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Weather Weapons / Weather Warfare

Mighty_Emperor

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
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In tonights "Crafty Tricks of War" they touched on a number of weapons that wer designed to use weather so I thought I;d start a topic on it as some of the things were only mentioned in passing and I was curious about the evidence out there for them.

Anyway a report on the show:

The scrapheap king goes back into battle

(Filed: 07/01/2004)


Colonel Dick loves to construct improbable military contraptions - and then shoot them down or blow them up. Andrew Martin finds out what makes television's most engaging new boffin tick


Dick Strawbridge, an amiable whirlwind, is giving me a tour of some of his favourite debris: "Those are bits of ballast for a Japanese balloon bomb we made. This is the residue of our man-lifting kite. Oh, and that's our sun cannon. It takes the sun's light, shines it onto a parabolic reflector, and you can direct it like a laser. We took it to Southern Spain and it worked! We managed to burn a log with it."

"Now this is amazing," he continues, picking up some shapeless plastic object. "It's a replica of camel dung that we built. The Germans consider it good luck to drive through dung, so, in North Africa during the Second World War, British agents were supplied with models of it filled with explosive. Eventually the Germans worked out what was going on, so they stopped driving through it, but then the British began to make explosive dung with tyre tracks in, so that it looked as if it had already been driven through, and was safe to go through again."

We are on the set of Crafty Tricks of War, a new television series in which Dick Strawbridge recreates inventions thrown up by the conflicts of the last century, and tests them out, preferably culminating in an explosion. Many will already know him as a regular contestant on Scrapheap Challenge, the Channel 4 series in which two teams are given the run of a scrapyard in order to bodge together contraptions such as floating fire engines, catapults or diving bells; these are then pitted against each other to see which works best - or, in practice, which breaks last.

At first, Dick Strawbridge was always "Major Dick" on Scrapheap, because he was a Major in the Royal Corps of Signals. He was always a team captain; that went without saying. He would point at a jagged edge of metal protruding from some weird contraption and say, "Just buzz it off with the sozzle", this being the nickname for his beloved reciprocating saw. When he built a drag racer that turned out to have only one gear - reverse - he simply raced it backwards.

During the course of the 19 episodes in which he appeared, Major Strawbridge was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel - and casually bumped up further by his television colleagues until he was known as "Colonel Dick". In late 2001, aged 42, Dick Strawbridge retired from the Army, and earlier this year he was, more or less inevitably, given this new series of his own.

Crafty Tricks of War is filmed in a Boy's Own paradise located on a former military airfield at Pershore in Worcestershire. Bits of jagged sawn-off metal lie strewn about, for he has just been encasing a Volkswagen Polo in steel to demonstrate the properties of an armoured car. The plan is to place a camera in the Polo then fire at it with a machine-gun, and see what happens.

When I eventually manage to get in a few questions, I find myself asking about his moustache, which is transfixingly luxuriant. "I've had it since I was 16," he says. "I could never work out how to shave my top lip without cutting myself."

"But surely it's a military moustache?" I protest.

"Oh, it's a military moustache, yes," agrees Dick, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were both officers, and whose two brothers are also in the Army. "But I was asked to shave it off at Sandhurst, and in the Army you're not allowed to have a moustache hanging below the top of your top lip." Weighing up the 'tache, I see that it obscures his entire mouth. "So it was shorter back then?" "No!" booms Dick. "I think that was the first time I ever told my RSM to fuck off."

When he first auditioned for Scrapheap Challenge, Dick was teamed up with some other hopefuls, and told to undertake some "leaderless tasks". (He wasn't having any of that: "I took charge!") He has his wife, Brigit, to thank for his presence at the audition. She'd spotted an advertisement asking: "Are you outspoken, inventive and a capable engineer?" She knew her man.

The couple met in a pub in Dorset in 1980, and she bribed her younger brother to leave so that she could be alone with Dick, with whom she immediately discussed her 1955 Ford Poplar. She began to take him out in the car, and it would break down. The more it broke down, and the more Dick fixed it, the more they warmed to each other. Dick eventually bought the car from her, and has kept old cars ever since.

They married and set up home in army quarters in Worcestershire. In a shed in the garden, Dick spent hours making "wooden trays and bookcases, and rabbit hutches and things like that", with his router saw, which he likes as much as his sozzle.

The Scrapheap advertisement advised those interested to send in a video tape, so Brigit filmed Dick demonstrating one of his 64 inventions. "It was an idea for a frictionless bicycle dynamo," he says. "You see, fitted onto the spokes, you have a ring of alternating pole magnets."

