The American Replacement of Natural Disaster

There's an interesting little book by philosopher William Irwin Thompson entitled The American Replacement of Nature, written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War ("I would have liked to be patriotic and respect my President, but it was difficult when he behaved more like the Director of the CIA than President of the Republic").

"America's esoteric destiny," Thomspon writes, "seems to be one of breaking down all the cultures of the world in preparation for a new global culture that will become humanity's second nature." He concedes that when America's asymmetrical opposition calls it "the Great Satan," it has a point: "for this second nature is so artificial, so opposite to anything that a traditional person would wish to call cultural or natural, that it appears on the horizon of the human as something inhuman, monstrous, and evil."

It's been ten years since I read the book, but I thought of it the other day when I remembered these remarks from April 28, 1997, by then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen. He had just delivered the keynote address of the "Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and US Strategy" at the University of Georgia, and had opened up the floor to a Q & A (the context for the B'nai Brith reference is a spate of hoax anthrax letters the organization had received):

Q: Let me ask you specifically about last week's scare here in Washington, and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to deal with that (inaudible), at B'nai Brith.

A: Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a false threat under the circumstances. But as we've learned in the intelligence community, we had something called -- and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.

So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important.

Did you get that? Seven years ago, the US Secretary of Defense warned that terrorists were pursuing the bioengineering of gene-specific superbugs (a step behind PNAC, which regards targetting genotypes as potentially "a politically useful tool"), the alteration of the climate, the triggering of earthquakes and even volcanoes. If we assume Cohen was serious, then we can safely presume the US is leading the world in the development and deployment of such technologies.

What reminded me of Cohen's words was the reawkening of Mount St Helen's, and the simple fact of the calender. It's October - where's our surprise?

I may be foolishly naive here, but I'm prepared to give Karl Rove the benefit of the doubt on this one. I don't believe he's sitting in a bunker beneath the West Wing pressing the "erupt" button. But it would be even more foolish if we ignored Cohen's words, and their implications. Because we are entering a period of human history - the final period, if we don't watch ourselves - in which our speaking of the natural world means little more than a nostalgic conceit. That which used to be expressly "Acts of God" are being folded into the mission of the US military.

Raising this subject invites the debunker's usual fistful of tinfoil. But in The Times for November 23, 2000, Dr. Rosalie Bertell confirms that "US military scientists are working on weather systems as a potential weapon. The methods include the enhancing of storms and the diverting of vapor rivers in the Earth's atmosphere to produce targeted droughts or floods."

Another example, this time from a 1996 Air Force research paper entitled Weather As a Force Multiplier, which called for an examination of "the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will need to remain the dominant air and space force in the future":

US aerospace forces can "own the weather" by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather-modification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical road map.

A high-risk, high-reward endeavor, weather-modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather-modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary.

And weather is not only a force multiplier; it is a fear multiplier as well.

While HAARP and similar arrays diddle with the ionosphere, and our skies are increasingly streaked with man-made cirrus clouds, it's becoming difficult to find with certainty the intersection of natural and artificial phenomena. And so, a TV meteorologist's claim that he has begun to use the pattern recognition of "scalar weapons signatures" within cloud formations to better his forecasting record is not as crazy as it would have sounded even five years ago.

William Irwin Thompson:

In truth, America is extremely uncomfortable with nature; hence its culturally sophisticated preference for the fake and nonnatural, from Cheez Whiz sprayed ouf of an aerosol can onto a Styrofoam potatoed chip, to Cool Whip smoothing out the absence of taste in those attractively red, genetically engineered monster strawberries. Any peasant with a dumb cow can make whipped cream, but it takes a chemical factory to make Cool Whip. It is the technological process and not the natural product that is important, for what that point is aimed at, is the escape from nature.

Sure, Americans do like to hunt and fish, but not to commune with nature; rather to knock the old bitch around to show her who’s boss.

A hypothetical question: if the United States military is determined to "own the weather," what would the test of an environmental weapons system look like?