His awful rationale went something like this: if weather was sufficiently understood, and we saw a hurricane heading toward the US coast, we could use a thermonuclear explosion at high altitude to divert its path before it touched land. But that paved the way toward a terrifying scenario, since, as he warned in that very first outline, even the most constructive schemes for climate control would have to be based on insights and techniques that would also lend themselves to forms of warfare as yet unimagined; a weather war that would make Zeus’s lightning bolts seem as innocent and harmless as
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