In early 1958, retired Navy captain Howard T. Orville sat before the US Congress warning that a hostile power might one day melt the polar ice caps with black pigments or tip the planet into a new Ice Age with stratospheric dust.1 His testimony unfurled a catalog of surreal countermeasures bordering on science fiction: giant mirrors hung in orbit to melt Arctic harbors trapped in ice, or nuclear-powered pumps across the Bering Strait turning the Arctic Ocean into a warm lake. In the post-Sputnik panic, when the “impossible” had just happened, these visions felt less like speculation than prophecy. Congress listened because the Cold War made everything from melting polar caps to orbital weather platforms sound like a plausible national threat. From today’s perspective, however, Orville’s Cold War anxiety reads as an inverse articulation of what we now call the Warm War—our current epoch of conflict increasingly shaped by the cascading effects of climate change and its weaponization.
The concept of the Warm War initially addressed the Arctic’s developing friction in regard to challenged sovereignty, competing resource extraction, and emerging shipping routes through the Northwest Passage due to rapidly melting sea ice. The term has since evolved to include the intertwined history of weather modeling, climate analysis, and the military-industrial complex, with global warming as a threat multiplier. Introduced as a speculative concept in the 2000s, it is now to be found in official European Commission rhetoric.2 Though climate-security theory originally developed by observing the polar region, climate change now extends the Warm War to a global phenomenon with local effects. Conflicts during the Arab Spring might now be considered some of the first hot conflicts of the Warm War. Like the Cold War, the Warm War is about ideological battles, economic strategies, and proxy pressure as much as direct armed conflict.
From a historical perspective, much like World War II can be seen as a continuation of unresolved issues in World War I, the Warm War overlaps and extends issues first manifested during the Cold War. As nuclear science was to the Cold War, so geoengineering is to the Warm War—an applied technological solution with controversial chain reactions that can easily spin out of control. Already in 1955, John von Neumann—Manhattan Project mathematician and one of the principal architects of modern computational systems—argued that a central technological challenge of the future would be climate control. Though his analysis developed in light of game theory in a nuclear-armed world, his key insights on governing geoengineering remain unresolved to this day.3 As the world shifts to a multipolar theater of war, the Warm War wrestles with the escalatory cycle of scientific research being politicized over whether climate change is even real, in turn intensifying political polarization.
Weather and War
The relation between war and the weather is as old as memory allows. The oldest written narrative that we have, the Epic of Gilgamesh (written circa 2100–1800 BCE), tells of weather as a divine weapon through an onslaught of thirteen winds from all directions and climates.4 Shifting from myth to manual, Sun Tzu—who authored the oldest surviving treatise on warfare, collected as The Art of War (circa 500 BCE in China)—also articulates the importance of weather for military success. Already on the manuscript’s first page, Sun outlines five key principles in planning a battle, including the function of the Heavens, or meteorological phenomena.5 However, the observation of such phenomena did not guarantee an accurate interpretation, for in an era preceding meteorology as a scientific discipline, the study of weather was entangled not only with superstition but also with the Heavens’ astrological and meteorological phenomena. One need only think of the interpretation of portents such as eclipses or the titular meteors of meteorology. As late as 1492, the Holy Roman Emperor’s son Maximilian considered the fall of the Ensisheim meteorite in Alsace to be a good omen in his war against the French.6 Only in 1803 was it determined by Ernst Chladni that the origin of meteorites was extraterrestrial—that place between the land of the mortals and the house of the gods.7
Indeed, it would take until the century of speed—the nineteenth century—for a true meteorological discipline to be forged. Surprisingly, it took art critic John Ruskin, who lobbied for the field as a practical science, to imagine what was really necessary for weather prediction. In an 1839 paper, he asserted that if meteorology was to function, it must exist as if it was
a vast machine [that] desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect systems of methodical and simultaneous observations; it wishes its influence and its power to be omnipotent over the globe, so that it may be able to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere at every point on its surface.8
Such a dream would become a reality a couple of centuries later, but not due to the cooperative scientific drive Ruskin beckoned. Instead, the resources required for creating such a “vast machine” were driven by the military’s need for remote sensing and real-time processing after the birth of cybernetics.
