This is the climate, or “community,” in which ENMOD operations reached their zenith in the public sphere prior to 1977, and the climate from which weather weaponry research and development transitioned into the nebulous future they now inhabit – whatever that future might be. Project Corona operated, according to the declassified record released in 1995, up to 1972: other programs that proceeded in parallel, and those that began in the decades after Corona, remain highly classified.

The seventies seethed with protest about the American terrorist war on Vietnam. The FBI had unleashed COINTELLPRO – the secret program of domestic terrorism against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement – assassinating, brutalizing and otherwise terrorizing inner city populations and thousands of innocent people. East Timor was invaded in 1975, the day after the infamous Kissinger/Ford meeting with Indonesian President Suharto. (Henry Kissinger is a director of Freeport-McMoRan mining, one of the corporations that has enjoyed free business reign in Indonesia, linked to egregious human rights violations and the military persecution in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. [222] )   

The seventies also seethed with public protest about the burgeoning nuclear power industry: hundreds of behemoth nuclear power plants on order were cancelled. In January, 1975, the U.S. Congress created the Energy Research and Development Administration, which neatly and successfully set about to derail, destroy or expropriate -- for aerospace and energy corporations – emerging solar power development and technologies. Scores of billions of dollars of research and development programs over the next two decades went to Lockheed and Martin Marietta (Lockheed later bought Martin Marietta and GE Aerospace), Bechtel, Boeing, Grumman, GE, Westinghouse, NASA, and all the National Laboratories. [223]

It is important to again mention the means whereby secret programs were insured even after the U.S. government ostensibly “reformed” itself or the rogue agencies (and their people) involved. Thus were numerous “front” companies and laboratories encouraged and funded to pursue ENMOD technologies ostensibly forbidden by the international ENMOD treaty of 1977.

After the Senate Intelligence Committee’s revelations of the CIA’s covert and typically illegal and terrorist overseas operations, the agency grew very close to certain corporations. We can assume that this happened with various agencies of the national security apparatus. The revelations of the Senate Intelligence Committee had forced the CIA to do a housecleaning, and it became CIA policy that certain kinds of activities would no longer officially be performed. But that didn”t always mean that the need or the desire to undertake such operations disappeared. And that’s where some of these secretive “front” corporations came in.

Perhaps the most egregious of these secretive “front” and insider companies is Wackenhut Corporation, established in 1954 by FBI agent George Wackenhut Sr., a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover. “Hoover envisaged Wackenhut as a firm that he could rely upon to perform tasks from which the FBI was constitutionally barred from undertaking,” wrote investigative journalist Wayne Madsen. [224]

Wackenhut directors include: Admiral David E. Jeremiah, U.S. Navy (Ret.) former Commander-in-Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Dr. John S. Foster, Jr., Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the DOD, and former Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Troy E. Wade II, a deep insider whose 30-year government career included such stints as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Defense Programs, and Director, Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.

Current and recent members of the Wackenhut board have included much of the country’s recent national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci; former Defense Intelligence Agency Director General Joseph Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J. Rowley; former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of President Bush’s foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as Reagan’s CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut’s outside legal counsel.

While some of the institutions and members flagged and mildly dissected herein certainly have no role in ENMOD developments – a proposition, like their involvement, that is virtually impossible to prove or disprove -- their roles in maintaining the U.S. warfare state, and the intelligence and security apparatus it revolves around, cannot be denied. In contradistinction are the many certain ENMOD players counted amongst the panoply of organizations, individuals, agencies, laboratories and corporations delineated herein.  

The cold warriors of the past five decades – and the corporations, agencies and bureaus they staff -- have revealed that they show very creative imaginations in their capacity to define and implement secret terrorist programs, and actual covert deployments, of unlimited scope, brutality and horror. They are experts at deception and the expropriation of the public trust. Further, they are accountable to no one. Their jobs secured by fellow insiders, their careers furthered by insider appointments and promotions, the budgets they have had at their disposal were obscene. Over time they have become increasingly more obscene.

In his 1982 expose on the secrecy and deception of the nuclear industry, The Cult of the Atom: The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission, author Daniel Ford aptly described the insider culture of the atomic industry as a “cult.” This same terminology of the cult was applied to the U.S. intelligence community (explored at length herein) by authors Marchetti and Marks in their stark insider’s expose The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974). Dr. Helen Caldicott has similarly resurrected this apt description in The New Nuclear Danger, her scathing analytical expose of the cults of nuclear weapons and the Pentagon. [225]

This is exactly what we are dealing with: a cult of the multinational corporations, a cult of technological madness, a cult of arrogance, a cult of deception and death, a cult of supreme environmental hostility. What happened to all the interest in ENMOD? Did it really stop, in recognition of the 1977 ENMOD Treaty?

