Full Spectrum Dominance
Gulliver | 17.08.2002 21:37
In 1996, the U.S. Air Force’s best and brightest minds and their civilian advisors imagined six alternative futures. Here’s one of the predicted scenarios, according to an Air Force document: “The American world view became more global following a major terrorist attack on the U.S. early in the 21st century. This event, along with increasing concern for the global environment, was postulated to help produce a consensus that the U.S. should act vigorously to promote stability abroad despite the frustration of a dispersed world power grid.”
With a goal later described as “Full Spectrum Dominance” by the year 2025, the Air Force “backcasted” (as opposed to forecasted) what “determines the willingness and capability of the U.S. to take the lead in international affairs.” This scenario was called “Gulliver’s Travails.”
This chilling theme was echoed the next year by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor, in his book The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski argued that the key to world power is in Central Asia, with its vast oil deposits. But short of a galvanizing attack by foreigners or terrorists on the scale of Pearl Harbor, Brzezinski postulated four years ago, Americans lacked the imperial will to seize world dominance.
In March 1997, Arnold A. Barnes Jr., of John Hopkins University and Phillips Laboratory, described a key element of Full Spectrum Dominance at the U.S. Army’s Tecom Test Technology Symposium. In his address, Barnes, a consultant on the Air Force study, calmly outlined the history of the U.S. military’s weather modification programs and what would be needed for future “integrated weather modification capabilities.”
The good doctor referred to the document “Spacecast 2020,” later updated in “Weather As A Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025,” which noted, “Atmospheric scientists have pursued terrestrial weather modification in earnest since the 1940s… Space presents us with a new arena, technology provides new opportunities.”
While “Spacecast 2020” analyzed “the difficulty, cost and risk of developing a weather control system for military applications” as “extremely high,” Barnes offered a different perspective. He saw “opportunities to capitalize on investment militarily [as] medium/high” while the “political implications/health hazards [were] medium/low.”
In Barnes’ scenario, there had already been a long history of U.S. military weather modification. In fact, the U.S. Air Force History Office boasts on its website that “for meteorologists, a major consequence of World War II was the development of a world weather network utilizing new equipment and techniques.”
The British Royal Air Force and Western scientists engaged in Operation Cumulus in 1952, which, according to an August 2001 BBC broadcast, was a rainmaking project that led to 35 flood-related deaths in Devon. Declassified documents show that in 1953 the British military and their allies experimented with increasing rain and snow by artificial means in hopes of “bogging down enemy movement.”
Perhaps more shocking, the documents contemplate the possibility of “explod[ing] an atomic weapon in a seeded storm system or cloud.” This would produce a far wider area of radioactive contamination than a normal atomic explosion.
Between 1955 and 1956, the U.S. Air Force participated in Project 119-L, which resulted in a worldwide meteorological survey. If you’re going to artificially modify the weather, you have to be able to predict it first. Barnes referred to the Air Force’s ability to create “cloud holes” using the chemical “Carbon Black” in the ’50s and ’60s and, later, using silver iodide.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance created a Defense Environmental Services study group in 1966 “to review the full spectrum of environmental services and R&D within the Department of Defense.”
By early 1967, Operation Popeye was underway. The 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron took off, in the words of one military official, to “make mud, not war.” The military seeded the clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to create floods and wash out North Vietnamese supply routes. Barnes noted, “Operation Popeye [was] run by people from our lab.”
Columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about the politically sensitive operation in 1971, paving the way for a Congressional investigation that documented these and other secret weather modification warfare programs.
As public anger grew, Senator Clayborn Pell of Rhode Island, who originally believed it was better to be rained on with water than bombs, wrote an editorial in the Providence Journal Bulletin in 1975 titled “United States and Other World Powers Should Outlaw Tampering With Weather for Use as War Weapon.”
That year, the U.S. and the Soviets began negotiations to ban weather modification as a military weapon. In October 1976, the U.N. produced the treaty “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification” (ENMOD). It went into effect two years later, a fact lamented by Barnes. “Since 1978, the official Air Force position has been that weather modification has little utility or military payoff as a weapon of war.”
Barnes argued at the Tecom symposium, “The official Air Force position needs to be reevaluated,” especially “in the light of 19 years of scientific advances.”
While the U.S. and Soviet military had officially turned away from weather modification as a weapon, their partners in the private sector filled the gap for the next two decades. ENMOD had a huge loophole that allowed for the peaceful commercial use of weather modification.
