If it seems like it never stops raining, blame the Russians. Or even the North Koreans.

CIA chiefs fear hostile nations are trying to manipulate the world’s weather, a conference heard.

A leading academic has told how he got a mysterious phone call asking whether foreign countries could be triggering droughts or flooding.

Professor Alan Robock, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, said: ˜Consultants working for the CIA rang and said we’d like to know if someone is controlling the world’s climate would we know about it?

Of course they were also asking – if we control someone else’s climate would they then know about it.

The professor is one of many scientists from around the world are actively looking at manipulating the weather as a way of combating climate change.

Geoengineering techniques range from cloud seeding, in which chemicals are sprayed by planes trigger rainfall, to shooting mirrors into space to reflect sunlight and cool the Earth.

‘Tesla Tower’ video Futuristic high voltage… by TATS-2-MIN-NEWS

Professor Robock told the callers that any attempts to meddle with the weather on a large scale would be detectable.

However, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference in San Jose, that the weather has been weaponised in the past.

During the Vietnam War, US scientists tried to increase rainfall to hamper the enemy’s progress by spraying particles into the clouds.

And the CIA seeded clouds over Cuba  ˜to make it rain and ruin the sugar harvest
Professor Alan Robock, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, got a mysterious phone call asking whether foreign countries could be triggering droughts or flooding

Professor Alan Robock, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, got a mysterious phone call asking whether foreign countries could be triggering droughts or flooding

Asked how he felt when he got the call, the professor said:  Scared.

I’d learned of lots of other things the CIA had done that haven’t followed the rules and that wasn’t how I wanted my tax money spent.

I think this research has to be open and international, so there isn’t any question of using it for hostile purposes.

To add to the intrigue, the CIA is believed to have helped fund a major report into geoengineering.

Published last week by the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences, the report mentions the  ˜US intelligence community  in its list of sponsors, alongside organisations such as Nasa.

Professor Robock said the CIA had told one of his colleagues it wanted to fund the report, but apparently did not want this fact to be too obvious.

He said:  ˜The CIA is a major funder of the National Academies report so that makes me really worried who is going to be in control.

He added that the tension created by any large-scale meddling in the climate could escalate to such an extent that it would end in all-out war.

The professor said:  If one country wants to control the climate in one way, and another doesn’t want it or if they try to shoot down the planes…if there is no agreement it could result in terrible consequences.

 

‘Tesla Tower’ video Futuristic high voltage… by TATS-2-MIN-NEWS

No, it’s not an alien colony, a time machine, or even a Russian version of America’s ionospheric HAARP program. But in a forest near Moscow, this Soviet-era  lightning machine has a capacity arguably equal to Russia’s entire electricity output.

 

Bloggers flock to see this technical marvel, which has been dubbed the  High Voltage Marx and Tesla Generators Research Facility. The testing range, a branch of the Russian Electrical Engineering Institute, is in the sleepy town of Istra, 40 kilometers west of Moscow.

 

 

It is situated in a relatively small forest next to the New Jerusalem Monastery on the edge of town.

 

 

The secret, open-air, high-voltage testing device was constructed in the late 1970s for testing insulators to protect vehicles, aircrafts and electronic equipment against lightning.

 

 

The facility is absolutely unique; nothing like it exists anywhere in the world, primarily because of its outstanding charge capacity. At its peak operating capacity the giant Marx generator, when lightning is discharged onto an isolated platform, has power equal to all power generation facilities in Russia  including thermoelectric, hydroelectric, nuclear, solar, and wind power stations combined. But only for about 100 microseconds, Rossiya-1 TV reported.

 

 

The Marx Generator was named after German electrical engineer Erwin Otto Marx, who described it back in 1924. In Russia it’s known as the Arkadyev-Marx generator, as Russian physicist Vladimir Arkadyev and his co-worker, renowned scientific film director Nikolay Baklin, constructed a so-called  lightning machine 10 years earlier, in 1914.The Istra  lightning machine,  unparalleled in its discharge capacity, consists of a 3 Megawatt capacity transformer cascade; a 9 Megawatt Pulsed Voltage Generator (PVG), measuring 39.3 meters high, capable of creating 150-meter artificial lightning, believed to be largest in the world; and a 2.25 Megawatt constant voltage unit.The test bench discharges a lightning of a desired capacity on a special heavily isolated platform, on which a device or a material being tested is placed. The platform is full of sensors showing how exactly the electric discharge affected the tested object. 

When the facility is operating, the static charge in the  hot zone  is so large that the hair of anyone present bristles. In a TV report made for Rossiya-1 TV, staff said that once a nosy observer intruded into the facility and entered the testing ground right in the middle of a experiment, when condensers were charged to the maximum.

 

 God only knows how this guy remained alive and wasn’t struck by a discharge, said Vladimir Sysoev, a leading research worker at the facility.

 

 

Others say that lightning is still a matter for deep exploration, and that several trees burned to a crisp around the test bench serve as a reminder that lightning is very hard to control.

 

 

The Istra research center has conducted many tests since Soviet times. Among the latest carried out were lightning protection tests for Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet aircraft.

 

 

As the facility is really expensive to operate, it is only turned on for special occasions.

 

 

Unlike the famous High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in the US, the Marx generator in Istra was never meant to modulate the weather, yet like HAARP it was involved in designing weapons for the future.

 

 

Next to the research facility there is another test center, called  Allure.  It is a stationary simulator of the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) needed to test the sturdiness of military and civilian aviation hardware to impulse electromagnetic fields of a natural and artificial nature.

 

An EMP created by a nuclear explosion is capable of terminally damaging electronic equipment, so the capability of creating an artificial EMP, particularly without exploding a nuclear device, is valuable in a military sense. That’s why an EMP weapon is a general’s dream in any country.

 

 

The Allure complex was set to become a part of a grandiose scientific building, with a dome 118.4 meters high and 236.5 meters wide, but when the construction was nearly ready, the behemoth structure imploded, collapsing on the early morning of Jan. 25, 1985. The building was never reconstructed, though its circular base could be seen from space (coordinates 55 ° 55  8 N, +36 ° 49  7 ). 

Though the dome crumbled because of mistakes in its construction, the collapse had unintended historical consequences.

 

The high-ranking Soviet Communist Party official in Moscow supervising the construction of the Istra dome was fired from his job and sent to a remote posting as punishment.

 

He was replaced with fellow Communist apparatchik Boris Yeltsin, who was invited to work in Moscow and eventually became Russia’s first president.