Weather As Weaponry

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31770, 29 August 1968, Page 11

Weather As Weaponry

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)

SYDNEY, Aug. 28.

Global wars fought with hurricanes, milehigh icebergs, rain, and electricity could happen withiii 10 to 20 years, a top United States scientist said yesterday.

A geophysicist, Dr Gordon McDonald, gave this warning to the science school for high school students at Sydney University. By the twenty-first century weather modification could well be an important part of every nation’s weapons arsenal, said Dr McDonald, who until recently was executive vice-president of the Institute for Defence Analysis, Washington.

Dr McDonald called for “an international agreement to prevent these weapons ever being developed.” Because of the natural irregularity of weather. Dr McDonald said, an alien power could divert and guide a hurricane to another country without rousing suspicion. Diversion of rainfall to produce prolonged droughts would result in devastation equal to that caused by modern weapons, with far less blatancy, Dr McDonald said. Other methods of weather warfare were more “far out” but equally possible, he said. One “far out” technique could reduce whole populations to imbecility by channelling electric current from an area below the stratosphere, he said. Experiments at the Massachussets Institute of Tech-

nology eight or nine years ago had shown that the human brain could not work efficiently if an electric current of a frequency of 10 cycles per second was directed at it.

This was the precise frequency of the electric current in a belt below the stratosphere, Dr McDonald explained. It would be quite possible to set off a series of lightning strikes which would direct a charge of this electricity over a whole country, he said. Also ‘Tar out,” but equally possible, was the melting of the South Pole ice cap, causing tidal wave destruction of every coastal area in the world.

Later, Dr McDonald said he felt every scientist should warn political leaders of these threats to world survival.