One answer is: yes: it really did stop. End of story. That is what U.S. Air Force Major Barry Coble has told us, and, certainly, given the absolute sincerity of American military leadership, the real issue might be our audacity– as members of the uninformed lay public -- in asking authorities such questions to begin with:

DOD funding for weather modification research peaked at $2.8 million in 1977. Funding was eliminated in 1979. Since then there has been no active research effort into weather modification by DOD. The Air Force spends no money on research, and there is no effort to monitor civilian research, applications and advancements. The Army’s program, “Owning the Weather for the Battlefield,” deals only with incorporating weather information into the digitized battlefield of the future. Efforts to modify the weather for battle are not being pursued. [226]

End of story. Or is it? Would our government lie to us? Do cigarettes cause cancer?

In 1966, Dr. Chalmers Sherwin of the DOD responded to a question from U.S. Senator Peter Dominick -- about the significance of weather as a weapon -- in these words:

I believe that I can state with assurance that at the present state of confidence and knowledge it has no direct military weapon type of activity value. The ability to control warm fog for landings is very important… The ability to produce clouds could have direct military utility and in that sense would be a component of a weapons system. [227]

Dr. Pierre St. Amand, doing weather modification research for the U.S. Navy at the time, put it more bluntly:

Answer: A campaign that peddled the “benign” and ‘scientific” interests of environmental monitoring and modeling, for weather forecasting, meteorology and the understanding of global climate change.

That is, coincidentally or not, exactly what we have seen. Further, supposing that weather modification has been clandestinely pursued on the regional or global scale, DOD secret programs would enjoy the benefits of the actual overt scientific research and modeling of weather and climate. Under this scenario, a massive propaganda campaign that denied and obfuscated the rising global climate chaos (perhaps as much a result of covert ENMOD operations and experiments as the deleterious toxic emissions from entrenched fossil fuel industries) would be highly efficacious.

Indeed, whether the latter case occurred or not – and it seems likely that it did – there has been a concerted corporate and government effort to downplay the realities of serious human-induced climatic instabilities. As the issues of climate change came to greater public attention over the past decade, the industries whose profits were threatened began to devote increasing resources to institutes and think-tanks, government lobbying and legislation, academic programs and “experts,” to huge campaigns of disinformation in schools, public forums, books, videos, on the internet and in the press. [228] It is easy to dismiss this as the nature of capital, protecting profits and entrenched industries like oil, coal and nuclear, which has certainly happened. However, there may be something much deeper at issue, and that just might be the intentional, secret military development of weather warfare capabilities.

There is also the possible greater agenda of intentionally facilitating radical climate instabilities for scientific adventurism. For example, when the Washington Post in 1989 reported on the 1989 Tokyo conference on global environment, they quoted World Bank president Barber Conable to say:

While higher temperatures may cause ‘a number of natural disasters,’ they might also warm cold and unproductive lands in the north into productivity. [229]

Reflecting the capacity to at least consider serious ENMOD experiments of potentially cataclysmic proportions, this is not an isolated and inconsequential statement. Indeed, it is the expression of an idea forwarded by numerous scientists in the past. It has always been a favored objective of ENMOD scientists in Russia, where research paralleled all ENMOD research pursued in the U.S., with additional studies of warming the Arctic region artificially. Melting the sea of the frozen Arctic and warming Siberia were pet projects of theirs, the obvious benefits being land reclamation and warmer growing climates for northern areas. “The Soviet program includes activities in both the Arctic and Antarctic.” [230]

Note, by the way, that the tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland has begun to thaw, there are changes in species’ behaviors and migrations, and species even recently prolific are absent. To the horror of indigenous peoples, places where they have always known only icepack have become open sea.

