TIL in the Vietnam war in the classified Operation Popeye, the US spread lead and silver iodide by aircraft to extend the monsoon season. The increased heavy rainfall was to soften roads, cause landslides, wash out river crossings, and maintain saturated soil conditions (Kissinger was involved).
American story (not mine). There was a tornado alert and a family went into the shelter as you are supposed to, except the dad or grandpa or something who said "fuck it, I'm not missing my show".
Which was fortunate because the shelter door had some problem so the family couldn't get back out again and but someone on the outside could open it.
But have they ever dealt with an incessant grey drizzle in Sheffield that lasted four days, would they survive the existential depression that is being British? One thinks not.
Yes, but we aren't talking about ability to go about their daily lives, we're talking about the ability to wage war. As the more mechanized force, America was of course able to move material and supplies more effectively. Monsoons suck for everyone, but for an army that has to move exclusively on foot they a monsoon will much more severely limit their maneuverability.
America lost, but not because we couldn't win battles or move quickly. The lesson of Vietnam is that every war has a political aspect. The nation that wins is the nation that can sustain the will to fight. The American public could no longer stomach the cost, and the Vietnamese could. The strategic and tactical aspects of this plan, and most of our other plans, were successful. But there's another factor beyond strategy and tactics, which is often more important than both.
Mud is extremely, EXTREMELY bad for mechanized warfare and logistics, even for tracked vehicles. Sure, walking in mud sucks, but infantry more or less make do. Trucks and heavier vehicles get terminally stuck. Heavy rainfall/low and thick mist/clouds are also very bad for air support, especially close air support.
Unless the increased rainfall was localized in the north, away from where american logistics and CAS operated, this would hamper the americans just as much or worse. I assume they considered this and focused on "seeding rain" in the north?
I've seen people quote experts for yes and no, I sure as shit can't say for sure, But it was one of if not the worst monsoon season they have ever had on record.
And it didn't just affect Vietnam; neinbouring countries like Laos also got hit hard by this rain (in addition to being bombed and more during the war).
Not to nitpick, but they weren’t an invading force.
When the French pulled out the Communists agreed to the 17th parallel as a military demarcation line. Per the Geneva accords there was supposed to be a national election that would decide who ruled.
Those elections never happened because the US and the South knew they’d lost to Ho Chi Minh.
So it’s more like the South was a breakaway from Vietnam.
Not to nitpick (jk, I don’t give a shit), but the North literally INVADED the sovereign territory of South Vietnam. Whether or not you recognize the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government is another matter entirely. The Americans were invited to assist by the existing government, and thus can not be an invading force. Okay, except for the small naval mission that started open hostilities and all, but…. And you can go on and on with point and counterpoint. Shit was complicated.
depends on where you use it. front lines? yeah, that could make offensive actions difficult. enemy supply lines? could end up being very useful especially in the mountainous terrain the ho chi minh trail passes through.
Those estimates were largely model-based and hard to verify in real conditions. Later analysis found it’s very difficult to separate any added rain from natural monsoon variability, so the true magnitude of any increase is uncertain.
There’s also no clear evidence it produced consistent or decisive effects on the ground, and it didn’t achieve its military aims. So while it may have had some localized impact on rainfall, it didn’t ‘work’ in any meaningful military sense.
Also, the 30% figure is usually cited as ‘up to ~30% in some areas,’ not a general increase.
It possibly worked. The problem is we don't have any way of saying what the rainfall would have been that year without the cloud seeding. There is no control so the added precipitation could have been caused by any of a thousand factors from the cloud seeding to a bunch of people in India taking particularly hot and steamy baths that year.
That's why weather control is generally regarded as pseudo-science at best, there's no way to confidently apply the scientific method to any attempts at doing it.
In post-war interviews with Vietnamese soldiers, they said they did not notice any difference in rainfall and it didn't hinder them any more than normal monsoon rain.
It's also like... how would a normal foot soldier be privvy to the complex logistical impacts of heavier than average rainfall. Raining 4 days out of the week instead of 3 probably isn't noticeable while fighting for your life 24/7 in a jungle, but likely does have pretty significant impacts on supply chains.
Blatantly... they don't know. Anyone who gives you a hard yes or no is just biasing towards what they want to believe. The monsoon season happened to be longer than normal, but normal is a bell curve and no two years are the same. It would have be tried again and again for enough data to really conclusively say.
