Weaponizing the Weather

The term “weather war” might seem appropriate only for fantastical tales or at best an exigency for the next centuries. In reality though, it’s a firmly established component of combat, not of the far future but going back into the distant past. The U.S., for example, was on the brink of unleashing a man-made tsunami on Japan in 1945. Project Seal was an operation that called for detonating a string of four million pounds of high-explosives five miles off the Japanese shoreline so as to create a wave of water to inundate and destroy coastal defenses prior to subsequent planned American amphibious assaults.

During the Vietnam War the Air Force regularly seeded clouds above the Ho Chi Minh Trail in order to muddy the enemy’s supply line. Indeed, the use of tides and currents in naval battles, dazzling sunlight reflected off polished shields to disorient enemy lines, night assaults scheduled for Moonless phases, and other tactics utilized by clever commanders has been an effective strategy of warfare for millennia.

There has been sufficient speculation in recent years regarding how earthquakes, hurricanes and/or other natural disasters might be somehow brought to bear to injure an enemy, and moreover to perhaps accomplish it surreptitiously. Whether this is possible or not at present, there seems little doubt that the great powers have at least posed that question to their militaries.

None other than world-class genius Nikola Tesla was extremely interested in the topic as well, allegedly quipping to reporters that he had calculated that the crust of the planet could be split open by augmenting the Earth’s natural standing wave by repeatedly exploding a ton of dynamite every 1 hour and 49 minutes at the same locale, over and over again until the surface was rent asunder. Tesla — whether fact, fancy or urban legend — is purported to have built an “earthquake machine,” an oscillator for matching resonance frequencies, and to have tested it in New York City in 1898, resulting supposedly in police arriving and being forced to disable the mechanism with a sledgehammer.

The power of harmonics is real enough however. For those who doubt what subtle nudges, building one upon the other in phase can accomplish, video evidence abounds online capturing the catastrophic failure in 1940 of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the third longest suspension bridge in the world at that time. It was first set to trembling by a breeze of no more than 40 mph, but then building to wobble ferociously enough to juggle automobiles, and finally collapsing completely into the Puget Sound below.

Just exactly how earth-shattering harmonics might be set into phase beneath the seismically active territory of an adversary isn’t a question easily answered. Suffice to say though that it’s not in the realm of the impossible. Human-induced seismicity, in point of fact, is now considered by geological surveys around the world as an accurate by-product and consequence of many of mankind’s mammoth engineering activities.

Dams, fracking, artificial lakes, mining, and geothermal energy extraction are all sources of artificially created seismicity. Dr. Christian Klose — research scientist at Columbia University, Swiss Institute of Technology, German Research Center of Geosciences, etc. — has been advising for years now, and broadcasting his counsel on nationally televised U.S. airwaves, that the current geothermal energy operations around California’s Salton Sea, along the San Andreas Fault, might be imprudent.

Insofar as storms and hurricanes are concerned, it’s not so much a matter of whipping them up, but perhaps nudging them one way as opposed to another once nature has completed the titanic work of initiating them. Drawing typhoons and cyclones off their original courses and on to others of a purposeful design could achieve quite destructive results.

Meteorologists are aware that changes in precipitation, evaporation, pressure cells, and air temperature could alter a storm’s path and already have feasible proposals to attempt to guide dangerous storms toward less destructive tracks. These measures include cloud seeding, using biodegradable oil across the sea surface in the path of a hurricane, and beaming microwaves tuned to be absorbed by water vapor molecules. The microwaves set water molecules to vibrating and heating the surrounding air, thus perhaps causing the hurricane to move in a desired direction.

The Battle of the Bulge was launched on the Allies when the German High Command had been assured by meteorologists that an extended period of “Hitler Weather” was at hand, meaning snow and overcast skies, negating the overwhelming American and British air superiority. It’s neither unreasonable nor outlandish, three quarters of a century later, to assume and expect that the United States military should at least be investigating ways to wreak weather war upon future foes. Moreover, it is supreme artlessness to presuppose that our adversaries might not be exploring the same path.

David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. Nabhan is also a science fiction writer ("Pilots of Borealis," 2015) and the author of many scores of newspaper and magazine op-eds. Nabhan has been featured on television and talk radio all over the world. His website is www.earthquakepredictors.com. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.