There are two sides to Dick Strawbridge. For all his zaniness in mufti, his work in the Royal Signals Corps (for which he was awarded the MBE) involved sophisticated and subtle electronics, most of it with a purpose he is not at liberty to discuss.

Dick has now marched me outside once more for a look at his replica of the mighty Panjandrum, a sort of mobile Catherine wheel dreamt up by the boffins of the navy's Department of Miscellaneous Weapons during the Second World War. Rocket-powered and charged with high explosive, it was designed to destroy the huge defensive walls incorrectly assumed to exist at the time of the Normandy landings.

For the first episode of Crafty Tricks of War, the Panjandrum was rolled into a mountain of oil barrels , making a very satisfactory bang. The explosion - like all the explosions in the series - was the result of special effects rather than dynamite, and Dick is clearly rather sad about this. "We show archive footage of the Panjandrum being tested," he says, "and there are all these blokes standing very close to it in tweed suits, smoking pipes."

I need a moment to digest the implications of this, but Dick doesn't pause. "Of course, you've got to yearn for the adrenaline of the old days," he says.

telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/01/07/bvdick07.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/01/07/ixartright.html
Link is dead. The cited article is quoted in full above. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:


https://web.archive.org/web/2005111...7.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/01/07/ixartright.html

Emps
 
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Fugo: The Japanese Balloon Bomb

Pos. my favourite weapon ever - it was beautifully made from paper and was designed to take advanatge of the newly discovered Jet Stream across the Pacific.

Some links:

seanet.com/~johnco/fugo.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20040213011516/https://www.seanet.com/~johnco/fugo.htm


wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/wwii/jbb.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20040226011604/https://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/wwii/jbb.htm


axishistory.com/index.php?id=932

And a few pages on places that were hit:

http://www.militarymuseum.org/Hayfork.html

http://www.militarymuseum.org/Alturas.html

and some personal memories of them coming in:

hometown.aol.com/Gibson0817/bombs.htm

Old new report:

stelzriede.com/ms/html/mshwfug2.htm
Link is obsolete. The current link is:


http://www.stelzriede.com/ms/html/mshwfugo.htm

Emps
 
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Nazi weather weapons

These weren't gone into in such deatil - the wind cannon ws mentioned and they reconstructed a sun cannon (basically a parablic mirror to focus the sun's rays - in a similar manner to that claimed for Aristotle?).

Thsi page:

geocities.com/pentagon/2833/wunderwaffen/supergun/supergun.html
https://web.archive.org/web/2005052...agon/2833/wunderwaffen/supergun/supergun.html


has interesting details of these weapons as well as a vortex gun and a sound gun.

I'm still tracking down stuff on these but I see someone has built a vortex gun:

eiu.org/experiments/gsg/vortex.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20110917062147/http://www.eiu.org/experiments/gsg/vortex.htm


Emps
 
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There was a persistent rumour a while back, mentioned in Larry Warren's alleged deluso-fest Left at East Gate, that RAF Woodbridge housed a Reichian (as in Wilhelm, not Third) "Cloudbuster", which Warren maintains was responsible for the hurricane in 1987.
 
"I'm still tracking down stuff on these but I see someone has built a vortex gun."

Quite a few actually - they're a hot area for nonlethals. There are several US and European programs, but many details are lacking...I believe SARA advertise one.
 
U.S. Military Wants to Own the Weather
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 31 October 2005
06:24 am ET


The one-two hurricane punch from Katrina and Wilma along with predictions of more severe weather in the future has scientists pondering ways to save lives, protect property and possibly even control the weather.

While efforts to tame storms have so far been clouded by failure, some researchers aren’t willing to give up the fight. And even if changing the weather proves overly challenging, residents and disaster officials can do a better job planning and reacting.

In fact, military officials and weather modification experts could be on the verge of joining forces to better gauge, react to, and possibly nullify future hostile forces churned out by Mother Nature.

While some consider the idea farfetched, some military tacticians have already pondered ways to turn weather into a weapon.

Harbinger of things to come?

The U.S. military reaction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that slammed the U.S. Gulf coast might be viewed as a harbinger of things to come. While in this case it was joint air and space operations to deal with after-the-fact problems, perhaps the foundation for how to fend off disastrous weather may also be forming.

