Pell Believes U.S. Uses Rain‐Making To Flood Vietnam
“I want to stop this sort of thing in its tracks,” he said. If we permit weather modification, we’ve really opened up a new Pandora’s box. Man already has too many awesome and devastating weapons of war.” –Senator Claiborne Pell – United States Senator for Rhode Island (1961 to 1997).
“PROVIDENCE, R. I., June 26 (AP) — Senator Claiborne Pell says he believes that American military forces have used ad vanced rain‐making technology to cause flooding and death in Vietnam.
“I strongly believe clouds have been seeded in Southeast Asia for military reasons,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview published yester day by The Providence Journal. “There is little doubt in my mind, but I cannot go any far ther than that.”
Mr. Pell, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has introduced a draft of a treaty to forbid weather and climate‐modification activities as weapons of war. He said he would hold hearings on the proposal in about a month.
The Senator said he believed that the military began in 1966 to seed clouds to clear them away for the bombing of North Vietnam and that seedings produced rains that washed out north Vietnamese infiltration routes and caused floods that resulted in thousands of deaths.
“I want to stop this sort of thing in its tracks,” he said. If we permit weather modification, we’ve really opened up a new Pandora’s box. Man already has too many awesome and devastating weapons of war.”
The Defense Department has given no clear answers to in quiries about its weather‐mod ification activities, he added.
He said that Dr. John S. Foster Jr., director of defense research and engineering, wrote him saying most of the information he wanted was secret.”
Senator Claiborne Pell – United States Senator for Rhode Island (1961 to 1997).
“Rainmaking as a weapon of war can only lead to the development of vastly more dangerous environmental techniques whose consequences may be unknown and may cause irreparable damage to our global environment. This is why the United States must move quickly to ban all environmental or geophysical modification techniques from the arsenals of war.”
Gilbert Gude – United States Congressman from Maryland Gilbert Gude testified the following before the Senate in 1972.
“We must also consider that the use of weather modification is potentially indiscriminate. Unlike other weapons, the winds and seas are not so direct-able that we can discriminate between one target and another. By their nature, they are area-wide weapons. We cannot flood only military targets or cause droughts in areas producing only military rations. The technology will be used against people regardless of their uniform or occupation. Weather modification will inevitably strike civilians harder than nearby military objectives.”
Also, “The issues of command and control, and the discrimination highlight another disturbing characteristic of weather modification, the difficulty of detection. Unlike other weapons, it may be possible to initiate military weather modification projects without being detected. In other words, the military results may not be visibly tied to the initiating party. This raises the possibility of clandestine use of geophysical warfare…”
Link to Weather Warfare
Investigation into the historical and current use of weather modification for military purposes.
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