JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: They promised we could control hurricanes, but instead we got Twitter.

If you were a naval strategist in the 1960s who found yourself musing about the tactical implications of weather control — such as the ability to whip up a hurricane and hurl it at an enemy fleet — scientists offered encouraging news. The 1968 book Toward the Year 2018 was a compilation of expert forecasts, published by the Foreign Policy Association. It included an entire chapter on weather, written by Thomas F. Malone, director of research at Travelers Insurance and chair of the Committee on Atmospheric Sciences of the National Academy of Science. Malone believed “the next fifty years will be crucial for controlling, to a significant extent, this particularly sensitive part of our physical environment.”

Regional weather modification and control — increase rainfall, reduce hail, suppress lighting — seemed quite possible, with even wide-scale weather control, including hurricanes, given a 50-50 chance over the next half century. (That RAND survey found a median prediction of 1990 as to when we would be capable of enough weather control to destroy an enemy’s crops or flood its territory.) Malone seemed more concerned about international agreements to coordinate weather inventions than the potential success of those interventions. Little wonder, given such high confidence, that the immediate postwar decades were a boom time for experimentation. One of the most well known US government projects was Project Stormfury, an attempt to weaken hurricanes by having aircraft seed them with silver iodide.

Hey, the Rothschilds don’t share their weather control and space laser secrets with just anybody, you know.