Could the Bizarre Chinese Balloon Missions Be Even More Sinister Than Aerial Spying?

Issues About Surveillance Are Legitimate, However What About Weaponized Climate Modification?

The memes are humorous. The headlines are fascinating. However the true concern about last week’s Chinese balloon incident is greater than scorching air. Chinese language balloon operations over the U.S. could pose a real strategic danger. And this danger extends past the potential for gathering intelligence about U.S. missile bases. What if the 2 Chinese language balloons tracked across the western hemisphere final week might have been weaponized? Historical past and literature counsel the priority over weaponized balloons has benefit.

Historic precedents of weaponized balloons carrying every thing from incendiary weapons to disease-infested fleas exist. And maybe extra ominously, latest exercise in China means that important developments in climate modification – that could possibly be delivered by balloons – have been not too long ago deployed. Whereas a few of this evaluation has the texture of crackpot conspiracy idea, the details present that prime altitude balloons pose a real strategic risk as a believable weapons supply system.

In December, 2020, Bloomberg.com reporter Adam Minter wrote, “China introduced plans to develop its rainmaking capabilities to cowl almost 60% of the nation by 2025. Particulars are sketchy, however fears are rising in regards to the potential army makes use of of those capabilities, and their results on an already altering local weather.” Minter’s report was fascinating, despite the fact that he didn’t join the dots to incorporate point out of climate modification being delivered by lengthy vary, excessive altitude balloons.

Three years in the past, when Minter reported on Chinese language efforts to seed clouds to reasonable a regional drought, concern over Chinese language balloon overflights had not but gone viral. However his report acknowledged the potential for weaponizing the flexibility to manage climate, probably creating floods and mudslides. This can be a functionality simply delivered by excessive altitude balloons. Greater than half a century earlier than this, in a July 3, 1972 expose’, The New York Instances particular reporter Seymour M. Hersh wrote in regards to the previously top-secret U.S. weaponized rain making efforts in Laos, Cambodia, North and South Vietnam. Hersh reported that, “The US has been secretly seeding clouds over North Vietnam, Laos and South Vietnam to extend and management the rainfall for army functions. Authorities sources, each civilian and army, stated throughout an intensive collection of interviews that the Air Drive cloud seeding program has been aimed most not too long ago at hindering motion of North Vietnamese troops and tools and suppressing enemy antiaircraft missile hearth.”

Whereas there isn’t a empirical proof of any sinister intent within the widely-hyped Chinese language balloon incident, the potential for weaponized balloon overflight has historic precedent. Recall the WWII Japanese balloon bombing marketing campaign on the mainland United States. In a darkish nook of the Nationwide Museum of the US Air Drive at Wright-Patterson Air Drive Base in Dayton, Ohio, a small exhibit tucked behind a P-39 Airacobra remembers the weird Fu-Go balloon bombing marketing campaign waged towards the US by Japan. Artifacts embrace fragments from a Japanese balloon and one of many weapon supply rings that was suspended beneath the balloon because it crossed the Pacific on its method to the Northwestern United States. The Japanese balloons dropped incendiary weapons in forests to begin forest fires. And so they killed folks.

The Japanese Fu-Go balloon assaults on the U.S. mainland have remained largely obscure, a weird footnote to historical past. However the scope of the Japanese balloon marketing campaign turned out to be extra important, and probably lethal, than was reported throughout WWII. In truth, the precise risk of the Japanese Fu-Go balloons was closely suppressed in an effort to avert mass panic.

Writer and researcher Ross Coen wrote in his November 2014 e book, “Fu-Go: The Curious Historical past of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Assault on America”, that, “The Ninth Navy Technical Institute, extra generally referred to as the Noborito Institute, occupied an expansive compound on a bluff above the Tama River in southwest Tokyo. Based in 1927 by Captain Ryo Shinoda as a part of the Military Science Analysis Institute, Noborito started as a small analysis division devoted to covert warfare. Shinoda, a chemist who had studied on the prestigious Tokyo Imperial College, at first mined spy novels and films for concepts about intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Ultimately the laboratory moved on to extra deadly purposes, together with poisons and organic brokers that could possibly be used to destroy crops and livestock.” Coen additionally wrote about one of many few Japanese balloon assaults on the U.S. to attain notoriety. On Could 5, 1945, six folks, largely youngsters, died in an explosion outdoors Lakeside, Oregon after they tried to look at a Japanese Fu-Go balloon-borne incendiary bomb that had drifted throughout the Pacific on the Jetstream winds and landed in a forest.

