The strangeness of the Moscow weather provoke conspiracy theorists to talk about climate weapons that can harm a country, people or territory. The development of such weapons was really carried out, and before that considerable funds were pumped into them. But where is the line that separates fantasy from science?
Someone speaks of the "weather gun" as a joke, thereby reacting to the dank despondency (an option for the South of Russia is wild heat). Someone is talking about the danger of "climatic" and - in a broader version - "geophysical" weapons in all seriousness, although there is no data on more or less promising developments in this area, and there has never been. Except for a couple of special cases.
From the Viet Cong to Chernobyl
There is only one reliably known case of practical impact on the weather with the aim of causing damage to a military and political enemy. This is "Operation Popeye" (named after the famous cartoon character), conducted by the United States in Vietnam from 1967 to 1972. During the rainy season (March to November), silver iodide was dispersed from military transport aircraft flying into the clouds, which led to heavy rainfall. The technology was tested in 1966 on the territory of neighboring Laos on the Bulawen plateau in the Cong river valley, and the government of the then neutral Laos was not notified.
This story was originally a pure experiment, led by Dr. Donald Hornig, US Presidential Plenipotentiary Science and Technology Advisor and a former participant in a nuclear weapons project. The results of the operation were deemed unsatisfactory, even though the rainfall actually fell three times and the Ho Chi Minh trail was partially flooded, as were some of the tunnels that the Vietnamese guerrillas used for supply and movement. The problem is the short duration of the effect, which did not have a decisive influence on the course of the war. Bulldozers were both cheaper and more efficient.
Contrary to the traditional presentation of conspiracy, all this was not such a secret. Research in the field of the so-called active influence on the climatic environment has been carried out since the 30s. And the effect of silver iodide was discovered back in 1946, just the Americans were the first and only ones who decided to try it, so to speak, in practice.
By the way, for a long time the USSR went ahead of the rest of the planet in these developments, guided, however, not so much by military goals as by economic ones. In particular, systems were developed that made it possible to prevent the formation of hail, which was actively used in the interests of agriculture in the Transcaucasus, Moldova and Central Asia, so that grapes and cotton would not be beaten.
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As for the military objectives, at one time the development of a system for countering electronic and optical means and enemy satellites through weather conditions was carried out. Simply put, the enemy was supposed to be "blinded" by creating an impenetrable curtain of suspended particles in the atmosphere, for example, crystalline fog. Or, conversely, to improve the properties of the atmosphere for greater passability of its own radio waves. In the end, the effect was, again, economic: the Soviet people learned to crystallize fogs at low temperatures, removing the threat to civil aviation in the Far North.
All this scientific and technical routine does not bother an ordinary conspiracy theorist. Typhoon management is much more interesting. Few people know that both sides of the Cold War tried to achieve this at the same time, only the Americans experimented on their own territory (fortunately, the typhoon is a familiar phenomenon for them), and the USSR conducted research and testing together with Cuba and Vietnam. And in the end, he went a little further in this matter than the United States, which seem to need something like that in everyday life.
The Americans believed that it was enough to destroy some part of the cloud in any sector to change the energy balance of the cloud and thus change the direction and trajectory of the typhoon. The problem for them was not so much the "shooting" of a certain sector of cloudiness, but the mathematical calculation of where the typhoon will go after that. This proved overwhelming even for the Defense Department's supercomputers, and after 1980, the Stormfury program was gradually phased out. And the amateur performances of many enthusiasts, which Hollywood is so interested in, will not achieve large-scale results.
In the USSR, they thought more constructively, thinking about how to find the "pain points" of the typhoon, which affect its trajectory and power. Soviet scientists really made some headway in this, having learned to simulate the structure of a typhoon, which in the long term may allow them to be controlled to some extent.
But these are just one-time local technologies. One typhoon does not solve the issue. Another problem for Operation Popeye was its high cost. And to disperse a typhoon to the power required to damage a large modern city, unthinkable energy is needed. This technology simply does not exist. While.
It is all the more impossible to control super-large climatic phenomena (cyclones, anticyclones, atmospheric fronts) with dimensions of hundreds and thousands of kilometers. For example, one rain cloud (a couple of kilometers in size) contains the energy of several nuclear bombs. Accordingly, in order to control it, you need a force many times greater than it. In addition, it needs to be concentrated in a short period of time in a small space. At least, the energy introduced into the cloud must be no less than the one that it contains, while the introduced energy must be somehow withdrawn back, otherwise the consequences can be unpredictable.
By the way, the only successful operation of a climatic nature, and even carried out in an emergency, was also in the USSR. After Chernobyl, it was somehow possible to "bind" the cloud of radioactive dust with the atomized chemistry, minimizing the damage from it.