In the same decade as Ruskin’s prediction we can see two key drives that would converge in the twentieth century and have been further exacerbated by AI in the twenty-first century. First, fellow Englishman Charles Babbage—considered along with Ada Lovelace to be the inventor of the programmable computer—observed that the newly discovered deep time of the carbon cycle posed troubling questions concerning the Industrial Revolution’s poisonous emissions:
The chemical changes which thus take place are constantly increasing the atmosphere by large quantities of carbonic acid [CO2] and the other gases noxious to animal life. The means by which nature decomposes these elements, or reconverts them into a solid form, are not sufficiently known.9
Babbage could not have foreseen that the technological descendants of his device would one day draw on the environment as voraciously as the data centers serving today’s AI, yet his warning now reads as a prophetic glimpse of the endgame of power and computation. And second (also in the 1830s), the early meteorologist James P. Espy theorized that convection results in rain and was immediately commandeered into the US Navy, demonstrating a military interest in the cutting-edge science of meteorology that would expand exponentially as air power became the supreme military tactic.10 Espy’s key innovation was not prediction accuracy, but temporal coordination over an electric network. By being the first, in collaboration with Joseph Henry (the inaugural Secretary of the Smithsonian), to systemically use the telegraph to collect simultaneous observations from distant locations—albeit continental, not global—he reframed weather as a moving system rather than a local event.11 Taken together, these episodes progressively braid a genealogy in which the birth of meteorology, the rise of computation, and the ambitions of the military become inextricably intertwined in a feedback loop that would eventually contribute to the exhaustion of the planet’s resources.
In the decades leading up to the mid-twentieth century birth of cybernetics, a broad historical trajectory materialized: a progressive decentralization of communication based on military outpost architecture that supported Early Warning Systems. First, interwar British experiments with sound mirrors established a communications protocol, which across the English channel was followed by a system of communication bunkers as part of the Atlantikwall during World War II, leading finally to the networked Arctic geodesic radomes of the Cold War, with their eventual redundant protocol to thwart nuclear blackout.12 Initially conceived by the military for antiaircraft warfare, the development of digital computing began as a collaboration between American military research agencies and the US Weather Bureau around 1948.13 It is not a coincidence that the subsequent Cold War projects borrowed more than just temperature adjectives as it cloaked its military endeavors under the semiotics of weather. MIT’s Whirlwind computer forged the birth of cybernetics, evolving into the SAGE / DEW network. The DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line was a string of remote radar stations built in the High Arctic between 1954 and 1957 that connected to NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) in order to detect incoming Soviet bombers carrying nuclear warheads.14 But even before the DEW radar surveillance network was built, a collaborative initiative called JAWS (Joint Arctic Weather Stations) between Canada and the US constructed a series of five weather stations under the auspices of meteorological collection for southern weather prediction, magnetic readings for radio conditions, and controlling air space.15 The northernmost tip of the network (and still to this day the northernmost settlement in the world), Canadian Forces Station Alert in Nunavut, was constructed between 1947 and 1950 as a controversial blueprint for international collaboration used in the DEW Line.16 While the construction of the DEW Line was celebrated as one of the greatest infrastructural projects in history, many Canadians saw the outposts as an American breach of national sovereignty, while from an Indigenous perspective it signified a continued material presence of colonialism.
After its establishment, JAWS not only functioned as meteorological collection points but also as territorial outposts staking a claim at the limits of North America vis-à-vis the USSR. As an extreme outpost closer to Moscow than to Ottawa, the Arctic weather station CFS Alert was also revealed to be a secret military signals intelligence station, and today still functions as an environmental research station providing baseline recordings for greenhouse gas emissions while also eavesdropping on the Russians as a spy station. From a European perspective, the Arctic was only of interest as a shorter trade route, hence the search for the elusive Northwest Passage: the difference between colonial views of the Arctic as a “no-man’s-land” rather than a nomad’s land for Inuit hunting.