Antarctica’s peninsula’s average temperatures have increased by 5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last half-century. [231] The tundra’s permafrost has begun to melt, and the CO2 previously stored in the frozen ecology is now contributing to CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. Scientists have recorded accelerated rates of glacial retreat. [232] Ice and glaciers in Alaska are rapidly melting. [233]

On March 19, 2002, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reported that satellite imagery revealed, “that the northern section of the Larsen B ice shelf has completely shattered and separated from the continent.” A huge crack in the Antarctic ice block was reported in 2001. Two ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula known as the Larsen B and Wilkins were already in “full retreat” and lost nearly 3,000 square kilometers of their total area in one year. [234] As we might predict from a world inclined to ignore or suppress evidence of climatic mayhem, a world where people are inclined instead to manipulate and control the weather, “Explaining the quick thaw and determining its cause -- whether human or natural -- has so far eluded the experts.” [235]

Could the reasons for the rapid warming – which “has so far eluded the experts” – be due to military adventurism and/or competing programs in environmental modification? Were any of the earthquakes, hurricanes or typhoons that have devastated underdeveloped countries -- like Honduras, Bangladesh and Philippines – manufactured – or encouraged -- by the military [read ENMOD] adventurism of the US DOD? Was Mother Nature responsible for the major droughts and famines in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s? Or was it Father Technology at work? 

 

The U.S. military-industrial complex early on recognized the importance of weather as a weapon. The Battle for Britain was partially won because Allied forces successfully used a fog-dispersal system known as FIDO to enable aircraft takeoff and landing under otherwise debilitating fog conditions. Cold fogs were dissipated in the Korean War. [236] Project Popeye was implemented over Vietnam.

An article in Fortune magazine in 1948 spelled out the reality equally fortuitously, though it is a slightly different, and yet more horrible reality:

Army, Navy, and Air Force are spending close to a million dollars a year on weather modification and their tremendous interest suggests that military applications extend far beyond visiting a few showers upon an enemy. It does not require a sharp mind to figure out that wartime storms might readily be infected with virulent bacteriological and radiological substances. [237]

The Fortune sentiments are echoed, more recently, and in their contemporary incarnation, in statements by top U.S. officials. Speaking at an April 1997 conference on counter-terrorism, then Secretary of Defense William Cohen expressed concern about “eco-terrorism” using  ‘scalar electromagnetic weapons.” This statement inadvertently echoes the sentiments of the Fortune editors of 1948, though it has been translated into the fear-mongering hype of the cult of intelligence/madness:

Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes and volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves… So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations... It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts. [238]

In commenting on the plethora of “ingenious” minds out there dedicated to terrorism – and ever dismissing the possibility of our own -- we should duly note that from a psychological perspective, this is basically a projection about the plethora of “ingenious minds” proliferating within the U.S. military industrial complex whom are dedicated to inventing war and all of its concomitant horrors. In other, more simplistic terms, we know that we have thought of it, and that we are already doing it.

This deep-intelligence insider war-making propaganda seems to focus at length on that pillar of U.S. foreign policy which argues that others will beat us to the technological punch, and then just plain beat us, and so we need to pursue ANY and EVERY lethal military instrument our [dubious] minds can think up. Thus we have such statements as this one, made in the  Air Force 2025 document cited at the beginning of this writing:

The lessons of history indicate that a real weather modification capability will eventually exist despite the risk. The drive exists. People have always wanted to control the weather and their desire will compel them to collectively and continuously pursue their goal. The motivation exists. The potential benefits and power are extremely lucrative and alluring for those who have the resources to develop it. This combination of drive, motivation and resources will eventually produce the technology. History also teaches us that we cannot afford to be without a weather –modification capability once the technology is developed and used by others. Even if we have no intention of using it, others will. To call upon the atomic weapon analogy… we need to be able to deter or counter their capability with our own. Therefore, the weather and intelligence communities must keep abreast of the actions of others. [239]

Such is the Orwellian logic of our policy makers and military planners: the United States has repeatedly birthed major weapons of mass destruction under identical pretenses and, further, it is just such disingenuous arguments that are used by the United States to evade, dismiss or circumvent international treaties ostensibly designed to prohibit such unilateral military developments.  

Any conclusion of the assessment of the state-of-the-art of weather warfare technologies, and the psychology that embraces a global environmental – or nuclear – Armageddon, would not be complete without the input of Dr. Strangelove himself: Dr. Edward S. Teller, a lead scientist for the Manhattan Project, and the “father” of the hydrogen bomb.