In his paper “Progress in planned weather modification research: 1991-1994,” Robert Czys of the Atmospheric Science Division of the Illinois State Water Survey reports, “A randomized hail experiment, Grossversuch IV, was conducted in central Switzerland during 1977-1981. Research groups from France, Italy and Switzerland participated in the experiment to test the Soviet hail suppression method.” Meanwhile, back at home between 1987 and 1993, the North Dakota Cloud Modification Program was underway.
As Barnes noted, “operational and modeling information” from a 1976 scientific paper showed how “to achieve precipitation enhancement, create cirrus clouds and to dissipate fog and low clouds.” There were, however, “risks and limitations,” particularly the problem of the “creation of optimum submicron particles” which would pose a danger to health as they fell through the atmosphere.
But Barnes argued that the new “advanced weapons systems” were “more environmentally sensitive” and, once again, the military should be exploring weather modification weapons. After all, the uses were obvious. You could “deny fresh water” to the enemy, “induce drought,” “increase concealment” and “decrease [the enemy’s] comfort level/morale.”
Moreover, Barnes insisted that the weaponization of space is the key to warfare in the 21st century. The U.S. government would later produce a document named “Joint Vision for 2020” under the auspices of the U.S. Space Command outlining plan for “Full Spectrum Dominance.” In the years following Barnes’ presentation on fully integrating high-tech weather modification into the U.S. military, so-called “chemtrail” sightings have occurred throughout the United States and its Western allies.
Brzezinski predicted: “Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised… Technology of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”
Meanwhile, the commercial applications of the technology are apparently paying off. Weather Modification Inc. signed a contract with Thailand in 1996 to help “the southeast Asian country get a better grip on its weather” through “cloud modification.” In 1997, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government of Malaysia signed a contract with a Russian-owned company to create cyclones to blow pollution out to sea.
The BBC reported in 1998 that Canadian scientist Graeme Mather “believes he has found the Holy Grail of weather science in the skies over Mexico,” where he was trying to produce more water from available clouds. Also in 1998, an American Meteorological Society report conceded that over the past 20 years, “experiments had been carried out on lightning suppression.”
And this year, the Korean Times reported on January 27 that the South Korean “government is checking up on the possibility of using weather modification techniques” to prevent monsoon rains from interrupting the 2002 World Cup matches, which will be held there May 30-31. The paper reports, “Both the U.S. and Russia have commercialized rain and hailstorm prevention programs.” Meanwhile, North Korea continues to suffer the aftereffects of a decade-long drought.
With a goal later described as “Full Spectrum Dominance” by the year 2025, the Air Force “backcasted” (as opposed to forecasted) what “determines the willingness and capability of the U.S. to take the lead in international affairs.” This scenario was called “Gulliver’s Travails.”
This chilling theme was echoed the next year by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor, in his book The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski argued that the key to world power is in Central Asia, with its vast oil deposits. But short of a galvanizing attack by foreigners or terrorists on the scale of Pearl Harbor, Brzezinski postulated four years ago, Americans lacked the imperial will to seize world dominance.
In March 1997, Arnold A. Barnes Jr., of John Hopkins University and Phillips Laboratory, described a key element of Full Spectrum Dominance at the U.S. Army’s Tecom Test Technology Symposium. In his address, Barnes, a consultant on the Air Force study, calmly outlined the history of the U.S. military’s weather modification programs and what would be needed for future “integrated weather modification capabilities.”
The good doctor referred to the document “Spacecast 2020,” later updated in “Weather As A Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025,” which noted, “Atmospheric scientists have pursued terrestrial weather modification in earnest since the 1940s… Space presents us with a new arena, technology provides new opportunities.”
While “Spacecast 2020” analyzed “the difficulty, cost and risk of developing a weather control system for military applications” as “extremely high,” Barnes offered a different perspective. He saw “opportunities to capitalize on investment militarily [as] medium/high” while the “political implications/health hazards [were] medium/low.”
In Barnes’ scenario, there had already been a long history of U.S. military weather modification. In fact, the U.S. Air Force History Office boasts on its website that “for meteorologists, a major consequence of World War II was the development of a world weather network utilizing new equipment and techniques.”
The British Royal Air Force and Western scientists engaged in Operation Cumulus in 1952, which, according to an August 2001 BBC broadcast, was a rainmaking project that led to 35 flood-related deaths in Devon. Declassified documents show that in 1953 the British military and their allies experimented with increasing rain and snow by artificial means in hopes of “bogging down enemy movement.”