With the beginning of the Cold War, the High Arctic suddenly shifted from a marginal territory to an important potential battlefield. As Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan observed at the peak of the Cold War in 1967:
A border is not a connection but an interval of resonance, and such gaps abound in the Land of the DEW Line … Since the United States has become a world environment, Canada has become the anti-environment that renders the United States more acceptable and intelligible to many small countries of the world; anti-environments are indispensable for making an environment understandable.17
The Arctic enters the theater of war as part of game theory’s calculation of Cold War nuclear politics, but also as the site of future projections: both as signifier of climate change in melting sea ice and glaciers, as well as the future zone of interest for ice-free trade and resource extraction where sovereign borders are still fluid. One can draw parallels to operations at the opposite pole, where research stations waving the banner of science were built in anticipation of treaty breakdowns that would constrain territorial claims and extraction in Antarctica. Historic sites such as CFS Alert still serve as a bulwark against territorial claims by foreign states. These claims to ownership of the Arctic Ocean grow stronger decade by decade, grounded in new arguments based on the submarine extensions of continental shelves.18 Additionally, conventions respected elsewhere—such as the Law of the Sea—would typically classify the entire Canadian Arctic archipelago as internal waters, a sovereignty claim not recognized by antagonistic states or allies alike, who prefer to treat it as an international strait for their own benefit (e.g., China and the US). As such, when the Cold War melted into the Warm War, the Arctic became an early focal point for observing climate change and its cascading effects for both the environment and national security.
Climate as Threat Multiplier
As weather forecasting improved its accuracy and range of projection both temporally and spatially, the history of weather—what we could call climate change—came into sharper focus. Again, the long-term logistical thinking of the military played an important early role, funded by strategic and security interests. Initially pursued in the twentieth century as fundamental research with distant spin-offs for defensive or strategic concerns, military-funded research eventually shifted in the twenty-first century to explicitly recognize climate change as a critical “threat multiplier” to national security. Parallel to the development of the JAWS and DEW military bases in the 1950s, US Navy maritime operations faced immediate impacts from climate shifts (escalating storms and rising sea levels) and became a key driver in tracing anthropogenic causes to climate change. In particular, Navy officer Roger Revelle, renowned for observing the Bikini Island nuclear tests in 1946, became instrumental in pioneering climate research linked explicitly to geopolitical dynamics. In 1956, Revelle’s testimony to Congress (two years before Howard T. Orville’s fantastical “doomsday machines” testimony) foretold that Arctic warming would reshape geopolitical boundaries by opening previously inaccessible northern routes, altering strategic advantages between Cold War adversaries.19 His analysis explicitly positioned climate change within the broader framework of Cold War competition, suggesting warming would directly empower the Soviet Union as melting Arctic ice expanded navigable waters along Russia’s northern coast, a prediction realized in 2017 by the passage of a Russian oil tanker and in 2025 by a Chinese cargo ship.20 Revell later went on to describe humanity’s emissions of fossil-derived carbon dioxide as an unprecedented “geophysical experiment” reinserting millions of years’ worth of stored organic carbon back into atmospheric circulation.21
As environmental movements began to grow in mainstream culture, academic research, and national politics, the discussion was led by scientists such as Rachel Carson, primarily focused on the local effects of pollution, pesticides, and biodiversity.22 In parallel, secret military intelligence assessments surveyed scientific literature, searching for as-yet-functional climate models in order to speculate about global effects related to security.23 A pair of declassified documents from the CIA, both dating from August 1974, confirm early internal concerns regarding climate-induced geopolitical instability. The reports explicitly framed climatic change as an immediate threat to global stability, predicting widespread crop failures, famine, mass migrations, and political unrest—factors critical to US national security. While drawing on publicly accessible scientific publications, the CIA documents also built upon research originally funded by ARPA and the RAND Corporation, amongst others. It took until 2004, with a high-profile leak, for the general public to discover the military’s alarming concern about climate change. The analysis cowritten by the former Head of Scenario Planning at Royal Dutch Shell offered stark projections of climate-induced geopolitical instability, including resource conflicts and forced migrations, explicitly urging the Pentagon to integrate climate risks into strategic planning.24
