Placed within scholarly literature on the state and on the control of nature, and based on congressional hearings and extensive correspondence and records obtained from almost two dozen manuscript collections, Make it Rain weaves together the story of how federal officials—politicians, bureaucrats, military leaders, and diplomats—doggedly pursued the ultimate control of nature: weather on demand. At the same time, meteorologists were struggling to figure out how the atmosphere functions, how to model it, and how to make viable weather and climate forecasts. But no matter how proponents of weat ... More

Placed within scholarly literature on the state and on the control of nature, and based on congressional hearings and extensive correspondence and records obtained from almost two dozen manuscript collections, Make it Rain weaves together the story of how federal officials—politicians, bureaucrats, military leaders, and diplomats—doggedly pursued the ultimate control of nature: weather on demand. At the same time, meteorologists were struggling to figure out how the atmosphere functions, how to model it, and how to make viable weather and climate forecasts. But no matter how proponents of weather control spun it, weather control was really about controlling only one weather element: water. Make it Rain views weather control as a political agent. Politicians, with the aid of entrepreneurial scientists, attempted to use weather control for their own political ends, be that domestic (bringing home water for their states) or foreign (as a weapon or diplomatic tool). But those scientists were not playing on the same level as the state officials calling the shots: they were subordinates, taking the funding and producing the science, not determining how it would be used. The scientists receiving state funding to conduct research related to weather control, particularly during the Cold War, may have naively considered their research as basic as opposed to applied, but the eventual uses of their atmospheric discoveries were going to be neither under their control, nor their influence. Starting in the late nineteenth century, weather control was in the hands of the American state.