The oddities of the Moscow weather provoke conspiracy theorists to talk about climate weapons that can damage the country, the people or the territory. The development of such weapons was indeed carried out, and before they pumped in a lot of money. But where is the line that separates fantasy from science?
Someone speaks of the "weather gun" as a joke, thus reacting to a dank despondency (an option for the South of Russia - wild heat). Someone argues about the dangers of "climatic" and - in a broader version - "geophysical" weapons in all seriousness, although there is no information about more or less promising developments in this field, as it was not. Except for a couple of special cases.
From the Vietcong to Chernobyl
There is only one known case of practical impact on the weather in order to damage the military and political adversary. This is "Papaya Operation" (named after the famous cartoon character), conducted by the USA in Vietnam with 1967 for 1972 year. During the rainy season (from March to November), from military transport planes flying into the clouds, silver iodide was scattered, which led to heavy rainfall. The testing of the technology was carried out in 1966 in the neighboring Laos on the Bulaven Plateau in the valley of the Cong River, and the government of the still neutral Laos was not informed.
Initially, this story was a pure experiment, led by Dr. Donald Hornig - the US presidential adviser for science and technology and a former member of the nuclear weapons development project. The results of the operation were found to be unsatisfactory, even though the precipitation actually tripled and the Ho Chi Minh trail was partially flooded, as were some of the tunnels that the Vietnamese partisans used to supply and move. The problem is the short-term 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 supply of conspiracy, all this was not so secret. Studies in the field of so-called active influence on the climate environment have been conducted since 30-ies. And the effect of silver iodide was discovered back in 1946, just Americans were the first and only to try it, so to speak, in practice.
By the way, for a long time the USSR has been ahead of the rest of the world in these developments, guided, however, not so much by military purposes as by economic ones. In particular, systems were developed to prevent the formation of hail, which was actively used in the interests of agriculture in Transcaucasia, Moldova and Central Asia, so that the grapes and cotton did not break.
As for military objectives, at one time, systems were developed to counteract electronic and optical means and enemy satellites through weather conditions. Simply put, the enemy was supposed to "blind", creating an impenetrable veil of suspended particles in the atmosphere, for example, a crystalline fog. Or vice versa - to improve the properties of the atmosphere for greater patency of own radio waves. In the end, the effect was, again, economic: Soviet people learned to crystallize fog at low temperatures, removing the threat to civil aviation in the Far North.
All this scientific and technical routine of an ordinary conspiracy officer does not bother. Management of typhoons is much more interesting. Few people know that both sides of the Cold War tried to achieve this at the same time, only Americans experimented on their own territory (the benefit of the typhoon is a familiar phenomenon for them), and the USSR carried out research and testing jointly with Cuba and Vietnam. And in the end I went a little further in this issue than the US, which seems to be much more necessary in everyday life.
Americans believed that it was enough to destroy some part of the clouds in some 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 cloud sector, but the mathematical calculation of where the typhoon would go after that. This turned out to be unbearable even for the supercomputers of the Ministry of Defense, and after 1980 the Stormfury program was quietly curtailed. And the amateur performance of a lot of enthusiasts, so interested in Hollywood, you 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 have really made progress in this, having learned to model the structure of the typhoon, which in the future may allow them to manage to some extent.
But these are just one-time local technologies. One typhoon of the issue does not solve. For "Operation Papaya" the main problem was its high cost. And just to disperse the typhoon to the power needed to damage a large modern city, you need unthinkable energy. Such technology simply does not exist. Till.
The management of super-large-scale climatic phenomena (cyclones, anticyclones, atmospheric fronts) of hundreds and thousands of kilometers is all the more impossible. For example, in one rain cloud (the size of a couple of kilometers) contains the energy of several nuclear bombs. Accordingly, in order to control it, we need a force many times greater than it. In addition, it needs to be concentrated in a small amount of time in a small space. At the very least, the energy introduced into the cloud must be no less than the one it contains, while the introduced energy must somehow be brought back, otherwise the consequences can be unpredictable.
By the way, the only successful operation of a climatic nature, moreover, conducted in an emergency, was also in the USSR. After Chernobyl, somehow, it was possible to "tie" a cloud of radioactive dust dispersed by chemistry, minimizing the damage from it.