Notably, the year 2007 marked a watershed moment for climate-security discourse. Three interrelated factors converged: scientific consensus, shifting political attitudes, and mounting public visibility of climate impacts. In the civilian sphere, a critical mass of environmental concern was mounting. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from 2007 declared climate change “unequivocal” and very likely human‑caused, providing an anchor for scientific and political research moving forward. Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar for best documentary, saturating mainstream culture. The IPCC and Gore shared that year’s Nobel Peace Prize. During that summer, melting Arctic ice levels shattered all records by 40 percent, rapidly accelerating previous predictions by half a century. Backed by decades of discussions in the military sphere (albeit behind firewalls), the 2007 convergence propelled climate change onto the international security agenda. The CNA Military Advisory Board, comprising retired US generals and admirals, published the landmark report “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” explicitly categorizing climate change as a “threat multiplier” capable of exacerbating global instability.25
Firmly established as a discourse, tandem developments in climate security risks were simultaneously brought to the fore in Europe and the UN in the same year. The UK’s Ministry of Defence highlighted climate change as a conflict driver and operational challenge,26 while the UN Security Council, under UK leadership, organized a controversial session of climate-security debates.27 In Germany, the national Advisory Council on Global Change pointed to potential state collapses, resource conflicts, and migration pressures resulting from climate instability.28 The following year saw non-Western actors incorporate rhetoric about climate change into their security white papers for the first time. China did so in their 2008 national defense policy, but only in passing, along with other concerns such as terrorism and pirates.29 Concurrently, Russia, another permanent member of the UN Security Council, entered the conversation with its first remarks connecting climate change and security risks.30 By 2010, as forcefully articulated in the US Quadrennial Defense Review, a significant global shift had crystallized within military planning, formalizing decades of prior research into policy frameworks that explicitly linked climate change to security concerns.31
Scorched Earth
Typically, climate change analysis predicts critical points and crises in the distant future, which makes mobilizing for change difficult. In game theory, this is called “the social trap”—when actions that secure immediate personal benefit appear more attractive when it comes to dealing with the commons, since detrimental effects occur slowly and minutely against a backdrop of shared responsibility.32 This results in what was theorized in the late 1960s by one environmentalist as the “tragedy of the commons”: the lack of shared stewardship of the commons through mutually individual restraint results in its ultimate collapse.33 But the “distant” future where the commons of a planetary ecosystem come crashing into the present already occurred in 2010. While the physical impacts of climate change are most pronounced in the polar regions, their smaller populations and relative political stability mean that social consequences emerge more gradually as superpowers cautiously jockey for resources and advantages. By contrast, in southern regions these pressures surfaced more rapidly, creating a flashpoint for fragile governments and infrastructures.34 Thus the Arab Spring’s revolts across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen could be considered the first manifestation of direct Warm War conflict.35 Massive droughts across the region in the decade preceding 2010—exacerbated by Russia’s ban on wheat exports following its own crop failures fueled by heat waves and wildfires—ignited a combined grain-shortage and commodity-price crisis, starving citizens and destabilizing governments. This convergence of factors acted as a “threat multiplier,” producing the cascading outcomes anticipated in military assessments from 2007: grassroots revolutions, civil wars, regime changes, and the largest refugee crisis since the term was legally defined in 1951. While the effects of climate change contributed to a violent sequence of ostensibly unconnected political events—framed by the seasonally charged historiographical construct “the Arab Spring”—slower, ongoing crises continue to unfold across the globe with increasing scale and significance. Often the violence is not so dramatic but just as real and persistent—what author Rob Nixon called “slow violence.”36 Like the Cold War, which was global in scope but lacked a singular explosive moment, the Warm War outsources its ideological failings as metabolic crises at the expense of the world’s most vulnerable populations and regions.