One of Dr. Teller’s bright ideas of the 1950s was to create harbors by nuking our own coastline. He also advocated minerals excavation – oil, coal, uranium – by nuclear explosion. At the same time, Dr. Teller was the number one advocate of $200 bargain basement bomb shelters that proliferated in the 1950s. [240]

Dr. Teller was an early security adviser for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) who pushed to accelerate nuclear power development in disregard of major safety issues that even he admitted. “Nuclear plants contain radioactive poisons,” Dr. Teller noted. “It is my opinion that the unavoidable danger which will remain after all reasonable [safety and legislative] controls have been employed must not stand in the way of rapid development of nuclear power.” [241] Dr. Teller played a leading role in easing later safety regulations that ‘shackled the nuclear power industry [read: diluted profits considerably].” 

It is also interesting to note that early ENMOD research was undertaken in tandem with AEC support. The National Hurricane Research Laboratory, for one example, worked for years with the AEC (coordinated by the Naval Research Labs – NRL) on programs, for example, measuring the density of the atmosphere using nuclear instrumentation. [242]   

Dr. Teller was for years an eminent member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). Formed by President Eisenhower, in 1956, the PFIAB was an executive branch intelligence “watchdog” or “oversight” committee, staffed by top defense and intelligence insiders. It was often used as an “in-house” investigative body that could be counted on never to publicly breach the halls of secrecy or compromise the cult of intelligence – much like the President’s Commission of Inquiry into the Three Mile Island Accident, which was tasked to produce a whitewash, and obscure the public contamination, health and safety issues, and which did just that. Dr. Teller served on the PFIAB with the likes of Nelson Rockefeller. [243]  

Thanks to a major energy report produced under Dr. Teller’s direct supervision in 1974 and 1975, adopted by the Ford Administration, U.S. energy policy shifted drastically in favor of increased oil and gas production, strip-mining of coal and uranium, and nuclear power. A month after Nelson Rockefeller released the report, 3000 National Guardsmen occupied the Black Hills in South Dakota accompanied by sixty FBI agents at the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation. By June 26, 1975, the Tennessee Valley Authority had drilled 6000 test holes throughout 65,000 acres of Black Hills land, and had located an estimated five to six million pounds of uranium. Resistance by the American Indian Movement (AIM) prompted a full-scale military-type invasion – some 170 agents using armored personnel carriers, helicopters and M-16s -- of the Oglala Lakota Sioux reservation. Targeting AIM, the major terrorist actions that ensued were partially coordinated by Nelson Rockefeller. AIM was neutralized by a reign of terror; Leonard Pelletier was framed and incarcerated. [244]  

Most notable however, is that in 1967 Dr. Teller told a U.S. Senate Military Preparedness Committee that the United States could become a second-class power without war if the Russians succeed in controlling weather to produce rain over their territory and deprive America of needed rain. [245]   

Teller has for decades urged the U.S. to adopt a more defensive nuclear policy: Star Wars fits his bill neatly and he has enjoyed an enduring and, certainly, intimate association with nuclear devastation directors Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. [246] It should be no surprise then to learn then that Dr. Teller “has promoted the idea of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to counteract global warming.” [247] Computer simulations on the use of aluminum oxide to counter global warming come from Lawrence Livermore Weapons Laboratory, and this is one of the national labs cited (herein) for their heavy involvement in contemporary ENMOD research and development programs. Director Emeritus at Lawrence Livermore Labs, by the way, is Dr. Edward S. Teller.

A son of the Manhattan Project and a close associate of Dr. Edward Teller, was prominent physicist Frederic de Hoffmann, founder of General Atomics, a corporation owned privately by the Blue family of Denver (CO): Neil Blue remains chairman and CEO; brother Linden Blue is Vice-Chairman. Other directors are Harold Agnew, former Director of Los Alamos National Laboratories; John Vessey, former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Jay Keyworth, former science advisor to President Ronald Reagan.

According to one chronicler of the Atomic Age, General Atomics was “the first company anywhere dedicated to building atomic reactors.” General Atomics is a major player in the nuclear poisons arena, partnered, for example, with Entergy Corporation, Russia and U.S. DOE on a next-generation nuclear power project called the Gas Turbine - Modular Helium Reactor (GTMHR). [248] General Atomics is also “principally responsible party” to major U.S. Superfund environmental disasters. [249] General Atomics, once again – as outlined previously -- is a major secret aerospace and intelligence corporation dedicated to black programs and major UAV development and deployment.

Next: The Business of Intellect & Influence

keith harmon snow graduated B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. with a specialty in microwaves and antennas engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in 1986. From 1985 to 1989 he worked for General Electric Aerospace Electronics Laboratory on aerospace and defense technologies for classified communications, RADAR, EW and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) programs. Since 1990 he has worked as a journalist.