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In 1962, during the Vietnam War, American forces responded with Operation Ranch Hand.

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Over the next nine years, spraying an area about the size of Massachusetts with defolients,

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the most notorious being Agent Orange.

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Large swaths of Vietnam were left barren.

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Enough food to feed 600,000 people for a year has been destroyed.

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Despite this sudden devastation, U.S. officials said the spraying created no lasting harm.

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Milton Ross, a special forces advisor near Pleiku, has a son born without the tips of his fingers.

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North Vietnam charged today that defolients have produced many instances of miscarriages,

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congenital defects, and monstrosities among children.

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The Vietnamese government insisted the cause was Agent Orange.

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Although that war was long ago, there is lingering anger about the United States' use of a controversial defoliant

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spread by American aircraft on the jungles there.

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An epidemic of birth defects, brain damage, and rare cancers is still affecting hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese today.

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According to environmental studies, high levels of dioxin could still be found in the soil in certain areas,

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and had seeped into nearby lakes.

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Agent Orange was a safe product when it was used, and the Vietnam War, and it's a safe product today.

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I've got something to say.

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I want to know how come the fascist pigs have been seeding the clouds.

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Right.

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Because I've seen the airplanes going over twice with all the smoke coming out of them seeding the clouds.

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And I want to know, you know, why that stuff is going down, man.

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And why doesn't the media report that stuff to the people, man.

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I'm telling you what happened if planes come over an hour and a half and they've seen all the clouds.

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And it's the second time they've seen the clouds.

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People of unknown origin were seeding the clouds over the air.

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You know, I don't know what they hope to prove, man.

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You ain't waiting for.

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Project Storm Fury assembles a team of highly trained scientists and technicians to fly into mature hurricanes.

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Scientists working on the project were convinced that they could reduce hurricane devastation using a process called cloud seeding

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by spraying the thunderclouds inside the hurricane with a chemical called silver iodide.

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This would become known as the Storm Fury Hypothesis.

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The seeding flames fly across the eye and into these clouds, seeding the supercooled water droplets from the belt of maximum winds outwards.

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As the silver iodide turns the supercooled water into ice, the heat release during this process causes the seeded clouds to grow and develop into a new outer eye wall.

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At that time, the United States Army were in Vietnam, Pierre Saint-Amand was part of the team assembled in a top secret cloud seeding operation known simply as Project Popeye.

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In May 1967, as monsoon clouds developed over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Armand and his team put their new weapon to the test.

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We ejected the material so that it fell into the growing part of the cloud, and it rained very heavily out of it, and everybody was convinced with that one experiment that we had done enough.

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Project Popeye had opened the door to a new and dangerous type of warfare.

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Some said, if you control the weather, you can control the world.

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Military planners imagined loading the clouds with radiological, biological, or chemical agents and having them rain on demand.

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They could attack your enemy using the weather, but deny ever doing so.

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Allegations were made that cloud seeding had not only made jungle paths impossible, it had also killed thousands of innocent people.

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But this didn't stop governments from continuing to explore ways of modifying the weather, sometimes for highly questionable purposes.

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And that message calls for new frontiers, new visions.

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It calls for us taking the steps now that will make us no longer second in space and in science.

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It lays the predicate and the foundation for the development of a weather satellite.

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That will permit man to determine the world's cloud layer, and ultimately to control the weather, and he who controls the weather will control the world.

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It lays the steps that's necessary to provide a nuclear rocket.

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That will produce benefits that are so unlimited that I couldn't tell you about them if I had all that.