Despite the military’s long history of acknowledging climate threats, high-level defense politics have consistently sought exemptions from climate accountability. This stance became clear during the drafting of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, when the US Department of Defense successfully lobbied for exemptions from greenhouse gas emission restrictions.37 Such lobbying underscored that observing climate change is distinct from understanding its cause, or furthermore committing to correction. Neta Crawford highlights the military-industrial complex’s role in perpetuating a “deep cycle” of economic expansion, fossil fuel dependency, and climate harm.38 Pulling together various reporting methods and deductions due to a lack of continuous transparency, she was able to outline how the US DoD remains the largest institutional consumer of petroleum globally, directly responsible for the federal government’s largest emissions of greenhouse gases both historically and currently. Like a snake eating its own tail, the military, needing oil to operate, must secure and protect oil supplies abroad, which in turn requires more oil. As US General David Petraeus famously said in the year he became the director of the CIA: “Energy is the lifeblood of our warfighting capabilities.”39
The real destruction that occurs when wars destroy infrastructure, energy holdings, and the landscape is almost impossible to calculate. However, one could start by looking at lucrative contracts to “rebuild” war zones, often conveniently with NGOs from the same countries where foreign aid comes from, creating another self-reinforcing cycle. Whether it is the total annihilation of Gaza’s territory by bombing hospitals, schools, and homes, or the bombing of Ukraine’s energy depots and supply chains, or the destruction of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, war destroys the labors of our production along with all the subsequent costs of re-extracting resources from the earth simply to rebuild following the conflict. A scorched-earth mentality—as old as the Scythians against the Persians in the fifth century BCE—has ravaged the natural landscape throughout history, extending beyond formalized warfare into paramilitary conflicts that employ arson as a strategy, from ranchers in the Amazon basin to Zionist settlers in the olive groves of the West Bank.40 While environmentalists rally around the globe to save the world’s rain forests, the war machine perennially burns ecosystems to the ground.
Weaponizing Weather
The burning forests in World War I are typically considered collateral damage to artillery warfare, but the “Great War” also marked a significant change in military strategy: the weaponization of the atmosphere. In step with the development of the casemate as a new defensive architectural form, a direct attack on breathable air was inaugurated with the first instance of gas warfare. In Paul Virilio’s unorthodox treatise Bunker Archaeology from 1975, he describes the pivotal moment in World War I when total war “competed successfully with natural forces” by assaulting the enemy’s environment rather than the enemy itself. A new landscape was thus forged where “firearms, explosives, smoke screens, and gases have contributed to the creation of an artificial climate.”41
In the aftermath of World War II, high-profile wartime scientists orbiting the Manhattan Project, such as John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and most passionately Irving Langmuir, considered the weaponizing of weather as the next big technological feat that should be instrumentalized:
A seeded thunderstorm became Langmuir’s A-bomb, and like his nuclear peers, he tested his techniques in the desert of New Mexico and bombed clouds with a B-29 aircraft, the sister of Enola Gay and Bockscar, the planes that had delivered atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.42
Side-by-side New York Times articles in 1950 articulated both the hype and controversy of such militarized science. In one column, Langmuir is quoted claiming that “weather control can be as powerful a war weapon as the atom bomb”; in the next column, New Mexico Senator Clinton P. Anderson announced he was introducing federal regulation to control such military endeavors and their “terrifying implications.”43
By 1953, President Eisenhower tapped Howard T. Orville to become chairman of the president’s Advisory Committee on Weather Control.44 While Orville’s 1958 Congressional address speculated about a chilling catalog of weather and climate modification schemes, his career focused primarily on cloud seeding—a method for inducing rainfall at specific locations that James P. Espy had theorized as early as 1838. Espy never garnered support to implement his theories of massive conflagrations inspired by ancient practices of “controlled burns” that he’d heard rumored to be used by Paraguay Indigenous people and Ancient Babylonians.45 In contrast to Espy, who worked for the Navy, it was the later French pacifist Charles Le Maout who attempted to connect rain with violence based on anecdotal evidence of bad weather following battles—an idea shared by retired Civil War general Edward Powers in his 1871 book War and the Weather, or, The Artificial Production of Rain. Nineteenth-century theory quickly moved toward dubious praxis in the hands of entrepreneurs David Ruggles and Robert St. George Dyrenforth, who both claimed that firing artillery explosives into the atmosphere could summon the desired rain. To these “paradoxers,” the solution to environmental crises was literally to bomb it.46 Perverting the logic further, why not use weather as a weapon?