And the authorities hide
In the period before the 80-ies, the governments and special services of the USSR, the United States and some other countries (Britain, Canada, South Africa) were entertained with the most varied nonsense - from psychics, "super-soldier" and "racial plague" (in South Africa they invented a virus that should only hit Zulu) to climatic, seismic and ionic weapons, not to mention the "extraterrestrial intelligence". The turning point came in the strength of a new round of scientific and technological progress, and most of the exotic programs are quietly covered.
They say that in some places there are laboratories of one or two people, but they are people possessed, sincerely believing in their ideas and, most importantly, they do not have access to big money, resources and supercomputers - without this, the atmospheric front to Moscow will not be set up. Among them, there was not yet a new Nikola Tesla, who managed to successfully lead the nose of potential investors, telling rich people that the tower he built in America caused an explosion in Podkamennaya Tunguska somewhere in boundless Russia, and there was no meteorite. His Bolsheviks came up with the idea that Tesla should be compromised.
Desperate, the test of nonexistent "climate weapons" was banned by the UN resolution from 1977 year, and a year later the USSR and the US signed a similar bilateral treaty. Of course, these enthusiasts will not stop this, but no one has been engaged in large-scale development in the field of "climate weapons" since then, and most of the accompanying facilities have moved to civilian departments. Nevertheless, accusations from conspiracy theorists and radical leftists (especially advanced militant groups of extremist ecologists) are being regularly sung to governments.
Thus, in the devastating invasion of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana, both George W. Bush and Russia were accused at the same time. Barack Obama was accused of having "summoned" Hurricane Sandy a week before the election. There is a "version" that the drought in California during the governorship of Schwarzenegger was also caused artificially, in order to turn the richest US state into an addict and subsidized. And in the "incitement" of hurricanes on Nicaragua and Panama, the Americans were suspected in 1969.
However, the main newsmaker in this issue was the former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who directly accused Washington of a thirty-year drought in Iran. Ironically, he finished his public speech on this topic at the same time when torrential rain started in Tehran.
Now the main source of "auditory" is the American system HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) - a huge antenna complex high-frequency study in Alaska, built in 1997. With his help, it was supposed to investigate the ionosphere of the atmosphere, and the customer was the Agency for Advanced Defense Research Projects (DAPRA), which in the US is designed to cling to everything that has not been studied.
However, the project proved to be too costly and did not bring any practical results. In 2014, the US Air Force disowned the center in Alaska, saying that they now intend to develop other methods for studying and monitoring 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 no longer deals with military programs. However, his ability to concentrate in one ray of great energy has not gone away and makes even nervous technically savvy people, and not just the inventors of the perpetual motion machine and witnesses of UFOs.
In any case, it is HAARP that is still the main target of conspiracy theorists who accuse the antenna complex, even in the appearance of unprecedented diseases, the fall of aircraft and other misfortunes (hurricanes are a common place). There are two more similar complexes of much smaller capacity in Arctic Norway - in Tromsø and Longyearbyen. The secrecy around them also generates rumors, from which "rumors-versions" are born. In this case, the predecessor of HAARP, located in the same Alaska near Fairbanks, was dismantled at 2009 year, and another one - in Puerto Rico - is under reconstruction.
In Russia, too, there are two complexes of the ionosphere, as in the case of the Norwegian - much less power. Both work. This is the Sura project in the Nizhny Novgorod region, which looks terribly similar to HAARP, and another project in Tomsk on the basis of the Siberian Physicotechnical Institute, but it is in the process of disbanding.
A similar project is in Ukraine - in the vicinity of the city of Zmiyiv, Kharkov region (URAN-1). For obvious reasons, you can not know exactly what they are doing there, if they do something at all. It is possible that the fat is smoked.
In the final analysis, climate weapons can easily be described as "urban legends" on a par with mutant rats in the Moscow metro and Bugyman in American mirrors. However, this does not mean that an active impact on the atmosphere is impossible in the future. The same applies to seismic weapons ("tectonic"), for which at one time experienced Jokhar Dudayev.
If very seriously, most developed countries have an advanced system for monitoring the environment. Not only atmospheric and marine, but also seismic phenomena, therefore it is simply impossible to use such weapons. Consequently, there is no point in trying - problems and costs will be greater than the effect. But conspiracy is always interesting. Even the most sensible people at least once in their lives looked or read something about aliens and ghosts. Such is the nature of human consciousness, especially in large cities. The main thing is to know the extent.