The Plan to Make it Rain in Vietnam to Tamp Down Protests
By 1963, South Vietnamese president and US puppet ruler Ngo Dinh Diem was on the ropes. His regime, marked by nepotism, graft, and corruption, was hugely unpopular. Between that, a steadily intensifying Viet Cong insurgency, and economic hardships, South Vietnam seethed. Protests erupted throughout the country, and were brutally put down by Diem’s security forces. That only added fuel to the fire, and gave the South Vietnamese more cause for protest. However, bad as Diem might have been, he was still America’s Man in Saigon. So the US government did what it could to prop him up – before it finally abandoned Diem and backed a coup that overthrew him. Before it washed its hands of Diem, however, American officials thought up some batty ideas to support him.
One plan cooked up by the American military and the CIA was to seed clouds to make them literally rain on Diem protesters’ parades, to dampen turnout and disperse the crowds. That did not save Diem, but cloud seeding survived as a tactic. Codenamed Operation Sober Popeye, modified cargo plans overflew the Ho Chi Minh Trail starting in 1967, and relased silver and lead iodine flares. The goal was to heavily increase the monsoon period’s rainfall, and thus negatively impact the routes used to supply and reinforce communist forces in South Vietnam. Over 2600 missions were flown, and roughly 47,000 cloud seeding charges were dropped, by the time the operation was terminated in 1972. They had no impact on the Ho Chi Minh trail and communist supplies and reinforcements.