Aside from sporadic experiments and proposals in the US, Britain, and France, the first documented large-scale military use of cloud seeding surfaced when secretly deployed as a weapon in the Vietnam War between 1966 and 1972. The rationale: drops of rain were no worse than dropping napalm.47 But the classified “Operation Popeye,” as it was code named, was revealed in the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak and became entangled in the momentum of the Watergate scandal and the broader reckoning of the Nixon administration. Several congressional hearings throughout 1974 attempted to rein in the military’s ambitions, which resulted in the Soviet-proposed 1977 UN treaty “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD).”48 Despite such a treaty however, an internal 1996 Air Force study argued that the US military should control the weather in the twenty-first century for operational assaults.49 Titled Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, the report already anticipates the term “threat multiplier” in its framing of weather and climate as active agents within military rhetoric.
If ENMOD first framed environmental modification as a matter for arms control, it also laid the groundwork for later civilian policy, such as the 2008 Convention on Biological Diversity’s decisions to ban ocean fertilization, which was expanded in 2010 as a de facto moratorium on large-scale climate geoengineering.50 While manipulating the environment is ostensibly banned by both military and civilian treaty, growing pressure is mounting, openly and clandestinely, to continue research in the field. But today the arms race oscillates between the enemy being a foreign state and the state of the climate. However, despite the shared climate crisis, there are still no clear paths forward to implement geoengineering in a safe and predictive manner—even with the best intentions.51 There are fewer divisive issues that challenge dogmatic assumptions resulting in paradoxes: international law banning military before civilian geoengineering operations, the military and not politicians recognizing climate change as real, Indigenous communities in violation of biodiversity treaties, publicly traded oil corporations implementing the largest carbon capture operations, etc.52 We are in the zone where effects are nonlinear and agential alignment becomes counterintuitive. A local aerosol intervention with the ambition to cool a domestic territory during a fatal heatwave might cascade into torrential floods in a neighboring state—a reality enacted by a rogue state that is less and less science fiction season by season.53 Whether such an action results in direct destruction of a neighbor’s territory, or acts as a “threat multiplier” that destabilizes the neighbor’s political state, or is misinterpreted as an act of aggression itself that triggers a military response, becomes moot.
Just as boundaries between types are often indistinct in cloud morphology, determining what qualifies as weather or environmental modification is a nebulous task. On one hand, such ambiguous agency makes clandestine weather-modification operations attractive, as bad actors can deny responsibility and blame damage on ostensibly natural causes. On the other hand, the persistent gaps in our understanding of meteorological dynamics and the “act of God” element of natural disasters create fertile ground for evidence-free conspiracies: former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez allegedly blamed US DARPA’s HAARP program for “eco-catastrophes” such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake.54 Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali, head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization, publicly claimed in 2018 that Israel and the UAE were responsible for “cases of cloud theft and snow theft.”55 Most recently, a growing cluster of alt-right conspiracies in the US claim that airplane “chemtrails” are used for everything from population sterilization to covert geoengineering.56 The Warm War is always deferential when tracing accountability. But if the Warm War has a front line for thought, it lies in refusing to treat the atmosphere as a neutral medium for strategy and insisting instead that every projection, every model, every “scenario,” is already a political decision about whose futures are expendable.
War Games
While weather modeling was historically an observational practice, the computational acceleration in meteorology driven by military imperatives marked a shift from understanding the atmosphere to actively intervening in it. We do not create models only to measure the world, but also to modify the world. This trajectory has only intensified as we now confront an environmental crisis born of human activity, which is met with an urgent desire to repair and reengineer the atmosphere. As a result, climate control has shifted from the Cold War dream of secret weapons programs and agricultural optimization to the Warm War’s option of last resort in a gluttonous world unable to curb its emissions as much as make peace with its neighbor.