And the authorities hide
In the period up to the 80s, the governments and special services of the USSR, the USA and some other countries (Great Britain, Canada, South Africa) amused themselves with a wide variety of nonsense - from psychics, "super soldiers" and "racial plague" (in South Africa they invented a virus that should infect only Zulu) to climatic, seismic and ionic weapons, not to mention the "extraterrestrial intelligence." The turning point came due to a new round of scientific and technological progress, and most of the exotic programs are quietly covered up.
They say that laboratories of one or two people have survived in some places, but these are people who are obsessed, sincerely believe in their ideas and, most importantly, do not have access to a lot of money, resources and supercomputers - without this, you cannot set the atmospheric front on Moscow. Among them, there was still no new Nikola Tesla, who managed to successfully lead potential investors by the nose, telling the rich that the tower he built in America caused an explosion on Podkamennaya Tunguska somewhere in endless Russia, and there was no meteorite. The Bolsheviks invented it to compromise Tesla.
Desperate, the testing of a nonexistent "climate weapon" was banned by a UN resolution of 1977, and a year later the USSR and the United States signed a similar bilateral agreement. Of course, this will not stop real enthusiasts, but no one has been involved in large-scale developments in the field of "climate weapons" since that moment, and most of the related facilities have been transferred to civilian departments. Nevertheless, accusations from conspiracy theorists and left-wing radicals (especially the vanguard of the extremist environmentalists) are pouring in regularly against governments.
Thus, George W. Bush and Russia were blamed for the devastating invasion of Louisiana by Hurricane Katrin. Barack Obama was accused of "causing" Hurricane Sandy a week before the elections. There is a "version" that the drought in California during the reign of Governor Schwarzenegger was also artificially caused in order to turn the richest state in the United States into a dependent and subsidized state. And the Americans were suspected of "inciting" hurricanes on Nicaragua and Panama back in 1969.
However, the main newsmaker on this issue was former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who directly blamed Washington for a thirty-year drought in Iran. Ironically, he finished his public address on the topic when it started pouring rain in Tehran.
Now the main source of "rumors" is the American system HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) - a huge antenna complex for high-frequency study in Alaska, built in 1997. With its help, it was supposed to investigate the ionosphere of the atmosphere, and the customer was the Agency for Advanced Defense Research and Development (DAPRA), which in the United States is called upon to seize on everything unexplored.
However, the project turned out to be too expensive and did not bring any practical results. In 2014, the US Air Force disowned the center in Alaska, stating that they now intend to develop other methods of research and control of the ionosphere, without specifying which ones. In the summer of the same year, the last programs and grants from DAPRA ended, and a year later the entire complex was transferred to the balance of the University of Alaska, and it is no longer involved in military programs. However, his ability to concentrate huge energy in one beam has not gone anywhere and makes even technically savvy people nervous, and not only the inventors of the perpetual motion machine and UFO witnesses.
In any case, it is HAARP that is still the main target of conspiracy theorists, who blame the antenna complex even for the appearance of unprecedented diseases, aircraft crashes and other misfortunes (hurricanes are a common place). There are two more similar complexes of much smaller capacity in polar Norway - in Tromsø and Longyearbyen. The secrecy around them also gives rise to rumors, from which "rumor-versions" will be born. At the same time, the predecessor of HAARP, located in the same Alaska near the city of Fairbanks, was dismantled in 2009, and another one - in Puerto Rico - is under reconstruction.
In Russia, there are also two complexes for the study of the ionosphere, as in the case of the Norwegian ones - of noticeably lower power. Both work. This is the Sura project in the Nizhny Novgorod region, which looks terribly similar to HAARP, and another project in Tomsk based on the Siberian Institute of Physics and Technology, but it is in the process of being disbanded.
There is a similar project in Ukraine - near the city of Zmiev, Kharkiv region (URAN-1). For obvious reasons, one cannot know exactly what they are doing there, if anything at all. It is possible that lard is smoked.
Ultimately, climatic weapons may well be included in the category of "urban legends" on a par with mutant rats in the Moscow metro and the Boogeyman in American mirrors. However, this does not mean that active impact on the atmosphere is impossible in the future. The same applies to seismic weapons ("tectonic"), for which Dzhokhar Dudaev was worried in his time.
But seriously, most developed countries have an advanced environmental monitoring system. Not only atmospheric and marine, but also seismic phenomena, therefore it is simply impossible to use such a weapon. Therefore, there is no point in trying - there will be more problems and costs than the effect. But conspiracy theories are always interesting. Even the most sane people have watched or read something about aliens and ghosts at least once in their lives. This is the nature of human consciousness, especially in big cities. The main thing is to know when to stop.
Evgeny Krutikov