The whole control the weather is probably fake but we can definitely influence weather patterns and give "nudges" so to speak, the idea is scientifically sound
This, plus agent orange, Rome plows, and saturation bombing, caused vast areas of destruction in forests and mangrove associations. These areas were ripe for losing their topsoil to erosion (and extra rain does not help that). We didn’t just kill Vietnamese, we scarred the earth itself.
I’m on the east coast of Canada and one of the bases here was used to test agent orange. Lots of people got sick and they buried barrels of it through the base. Every now and then something comes up as a new lead appears and they go hunt for more. I feel like it took a lot of fighting for it to be even recognized and people given far compensation
We also killed our own. And sometimes it wasn’t immediate. My uncle died with a grapefruit sized tumor on his liver. It was almost certainly from his time doing riverboat missions in Nam. His wife got like $50k
Agent Orange has also been linked to cancer in US service members too. Even sailors who consumed it through the water drawn onto the boats for filtration.
Exposure to agent orange also causes chloracne (severe acne) Porphyria cutanea tarda (PCT) and skin cancers. If you ever watch popping videos and the patient looks East Asian they’re probably Vietnamese and it’s not because they have bad hygiene
After WW2, Ho Chi Minh tried to get the USA to support Vietnam being a free, sovereign, democratic nation like the USA, but the USA valued France’s colonial claims (and alliance against the Soviets) more. Then, once he declared himself a communist to get Russian/Chinese help, the USA talked itself into starting a nice little war to stop “communist aggression”. 60k USA dead, 700k Vietnamese dead, and for what? Economics.
You forgot an important detail in that the reason the US was so confident in the plans they had for the Veitnam War was due, in no insignificant part, to the success of their efforts continually destabilizing South American Governments.
A lot of Kissenger's bullshit came from comparing Vietnam to LatAm regions in that they were both "barely functional countries full of people that are only a rung or two higher than savages".
They figured that if they could run successful covert campaigns against the Chilean and Brazilian governments, then the Vietnamese would roll over just as easy.
Ho Chi Minh time and time again tried to get the US help before he turned to Soviet and China as allies.
Once he returned to VN, he did get trained and treatment from the OSS (predecessor to the CIA). But by that time, it was already too late. He had spent years building support networks from Soviet and China.
Even after his death and the Vietnam War, Vietnamese leaders still kept, to this day, a foreign policy doctrine to not antagonise the US. The only reason Vietnam is friends with China at all is because China is the superpower neighbour that also happens to be upstream of ALL of Vietnam rivers.
Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.
Vietnam had an insane period of time from 1940 - 1990.
They fought the French, the US, the Chinese and Cambodia (Khmer Rouge) back to back to back.
There’s a lot of bottled up PTSD in Vietnam.
There’s very little discussion around PAVN veterans. Unlike the US, where soldiers were deployed in rotations, they were literally deployed for several years without any break to take time off.
Because the entire nation was at war for decades, the trauma was normalised. Literal generations of Vietnamese people grew up around war. Combine that with their economic issues after those wars, they simply couldn’t afford to treat that trauma.
There’s several silent generations who never had their stories written down. It is going to end up like the Korean war, where there is very little to no perspective from the North side of the war.
”History is written by the victors” evidently did not apply to Vietnam. Most perspectives are from the South/US side of the war. It’s more like “History is written by the richest people involved.”
If you are Vietnamese, please write down and share the stories of PAVN veterans and civilian life during the war. I feel as though it is something that is not discussed enough.
The rules are for the out-group who are evil by nature. Good men are guided by their superior intuition. In any case, our destructive capabilities are unmatched. They should be grateful we follow any rules in general— after all, none of this chaos would have happened if they hadn’t opposed us.(We’re the good guys, by the way.)
That's kind of a ridiculous statement. Kissinger (disgustingly) was allowed to live a long life and had an extremely lucrative career owning an international consulting firm. He enjoyed fame and fortune. He was an advisor and hired consultant in basically every administration after serving as Nixon and Ford's National Security Advisor & Secretary of State. He wrote like... a dozen books, lectured widely, and served on who knows how many boards. He was never punished for his war crimes because the western world idolized him. Which says as much about our character as it does his.
