Were the weather modification techniques also used for productive agricultural purposes?
Domestic cloud seeding got a boost in the 1940s. Lots of private companies promised to deliver rain to farmers experiencing drought, or increased snow pack for dry Western states in the mountains. There were any number of private companies out there with little planes and little silver iodide flares, trying to make it rain. But the US military wanted to suppress as much domestic cloud seeding as possible because they wanted to have the techniques for themselves. Plus, they wanted to have a pure background of unmodified weather to do their military experiments on, so they were very militant in trying to slow down the domestic cloud seeding. There must have been a lot of animosity between the farmers, the cloud seeders, and the military. In my early days, I was on a project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Leadville, Colorado. We were looking at how storms work by flying around in a glider. We weren’t cloud seeding at all. One night we were called to the hangar because