Numbers of spaceborne assets were tapped, among them:

Navigation and timing signals from the Global Positioning System (GPS) of satellites;
The Global Broadcast Service, a one-way, space-based, high-capacity broadcast communication system;
The Army’s Spectral Operations Resource Center to exploit commercial remote sensing satellite imagery and prepare high-resolution images to civilian and military responders to permit a better understanding of the devastated terrain;
U.S. Air Force Space Command’s Space and Missile Systems Center Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites that compared "lights at night" images before and after the disaster to provide data on human activity.
Is it far-fetched to see in this response the embryonic stages of an integrated military/civilian weather reaction and control system?

Mandate to continually improve

The use of space-based equipment to assist in clean-up operations -- with a look toward future prospects -- was recently noted by General Lance Lord, Commander, Air Force Space Command at an October 20th Pacific Space Leadership Forum in Hawaii.

"We saw first hand the common need for space after the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean," Lord said. "Natural disasters don’t respect international boundaries. Space capabilities were leveraged immediately after the tsunami to help in the search and rescue effort…but what about before the disaster?"

Lord said that an even better situation is to have predicted the coming disaster and warned those in harm’s way. "No matter what your flag or where you waive it from...the possibility of saving hundreds of thousands of people is a mandate to continually improve," he advised.

The U.S. Air Force is also looking at ways to make satellites and satellite launches cheaper and also reduce the amount of time it takes to launch into space from months to weeks to days and hours, Lord said. Having that capability will increase responsiveness to international needs, he said, such as the ability to send up a satellite to help collect information and enhance communications when dealing with international disasters.

Thunderbolts on demand

What would a military strategist gain in having an "on-switch" to the weather?

Clearly, it offers the ability to degrade the effectiveness of enemy forces. That could come from flooding an opponent’s encampment or airfield to generating downright downpours that disrupt enemy troop comfort levels. On the flipside, sparking a drought that cuts off fresh water can stir up morale problems for warfighting foes.

Even fooling around with fog and clouds can deny or create concealment – whichever weather manipulation does the needed job.

In this regard, nanotechnology could be utilized to create clouds of tiny smart particles. Atmospherically buoyant, these ultra-small computer particles could navigate themselves to block optical sensors. Alternatively, they might be used to provide an atmospheric electrical potential difference -- a way to precisely aim and time lightning strikes over the enemy’s head – thereby concoct thunderbolts on demand.

Perhaps that’s too far out for some. But some blue sky thinkers have already looked into these and other scenarios in "Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025" – a research paper written by a seven person team of military officers and presented in 1996 as part of a larger study dubbed Air Force 2025.

Global stresses

That report came with requisite disclaimers, such as the views expressed were those of the authors and didn’t reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the United States government. Furthermore, the report was flagged as containing fictional representations of future situations and scenarios.

On the other hand, Air Force 2025 was a study that complied with a directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force "to examine the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future."

"Current technologies that will mature over the next 30 years will offer anyone who has the necessary resources the ability to modify weather patterns and their corresponding effects, at least on the local scale," the authors of the report explained. "Current demographic, economic, and environmental trends will create global stresses that provide the impetus necessary for many countries or groups to turn this weather-modification ability into a capability."

Pulling it all together

The report on weather-altering ideas underscored the capacity to harness such power in the not too distant future.

"Assuming that in 2025 our national security strategy includes weather-modification, its use in our national military strategy will naturally follow. Besides the significant benefits an operational capability would provide, another motivation to pursue weather-modification is to deter and counter potential adversaries," the report stated. "The technology is there, waiting for us to pull it all together," the authors noted.

In 2025, the report summarized, U.S. 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 report concluded.

But if whipping up weather can be part of a warfighter’s tool kit, couldn’t those talents be utilized to retarget or neutralize life, limb and property-destroying storms?

All-weather worries

"It is time to provide funds for application of the scientific method to weather modification and control," said Bernard Eastlund, chief technical officer and founder of Eastlund Scientific Enterprises Corporation in San Diego, California.

Eastlund’s background is in plasma physics and commercial applications of microwave plasmas. At a lecture early this month at Penn State Lehigh Campus in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, he outlined new concepts for electromagnetic wave interactions with the atmosphere that, among a range of jobs, could be applied to weather modification research.

"The technology of artificial ionospheric heating could be as important for weather modification research as accelerators have been for particle physics," Eastlund explained.

In September, Eastland filed a patent on a way to create artificial ionized plasma patterns with megawatts of power using inexpensive microwave power sources. This all-weather technique, he noted, can be used to heat specific regions of the atmosphere.

Eastlund’s research is tuned to artificial generation of acoustic and gravitational waves in the atmosphere. The heating of steering winds to help shove around mesocyclones and hurricanes, as well as controlling electrical conductivity of the atmosphere is also on his investigative agenda.

Carefully tailored program plan

Eastlund said that the reduction in severity or impact of severe weather could be demonstrated as part of a carefully tailored program plan.

"In my opinion, the new technology for use of artificial plasma layers in the atmosphere: as heater elements to modify steering winds, as a modifier of electrostatic potential to influence lightning distribution, and for generation of acoustic and gravitational waves, could ultimately provide a core technology for a science of severe weather modification," Eastlund told SPACE.com.

The first experiments of a program, Eastlund emphasized, would be very small, and designed for safety. For example, a sample of air in a jet stream could be heated with a pilot experimental installation. Such experiments would utilize relatively small amounts of power, between one and ten megawatts, he pointed out.

Both ground-based and space weather diagnostic instruments could measure the effect. Computer simulations could compare these results with predicted effects. This process can be iterated until reliable information is obtained on the effects of modifying the wind.

Computer simulations of hurricanes, Eastlund continued, are designed to determine the most important wind fields in hurricane formation. Computer simulations of mesocyclones use steering wind input data to predict severe storm development.

After about 5 years of such research, and further development of weather codes, a pilot experiment to modify the steering winds of a mesocylone might be safely attempted. Such an experiment would probably require 50 to 100 megawatts, Eastlund speculated.

"I estimate this new science of weather modification will take 10 to 20 years to mature to the point where it is useful for controlling the severity and impact of severe weather systems as large as hurricanes," Eastlund explained.

Inadvertent effects?

Another reason for embarking on this new science could be to make sure inadvertent effects of existing projects, such as the heating of the ionosphere and modifications of the polar electrojet, are not having effects on weather, Eastlund stated.

As example, Eastlund pointed to the High frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). This is a major Arctic facility for upper atmospheric and solar-terrestrial research, being built on a Department of Defense-owned site near Gakona, Alaska.

Eastlund wonders if HAARP does, in fact, generate gravity waves. If so, can those waves in turn influence severe weather systems?

Started in 1990, the unclassified HAARP program is jointly managed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research. Researchers at the site make use of a high-power ionospheric research instrument to temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere for scientific study, observing and measuring the excited region using a suite of devices.

The fundamental goal of research conducted at the facility is to study and understand natural phenomena occurring in the Earth’s ionosphere and near-space environment. According to the HAARP website, those scientific investigations will have major value in the design of future communication and navigation systems for both military and civilian use.

Messing with Mother Nature

Who best to have their hands on the weather control switches?

The last large hurricane modification experiments -- under Project Stormfury -- were carried out by the U.S. Air Force, Eastlund said. "It is likely the Department of Defense would be the lead agency in any new efforts in severe storm modification."

Additionally, federal laboratories with their extensive computational modeling skills would also play a lead role in the development of a science of weather modification. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would find their respective niches too. The satellite diagnostic capabilities in those agencies would play a strong role, Eastlund suggested.

It appears that only modest amounts of government dollars have been spent on weather modification over the last five years.

"Hurricane Katrina could cost $300 billion by itself," Eastlund said. "In my opinion, it is time for a serious scientific effort in weather modification."

"Global warming appears to be a reality, and records could continue to fall in the hurricane severity sweepstakes," Eastlund said. "When I first suggested the use of space-based assets for the prevention of tornadoes, many people expressed their displeasure with ‘messing with Mother Nature’. I still remember hiding in the closet of our house in Houston as a tornado passed overhead. It is time for serious, controlled research, with the emphasis on safety, for the good of mankind," he concluded.

http://space.com/scienceastronomy/05103 ... onday.html
 
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Europe 'stealing Iran's rain'
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused Western countries of plotting to "cause drought" in Iran by using high tech equipment to drain the clouds of raindrops.
By Barney Henderson 12:16AM BST 21 May 2011

Moments after the Iranian president made the startling claim at the inauguration of a dam in a central province, it started to rain. :D

"Western countries have designed plans to cause drought in certain areas of the world, including Iran," Mr Ahmadinejad said in the city of Arak in Markazi province.
"According to reports on climate, whose accuracy has been verified, European countries are using special equipment to force clouds to dump" their water on their continent, he said.
By doing so, "they prevent rain clouds from reaching regional countries, including Iran," Mr Ahmadinejad charged.
Iran has experienced several droughts in recent years.

Mr Ahmadinejad also recalled an article by "a Western politician," whom he did not identify, in which "droughts in some regions spanning from Turkey and Iran to east of Asia are predicted for the next 30 years."
"The regions (referred to in) the article ... include countries whose culture and civilisation frighten the West," Mr Ahmadinejad said in support of his argument.

Iranian leaders claim on a daily basis that Western countries, led by arch-foe United States, devise "plots" to undermine the Islamic republic and to impede its economic and scientific development.
They also accuse world powers of colluding against Iran's national unity, independence, political establishment, culture as well as international relations.

...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -rain.html
 
Ahmadinejad is in a little reality bubble all of his own. :roll:

Reading that made me laugh like a drain for 5 whole minutes. :lol:
 
Stealing the rain?
I thought we were too busy planting the word 'ZION' on all the 2012 Olympic merchandise and trying to get a look at their Flying saucer they've built.
 
"Europe is stealing our rain!

er...

could you pass me my brolly?" :oops:
 
rynner2 said:
"Europe is stealing our rain!

er...

could you pass me my brolly?" :oops:

Yeah - good point!
Where is our Iranian rain? We've worked damned hard to steal it, where the hell is it?
 
It's all in Leeds. Comes down like a charm every time i try to get a coat of paint on the doorstep.
 
Half of his aides seem to be sorcers. Why can't they magic him up some rain.

I reckon hes got a wet brain.
 
The recent flooding of the Yangtze River was bad enough, especially as it not only damaged the 3 Gorges Dam, but threatens the vast number of sub-par dams built in the 1950s, 60s and 70s across China. Worse still is the fact that now the Yellow River is flooding too, due to a typhoon. Oh, and there have been earthquakes in Xinjiang and Tibet. This is leading to concerns in the CCP that China is facing a major food crisis. The CCP are "managing" this situation with their characteristic bureaucratic incompetence and brutality. Of course the situation is also worsened due to covid and the fact that China has imposed tariffs on many countries that used to sell them food, like the USA and Australia.

Link: China food crisis?

In this moment of increasing weakness at home and abroad, Winnie the Pooh has taken the step of seeking to seem increasingly internationally aggressive. This is a classic Sun Tzu tactic: “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” China is very weak indeed atm, which is why they are pushing on every border and acting bellicose. It is all an act.

While I don't normally wax conspiratorial, so to speak, it has occurred to me that there might be a hand in China's weather woes beyond the deep disappointment of Heaven at China's present tyranny. Has the USA developed a microwave weather weapon they are now using on China based on accidental discoveries from the HAARP project (now closed down)? Consider that the US military is usually 10-25 years ahead of civilian technology. If DARPA had managed to crack the mathematical issues of turbulent systems, they could potentially produce what I call a Butterfly Effect gun. A targeted localized burst of microwaves could be used to manipulate the weather pattern, based upon an accurate model of the weather system, and thus relatively small amounts of energy could be used to generate major weather effects. This would be a wonderful weapon, as it would allow a nation to attack a country with devastating force, but it would all be blamed on natural forces. If I really want to put on the tinfoil hat and start screeching about gay frogs and bouncing off the walls in a straightjacket, is it possible that Climate Change has been partly used to mask the testing and development of this weapon system? I am not serious about this idea of course, but perhaps it is worth a moment's consideration. For the sake of debate, please shoot this idea down, and I will attempt to defend it for sh!ts and giggles.
 
1640302391127.png
 
Wasn't HAARP closed down? Also... would the Chinese have access to HAARP?
 
Wasn't HAARP closed down? Also... would the Chinese have access to HAARP?

DARPA's HAARP program began in 1990. Construction of the research station in Alaska began in 1993.

The massive high-frequency radio transmitter array (which is the thing most commentators consider HAARP to solely be) was finished as of 2007. This was the third and final edition of the radio frequency transmission instrument.

DARPA completed the research projects associated with the facility in 2014 and announced the program and facility would be shut down. After negotiations the research facilities were transferred to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 2015.

UAF continued to maintain the facility and make it available for research use on a pay-for-play basis. See:

Under new management, Alaska's HAARP facility open for business again
https://www.adn.com/science/article/haarp-open-business-again/2015/09/06/

Assuming UAF is still offering the site's services for a price, anyone (yes, including the Chinese) could contract to use the facilities.
 
Assuming UAF is still offering the site's services for a price, anyone (yes, including the Chinese) could contract to use the facilities.
If HAARP could theoretically be used to create that many tornadoes, wouldn't UAF review all use proposals to make sure that didn't happen?




Unless they're in on it!
 
Do we have a mini HAARP? this is a site Aberystwyth.
Weather modification as been going on for years, Google it,
There was a rumour that a flood in I think Wales 1948 ish
was caused by experimentation into it several people were
killed, I think they have messed about with it so much
no one as a clue as to what the weather is really like.



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