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It’s the start of camping season, or as I like to call it, voluntarily being beat up by nature. Even a simple rain storm can really humble me when I’m camping for the weekend–we humans like to think we control our environments but take the house away and I am suddenly such a delicate creature. I think this is part of what is so unsettling about natural disasters, too; if you’ve ever come face-to-face with a fire, flood, or worse you know the feeling of total helplessness (I’ve fortunately only seen one wildfire in my years of Western-US living and, while it was small, it was SCARY!). It’s unsurprising that in the face of such humbling risks we try to get inventive to escape them. One line of thought that comes up around natural disasters seems to be “have you tried throwing some military technology at it?”
Welcome to the history of trying to bomb natural hazards.
The ties between the military and natural hazard management are historically strong– for example, the US Forest Service, tasked with watching out for and responding to wildfires, has been waging a “war” on fires since 1910, so much so that we don’t even notice the term “fire fighting.” This label pairs with all kinds of militant logics where the fire is treated as an enemy (versus, for example, a productive land management tool). During World War II, the Forest Service fire watchtowers were repurposed as military watch towers. After World War II, the Incident Command System (ICS), the structure used during US natural disaster responses, was developed by defense contractors.
Beyond this history of people- and systems-overlap with the military, military weapons have also been considered to respond to natural disasters: In 1935, the army bombed a volcano in Hawaii in an attempt to collapse lava tubes and stop lava from reaching the town of Hilo. The lava flows did slow, but there was debate over whether this was the result of the bombs or a coincidence. Some of the bombs are still lodged in the lava flows today.
And then, there’s the idea of bombing hurricanes (among other ideas). The idea to use nuclear weapons to destroy hurricanes has been around for 60 years, with serious consideration in the 1970s. Today NOAA notes that bombing a hurricane, even with a nuclear bomb, would be insufficient to change the atmospheric pressure. A second idea is to tow icebergs into place to cool ocean temperatures. You can see how many of these ideas involve expending a huge amount of energy, money, and technology to stop natural hazards in their tracks.
As climate change escalates the risks around us, it’s natural to look for big idea solutions. Geoengineering, or manipulating the climate through carbon dioxide removal, has gained proponents in recent years. The idea that we should chase human-advances caused problems with, well, more human advances in technology is appealing, more appealing than the prospect of changing huge aspects of our economy and lifestyles to avoid a major risk. But our extreme sci-fi fantasies of bombing disasters or shooting chemicals into the atmosphere also create additional risks, like nuclear radiation, or accidentally diverting lava flows toward other sites we’d like to protect.
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