Does the US Military “Own the Weather”? “Weaponizing the Weather” as an Instrument of Modern Warfare?

This article was first published in September 2017

Authors Note and Update

While Environmental modification (ENMOD) techniques have been available to the US military for more than half a century, there is no concrete evidence that these techniques have been used to trigger extreme weather conditions.

The broader issue of environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) must nonetheless be addressed and carefully analyzed. It should also be understood that the instruments of weather warfare are part of the US military arsenal.

“Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.”

Study Commissioned by the US Air Force: Weather as a Force Multiplier, Owning the Weather in 2025, August 1996

With the closing down of The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) program in Alaska in 2014, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been actively involved in ENMOD research, most of which is classified. In a 2009 Science report:

An official advisory group to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is convening [March 2009] an unclassified meeting … to discuss geoengineering, … DARPA is the latest in a number of official science funding agencies or top scientific societies that are exploring the controversial idea. … [The agenda … lists] top researchers who have studied geoengineering as speakers, including geochemist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science and astrophysicist Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine. “We don’t want to do geoengineering, but we’re in increasingly dire straits,” says climate expert Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington D.C., who has advocated publicly for research into geoengineering. He says that DARPA support for such work “could be good for the field.”

But other scientists worry that military support for the work could create the public impression that the work was meant to harm. “The last thing we need is to have DARPA developing climate-intervention technology,” says Caldeira. … Geoengineering is already so fraught with social, geopolitical, economic, and ethical issues; why would we want to add military dimensions?”

The article below, focusses on the history and analysis of ENMOD. It also provides direct quotes from a publicly available 1996 US Air Force which confirm the US Air Force’s intent to “Weaponize the Weather”.

It should be noted that a historic 1977 International Convention ratified by the UN General Assembly banned “military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.” (See AP, 18 May 1977). Both the US and the Soviet Union were signatories to the Convention: