The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: “Owning the Weather” for Military Use
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, September 09, 2017
Global Research 27 September 2004
Theme: Environment, Militarization and WMD
In-depth Report: Climate Change
print 12.7K 798 349 30.2K
Author’s Introductory Note
Environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) for military use constitute, in the present context of global warfare, the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.
Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use.
Environmental modification techniques have been applied by the US military for more than half a century. US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’. During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which was initially developed in the 1990s under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), was an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP –which was officially abolished in 2014– is a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.
Officially, the HAARP program has been closed down at its location in Alaska. The technology of weather modification shrouded in secrecy, nonetheless prevails.
Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, “offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary”, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes:
‘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.”
In 1977, an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned ‘military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.’ According to the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques:
The term “environmental modification techniques” refers to any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space. (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, United Nations, Geneva: 18 May 1977)
While the substance of the 1977 Convention was reasserted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, debate on weather modification for military use has become a scientific taboo.
Military analysts and scientists are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter and environmentalists are largely focussing on greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, is not part of the broader debate on climate change under UN auspices.
While discussion of the post Cold War military applications of weather warfare is a taboo, the US Air Force has nonetheless acknowledged the strategic importance of ENMOD techniques in the modern battlefield of non-conventional warfare and intel ops, including the conduct, without the enemy’s knowledge, of “covert” weather modification operations.
While the US Force acknowledges that ENMOD weapons are part of military arsenal, there is no formal proof or evidence that ENMOD techniques have been used by US military against a foreign country or enemy of the US.
At this juncture in our history, US-NATO forces are deployed worldwide.
The US and its allies are waging war on Syria and Iraq and targeting Iran and North Korea. They are also threatening Russia and China.
The Pentagon has formulated the contours of a global military agenda, a “long war”, a war without borders.
“Weather warfare” is the ultimate WMD with the potential of destabilizing an enemy’s ecosystem, destroying its agriculture, disabling communications networks. In other words, ENMOD techniques can undermine an entire national economy, impoverish millions of people and “kill a nation” without the deployment of troops and military hardware.
The following text, with the exception of some small edits was first published in September 2004.
The 2004 article was a follow-up on an earlier study by the author entitled Washington’s New World Order Weapons Have the Ability to Trigger Climate Change, Third World Resurgence, January 2001, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO201A.html
While The Ecologist published in 2007 a shorter version of the above study, the issue of climatic manipulation for military use has largely been ignored by Environmentalists.
The URL of the original article is:
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Rosalie Bertell, who, from the very outset revealed the diabolical nature of the HAARP project, as part of an integrated non-conventional weapons program:
“It is related to fifty years of intensive and increasingly destructive programs to understand and control the upper atmosphere. … HAARP is an integral part of a long history of space research and development of a deliberate military nature. The military implications of combining these projects is alarming. … The ability of the HAARP / Spacelab/ rocket combination to deliver very large amounts of energy, comparable to a nuclear bomb, anywhere on earth via laser and particle beams, are frightening. The project is likely to be “sold” to the public as a space shield against incoming weapons, or, for the more gullible, a device for repairing the ozone layer.“
It is my sincere hope that this article will renew the debate on the dangers of weather warfare and will contribute to the broader objective of World peace which requires the relentless “disarming” of the US- NATO military apparatus.