Perhaps more shocking, the documents contemplate the possibility of “explod[ing] an atomic weapon in a seeded storm system or cloud.” This would produce a far wider area of radioactive contamination than a normal atomic explosion.
Between 1955 and 1956, the U.S. Air Force participated in Project 119-L, which resulted in a worldwide meteorological survey. If you’re going to artificially modify the weather, you have to be able to predict it first. Barnes referred to the Air Force’s ability to create “cloud holes” using the chemical “Carbon Black” in the ’50s and ’60s and, later, using silver iodide.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance created a Defense Environmental Services study group in 1966 “to review the full spectrum of environmental services and R&D within the Department of Defense.”
By early 1967, Operation Popeye was underway. The 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron took off, in the words of one military official, to “make mud, not war.” The military seeded the clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to create floods and wash out North Vietnamese supply routes. Barnes noted, “Operation Popeye [was] run by people from our lab.”
Columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about the politically sensitive operation in 1971, paving the way for a Congressional investigation that documented these and other secret weather modification warfare programs.
As public anger grew, Senator Clayborn Pell of Rhode Island, who originally believed it was better to be rained on with water than bombs, wrote an editorial in the Providence Journal Bulletin in 1975 titled “United States and Other World Powers Should Outlaw Tampering With Weather for Use as War Weapon.”
That year, the U.S. and the Soviets began negotiations to ban weather modification as a military weapon. In October 1976, the U.N. produced the treaty “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification” (ENMOD). It went into effect two years later, a fact lamented by Barnes. “Since 1978, the official Air Force position has been that weather modification has little utility or military payoff as a weapon of war.”
Barnes argued at the Tecom symposium, “The official Air Force position needs to be reevaluated,” especially “in the light of 19 years of scientific advances.”
While the U.S. and Soviet military had officially turned away from weather modification as a weapon, their partners in the private sector filled the gap for the next two decades. ENMOD had a huge loophole that allowed for the peaceful commercial use of weather modification.
In his paper “Progress in planned weather modification research: 1991-1994,” Robert Czys of the Atmospheric Science Division of the Illinois State Water Survey reports, “A randomized hail experiment, Grossversuch IV, was conducted in central Switzerland during 1977-1981. Research groups from France, Italy and Switzerland participated in the experiment to test the Soviet hail suppression method.” Meanwhile, back at home between 1987 and 1993, the North Dakota Cloud Modification Program was underway.
As Barnes noted, “operational and modeling information” from a 1976 scientific paper showed how “to achieve precipitation enhancement, create cirrus clouds and to dissipate fog and low clouds.” There were, however, “risks and limitations,” particularly the problem of the “creation of optimum submicron particles” which would pose a danger to health as they fell through the atmosphere.
But Barnes argued that the new “advanced weapons systems” were “more environmentally sensitive” and, once again, the military should be exploring weather modification weapons. After all, the uses were obvious. You could “deny fresh water” to the enemy, “induce drought,” “increase concealment” and “decrease [the enemy’s] comfort level/morale.”
Moreover, Barnes insisted that the weaponization of space is the key to warfare in the 21st century. The U.S. government would later produce a document named “Joint Vision for 2020” under the auspices of the U.S. Space Command outlining plan for “Full Spectrum Dominance.” In the years following Barnes’ presentation on fully integrating high-tech weather modification into the U.S. military, so-called “chemtrail” sightings have occurred throughout the United States and its Western allies.
Brzezinski predicted: “Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised… Technology of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”
Meanwhile, the commercial applications of the technology are apparently paying off. Weather Modification Inc. signed a contract with Thailand in 1996 to help “the southeast Asian country get a better grip on its weather” through “cloud modification.” In 1997, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government of Malaysia signed a contract with a Russian-owned company to create cyclones to blow pollution out to sea.
The BBC reported in 1998 that Canadian scientist Graeme Mather “believes he has found the Holy Grail of weather science in the skies over Mexico,” where he was trying to produce more water from available clouds. Also in 1998, an American Meteorological Society report conceded that over the past 20 years, “experiments had been carried out on lightning suppression.”
And this year, the Korean Times reported on January 27 that the South Korean “government is checking up on the possibility of using weather modification techniques” to prevent monsoon rains from interrupting the 2002 World Cup matches, which will be held there May 30-31. The paper reports, “Both the U.S. and Russia have commercialized rain and hailstorm prevention programs.” Meanwhile, North Korea continues to suffer the aftereffects of a decade-long drought.
Gulliver