by MATTHEW GAULT
May is a month of holidays in Russia. With the official start of spring plus Labor Day, Victory Day and Orthodox Easter all taking place within days of each other, Russians spend the month celebrating.
And if Russian president Vladimir Putin has his way, there wouldn’t be a cloud in the sky to spoil the fun. In 2016, Kremlin planned to spend $1.3 million to eliminate clouds and ensure a lovely May.
Russia and other countries do this all the time. Weather-manipulation is old news. In 2008, the Russian air force accidentally dumped a 55-pound bag of concrete—one of the substances it uses to disrupt weather—on a suburban Moscow home.
China deployed the same technology to keep the skies clear during the Beijing Olympics. Dubai seeds clouds to create rain rather than disrupt it. Thailand maintains a Bureau of Royal Rainmaking and Agricultural Aviation. Several U.S. states also manipulate the weather.
Militaries love the technology and its implications, but rarely raise a cloud in anger. A U.N treaty stays their hands. But that doesn’t mean that world’s armed forces—particularly in America—don’t at least research weaponized weather.
One U.S. Air Force white paper from the 1990s proposed creating artificial clouds of very, very tiny “nanomachines” that could, in theory, manipulate the weather, spy on the enemy down below and even steer lighting to fry targets on the ground.
Yes, this sounds ridiculous, but other tech that the paper proposes—and which might have seemed impossible in 1996—is either here or coming soon. So maybe smart clouds aren’t far off.
