In recent years, meteorological weapons have attracted more and more attention, especially rumors about the manufacture and use of meteorological weapons by the United States to deal a blow to other countries around the world.
There are even rumors that the United States has mastered the "wind technique" and the ability to cause large areas of high temperatures, with the current technology, can meteorological weapons really reach this level?
The power of American meteorological weapons
The earliest applications of meteorological weapons appeared during World War II. At that time, the Nazi German military, in order to protect important industrial bases and military facilities, adopted the advice of meteorological experts and spread large fog in the Italian area on the banks of the Vult River, creating a thick fog that prevented British and French fighters from approaching the area.
Still here, in 1943, the US military also used the method of artificial fog to create a fog layer 5 kilometers long and 1.6 kilometers high. The thick fog created good cover for the actions of the American troops, allowing the American troops to successfully cross the river and fight.
After the end of World War II, Americans became more obsessed with the research of meteorological weapons, and applied them during the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. For example, in March 1967, several American aircraft flew over the Ho Chi Minh Trail every once in a while.
About half an hour after the planes left, the area would be covered by heavy winds, torrential rain, and muddy roads, causing great difficulties for the mobilization and transportation of materials for the Vietnamese People's Army.
Then in 1970, the United States and the Soviet Union fought a meteorological war in Cuba. At that time, the Americans throttled the flow of water vapor by firing silver iodide artificial rain bombs upstream of Cuba, thus causing a drought disaster in the Cuban region without water. The Soviet Union tried to alleviate the drought by using artificial rainfall in Cuba.
In view of the large number of applications of meteorological weapons by the Americans, Russian meteorological expert and retired colonel Nikolai Karavaev once said that Russia's rare drought and heat wave in 2010 was related to US military meteorological weapons.
At that time, a huge cyclone had been entrenched over Russia for a long time, and a similar cyclone had not been seen for a long time. And they observed a large-scale collapse of one of the Earth's upper atmosphere "thermospheres", which led to a decrease in the atmosphere's ability to block ultraviolet rays, causing hot temperatures in many parts of the world.
At that time, the temperature in Moscow reached 35~36 °C, while Berlin at the same latitude was only 18 °C, Warsaw was 25 °C, and Paris was 20 °C, so the Russians deduced that this was an obvious local attack and a purposeful target.
To what extent have meteorological weapons developed?
With the emergence of Russian conspiracy theories, rumors of the United States using meteorological weapons to cause global catastrophe have also appeared in various countries, and even more, the United States has mastered the "art of wind protection" and twice led hurricanes to Honduras, Venezuela and other countries.
However, in fact, judging from the power of meteorological weapons in the past, its impact range is small, and the price paid is very large. For example, fogging operations during World War II had a range of only 5 kilometers.
The US military's meteorological operation against Vietnam was, to put it bluntly, a continuous artificial rainfall, which lasted for seven years, with a total of 26,000 aircraft sorties and 4.74 million rain gas bombs, which only allowed a small part of Vietnam to continue to maintain rainfall.
It can be seen that some conspiracy theories have over-deified meteorological weapons, at least for now, human meteorological weapons have not reached such a terrifying point.
It is not surprising that some tactical meteorological weapons can artificially modify the weather on small scales. The area of influence is probably tens of kilometers below the horizontal scale, and the time scale is a few hours below, causing short-term thunderstorms and heavy rainfall and other disastrous weather.
What Russian military experts call strategic meteorological weapons can create a huge cyclone over Russia, making the temperature of the whole of Russia rise by 10-20 degrees Celsius compared to the same latitude, which is very difficult.
Theoretically, meteorological weapons may be able to cause disasters like heavy rainfall in Henan, but they cannot yet form a situation like heavy rainfall in many places in the Yangtze River basin, cold wave in the south and large areas of high temperature. But in fact, it is impossible for US military aircraft to cause heavy rain disasters without being detected.
In addition, the so-called "wind protection" is also nonsense, and we still do not have a more accurate understanding of the movement mechanism of tropical cyclone systems, which makes forecasting typhoon routes and intensity still difficult.
For example, the previous super typhoon "Kanu", originally aimed at China, but suddenly turned to Japan, no one expected, many people also said that China's mastery of the "wind control technique" secret can not be hidden.
At a global climate conference in the seventies and eighties of the last century, top meteorological experts around the world, based on theoretical research at the time, agreed that there would be no El Niño event that year, and as a result, the worst El Niño event on record broke out a few months later.
This embarrassing black spot in weather forecasting is enough to prove that human understanding of meteorological climate is still very limited, let alone want to manipulate meteorology.