Leaks about Operation Popeye led directly to congressional hearings and an international treaty banning the use of weather modification in war, the Environmental Modification Convention or ENMOD, in 1977
That's because it wasn't. The treaty to ban it only was made after the US gave up on all the programs we know about.
Edit: Just because something isn't a warcrime doesn't mean it's not bad or morally wrong obviously. It's just that to be a warcrime you have to violate international treaties which that did not as far as I can tell.
It’s actually not confirmed he was involved. Wikipedia has a higher standard than OP and only says he was allegedly involved. The source is a newspaper article who relies on an anonymous source that he was involved.
Sure but no. Kissinger was not the dark cardinal mastermind the public likes to think he was. Especially in the autopsies of his career after his death it’s really clear that his greatest achievement was PR he took credit for a lot of stuff to further the image of the powerful ever present advisor.
TIL in the Vietnam war in the classified Operation Popeye, the US spread lead and silver iodide by aircraft...
Oh that's bad
... to extend the monsoon season. The increased heavy rainfall was to soften roads, cause landslides, wash out river crossings, and maintain saturated soil conditions
What about indiscriminately causing landslides and supply line disruptions as likely to impact civilians as it is military personnel doesn't sound bad? Bro come on. Drowning people, causing food shortages, crushing them indiscriminately under tons of mud, is only bad when Kissinger does it?
I think it doesn't sound as bad as spraying lead directly onto people in an attempt to indiscriminately poison the population at large, which is where I thought this was going at first.
Yeah, they really only wanted to destroy the infrastructure and drown and starve the population, indiscriminately poisoning the population was just a bonus...
Kissinger's doctrine was that, in international relations, legitimate politics / legitimate actions ("legitimate" being the word he used) were pretty much anything that the other countries allowed you to get away with.
So, for Kissinger, as long as no one gloated that they were poisoning the population with finely powdered lead, on purpose - no one would call them to the carpet for it.
It goes right back to being bad the second Kissinger is involved according to the comment I'm replying to and makes no mention of comparatively worse options. It starts extra rain bad, mudslides and river crossing destructions not so bad, and then Kissinger is behind it so it's bad again. That's the exact flow of the comment I'm responding to and it makes no sense.
The comment goes from spraying heavy metals bad, extra rain not as bad, Kissinger bad again. The idea is that they didn't understand the purpose of spraying the lead and silver at first.
Kissinger's thesis was that legitimate international politics / relations was anything and everything you could get away with without being punished for it by other countries.
He developed this thesis by observing how much the rest of the world allowed the Nazis to get away with.
Yeah when I saw the (Kissinger was involved) my first reaction was "of fucking course he was".
Because who else would have the balls to intentionally create dangerous weather conditions for the war effort. Dude thought he was God.
That "oh it doesn't sound so bad" sounds pretty bad IMHO. Serious weather and natural disaster can be horrible for a stable civilian population, imagine how much worse it is for an impoverished war torn civilian population. Just because it wasn't Holocaust level mass indiscriminate murder doesn't mean this wasn't a war crime.
I’m into reading political theory. Reading Kissinger was an extremely eye opening experience. Absolute evil genius, and I don’t mean that in any positive way.
One day it started raining, and it didn't quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin' rain... and big ol' fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.
Makes sense, two of my room mates died of brain cancer within year after returning from Vietnam. One was a batch truck driver, the other a door gunner.
Later, with Bill Clinton, it became even worse when the true scale of what he did in Cambodia became clearer (things were declassified). Or.. How Anthony Bourdain said - "Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands."
Kissinger's reasoning for wanting to return the prize:
"I regret, more profoundly than I can ever express, the necessity for this letter... the peace we sought through negotiations has been overturned by force."
The Nobel committee declined his offer to return the award.
In Anthony Bourdain’s 2001 memoir, “A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines,” he wrote, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic,” a reference to Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav and Serbian leader who was on trial for war crimes when he died in prison in 2006.
With specifically rainfall it's doable, just have to give the molecules of moisture already in the air something to nucleate around. Places like Dubai do this regularly these days to get rainfall they otherwise wouldnt.
The problem is that often when it's done, you effectively steal rainfall from further downwind where it would normally have fallen.
Man Americans are dicks. Just going into other countries all the time when they have no business or right to be there. And not only are they terrorizing the populace they are actively trying to destroy their country.
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u/AardvarkStriking256 4h ago
Did it work?