator Claiborne Pell. The result: Senate Resolution 281 “Prohibiting Military Weather Modification,” which put the brakes on military efforts, or at the very least drove them further underground. However, these declines were aided by the fragmented nature of state weather control in the United States. With no one agency in charge and several agencies fighting over dwindling funds, no single voice could step forward to advocate for continued government patronage.
Conclusion: Weather Control and the American State
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226437378.003.0014
[weather control;state tool;American state;control of nature;geoengineering;water supply]
The conclusion argues that weather control and the American state grew in tandem during the twentieth century and that weather control was different from other state controls of nature because modifying the atmosphere affects everything downstream, not just a large patch of land. In contrast, even large dam and levee projects are essentially local. But now the effects of climate change add a new level of interest to humans’ desires to choose their environmental conditions. Geoengineering techniques, including carbon sequestration and reflecting sunlight back into space, are on a much larger scale than any weather control attempts. They would also be subject to global, not state, control, which makes them less likely, though not impossible. Depending on where they live, people will probably be clamoring, however, for more or less water, and that is within the capability of current weather control techniques, which have always been about water. Weather control may have lost its luster as a state tool in the 1970s, but that does not mean it is gone for good. Lessons learned from those earlier attempts could be key to future fresh water supplies.
