Climate Engineers Get Spooky Nod For Exotic Planetary Weapons

Military leaders in the United States and other countries have pondered the possibilities of weaponized weather manipulation for decades. Lowell Wood himself embodies the overlap of civilian and military interests. Now affiliated with the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford ­University, Wood was a protégé of the late Edward Teller, the weapons scientist who was credited with developing the hydrogen bomb and was the architect of the ­Reagan-­era Star Wars ­missile ­defense system (which Wood worked on, too). Like Wood, Teller was known for his advocacy of controversial military and technological solutions to complex problems, including the chimerical “peaceful uses of nuclear weapons.” Teller’s plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using thermo­nuclear explosives actually came close to receiving government approval. Before his death in 2003, Teller was advocating a climate control scheme similar to what Wood proposed. Despite the large, unanswered questions about the implications of playing God with the elements, climate engineering is now being widely discussed in the scientific community and is taken seriously within the U.S. government. The Bush administration has recommended the addition of this “important strategy” to an upcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the ­UN-­sponsored organization whose February study seemed to persuade even the Bush White House to take global warming more seriously. And climate engineering’s advocates are not confined to the small group that met in California. Last year, for example, Paul J. Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate, proposed a scheme similar to Wood’s, and there is a long paper trail of climate and weather modification studies by the Pentagon and other government agencies.