And what in regards to the plausibility of utilizing climate manipulation, probably delivered by excessive altitude balloons, as a strategic weapon?

In 1972, Hersh wrote that, “The climate manipulation in Indochina, which was first tried in South Vietnam in 1963, is the primary confirmed use of meteorological warfare.” However there isn’t a document of it being the final. In truth, concern over weaponized climate manipulation was important sufficient to warrant the United Nations drafting the October 5, 1978, “Prohibition of Navy or Any Different Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Strategies (ENMOD)”. This prohibition successfully asserts that nations is not going to use climate modification as a weapon. However not each nation signed the prohibition, a fair a few of those who did stay energetic in climate modification analysis. Not in contrast to nuclear science, the flexibility to distinguish between benevolent scientific endeavor and weapons analysis in climate modification is nearly not possible. One appears to be like almost equivalent to the opposite, and each have a historical past of using excessive altitude balloons.

In Minter’s 2020 report for Bloomberg.com, he wrote that, “Though China ratified the (ENMOD) treaty in 2005, its curiosity in controlling the climate and the surroundings didn’t wane. Meteorological calamities equivalent to hail and flooding account for greater than 70% of the nation’s annual disaster-related injury. Due to that ongoing toll, the federal government has staked its legitimacy partly on how nicely it responds to such incidents. In latest many years, because the nation has grown wealthier, Earth-altering initiatives such because the Three Gorges Dam have turn into a well-liked resolution.”

Of maybe even higher relevance to considerations about excessive altitude balloons being utilized in weaponized climate modification, Minter writes, “Climate modification, by comparability, is comparatively cheap. Within the Eighties, the federal government started making substantial investments in cloud physics and associated fields. Advances in every thing from satellites to rocketry boosted the trouble, despite the fact that definitive scientific proof for the effectiveness of cloud seeding emerged solely in 2018 (and in Idaho, not China). Nonetheless, the federal government claimed a terrific success in 2008, when Beijing launched 1,110 allegedly rain-suppressing rockets to make sure that the Olympic opening ceremonies have been dry (they have been, though scientists have questioned whether or not the rockets had a lot to do with it). By 2015, there have been rainmaking and hail-suppression applications in 30 Chinese language provinces, using some 35,000 folks.”

In the way in which that fiction so ceaselessly predates reality, well-liked creator Brad Thor’s 2015 novel, “Act of Conflict”, contains a collection of Chinese language balloons launched over the US to execute an electromagnetic pulse syndrome (EMP) assault that disables communications and electronics on a nationwide scale. Given final week’s headline, Thor’s plot appears prescient at this time. Whereas we watch for the official report on findings from the Chinese language balloon wreckage, this survey of historical past and literature about weaponized balloons, China’s climate management actions and different ominous potentialities paints a daunting image. And whether or not these storylines come from the pages of well-written fictional thrillers, historical past books or college analysis findings, it’s value understanding them as we navigate the more and more turbulent interactions with Beijing.

Tom Demerly is a characteristic author, journalist, photographer and editorialist who has written articles which can be revealed all over the world on TheAviationist.com, TACAIRNET.com, Outdoors journal, Enterprise Insider, We Are The Mighty, The Dearborn Press & Information, Nationwide Curiosity, Russia’s authorities media outlet Sputnik, and plenty of different publications. Demerly studied journalism at Henry Ford School in Dearborn, Michigan. Tom Demerly served in an intelligence gathering unit as a member of the U.S. Military and Michigan Nationwide Guard. His army expertise contains being Honor Graduate from the U.S. Military Infantry College at Ft. Benning, Georgia (Cycle C-6-1) and as a Scout Observer in a reconnaissance unit, Firm “F”, 425th INF (RANGER/AIRBORNE), Lengthy Vary Surveillance Unit (LRSU). Demerly is an skilled parachutist, holds superior SCUBA certifications, has climbed the very best mountains on three continents and visited all seven continents and has flown a number of varieties of mild plane.