Before New York City is re-designed as a subterranean metropolis, why not look to the well-funded and forward-looking scientific community and ask if there isn’t some way to prevent another Sandy, not just sit back and let it happen? I picture the late Senator Claiborne Pell looking down at all this and shaking his head. He had seen the future clearly when the Treaty on Environmental Modification (ENMOD) was being discussed in 1976-77. Its main thrust was to prohibit use against an enemy of “techniques that would have widespread, long-lasting or severe effects through deliberate manipulation of natural processes and cause such phenomena as earthquakes, tidal waves, and changes in climate and weather patterns.”
Pell lost in his challenge to an amendment allowing research and experimentation on these prohibited techniques, correctly picturing any agency permitted to develop them as becoming unable to resist the temptation to use environmental modification as a military weapon. He may have anticipated their domestic use, but should he have seriously anticipated illegal (criminal) domestic use to distort public opinion and Congressional motivation? Or long-term, to convert the United States into a police state on par with the Soviet Union or a Nazi Germany?
The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. signed the treaty in 1978, bringing a momentary quiet, but after the U.S.S.R. was dissolved in 1991 it announced that as “Russia” it was no longer bound by the treaty, followed by the U.S. position that neither was the U.S. The race was on. Ten years later, Representative Dennis Kucinich could be quoted in “Columbus Alive” for January, 2002: “The truth is there’s an entire program in the Department of Defense, ‘Vision for 2020,’ that’s developing these weapons.” Publisher Bob Fitrakis was asking him about the use of “chemtrails,” an operation which the U.S. Air Force denied, and still routinely denies, calling them “a hoax.” In print, the Air Force had announced its objective to master (“own”) the weather, once seen essentially as an answer to Russia. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that this objective has been discontinued or reduced. The more useful it becomes, the heavier the silence surrounding it.