Our world has collapsed into a Borgesian paradox: the map and the territory becoming one at one-to-one scale.57 Of importance today is not just who controls territory, but also who controls the model. The “vast machine” of environmental modeling has exponentially increased in resolution and predictive power. Aside from valid concerns that the data these systems rely on is biased, in this new paradigm shift, our position conflates simulation space and the sky above us, scripting weather and sculpting clouds to rewrite the terms of nature. Enter NVIDIA, a key architect of contemporary AI infrastructure and major actor in planetary visualization and modeling that began as a corporation specializing in graphics chips for video games. Alongside its core production of AI chips for defense infrastructure and weapons, one of NVIDIA’s flagship ventures is the more “benign” hyperlocal AI weather modeling platform it calls “Earth-2.” In this high-fidelity “Twin Earth” simulation of the planet’s atmospheric system (“cloud-powered” by the company’s own GPU chips), NVIDIA dreams of forecasting extreme weather events. The first client to sign up: Taiwan.58
Earth-2 is more than a forecasting tool. It is the scaffolding of a planetary-scale operating system. Echoing the Cold War’s doubled agency in JAWS/DEW mentioned earlier, or the more popular cover of NASA for classified surveillance and intercontinental ballistic weapons development, the early warning systems of weather and war can rarely be detangled. NVIDIA’s platforms now underpin not only climate research but the infrastructures of global capital and defense. On both sides of the Pacific, governments control and invest in chip development and trade as matters of national security. Simulations are never neutral; they are war games designed to reflect the priorities of those who build and “play” them.59 And yet, as these systems grow in complexity and reach, they remain fragmented, opaque, and controlled by corporate interests. In this accelerating race against accountability, climate models risk becoming tools of geopolitical leverage rather than collective planetary care. The coming storm is not only meteorological but geopolitical. Would an early warning system for a typhoon be more important for NVIDIA than an early warning system for an invasion of Taiwan, where NVIDIA’s chips are manufactured by TSMC?
In an era of declining global cooperation, the same security apparatus that once imagined climate control as a secret strategic edge in the Arctic now confronts a world in which every intervention in the atmosphere is both technical experiment and geopolitical signal. In a region that is no longer the frozen buffer of a bipolar world but the new Wild West of a multipolar one, the world’s overlapping interests converge at the place where many of its contested borders collide. Melting sea ice has shattered the Northwest Passage as a mythical labyrinth philosophized by Michel Serres into the contemporary loci of extraction and access.60 The morphing Arctic landscape is already lubricating faster shipping routes, expanding oil drillings, and rushing in prospectors for rare earth minerals. Onto this already militarized and industrial landscape, radical proposals have emerged in response to the urgent need to reduce Arctic temperatures, including controversial interventions such as marine cloud brightening, stratospheric aerosol injection, and the dispersal of silica microbeads. But any attempt to remediate the Arctic ice would inevitably reorder newfound trade routes, resource access, and military reach: a global geophysical experiment without a control. Despite high resolution models having replaced maps with monsters at their edges, labyrinthine passages still remain dark and elusive as we navigate the future. The Warm War is not only coming. It is already here.
US Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, “Weather Modification Research,” 85th Congress, 1958, 44–53.
See, originally, Charles Stankievech, “Cinema, Gramophone, Radio: A Quiet History,” eContact! 11, no. 2 (July 2009) →; and, more recently, Karmenu Vella, “High-Level Session of the Arctic Stakeholder Forum: European Investment Priorities for the Arctic,” European Commission, speech transcript, June 16, 2017 →.
John Von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?” in The Neumann Compendium, ed. F. Bródy and T. Vámos (World Scientific, 1995).
The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Maureen Gallery Kovacs (Stanford University Press, 1989), 44.
Sun-Tzu, The Art of War, trans. John Minford (Penguin, 2008), ebook.
Matthieu Gounelle, “The Meteorite Fall at L’Aigle and the Biot Report: Exploring the Cradle of Meteoritics,” Geological Society, London, Special Publications, no. 256 (2006). Gounelle points out that an early term for meteorites was “Betyl stones (from the Hebrew Beth-el, abode of God)” (73).
For a further connection between meteorites, ecology, and weapons see Charles Stankievech, “Magnetic Anomalies in the Arctic: Colonial Resource Extraction, Meteoric Cults, and the Rare Earth Age,” in Rare Earth, ed. Nadim Samman and Boris Ondreička (TBA21 / Sternberg Press, 2015).
“Remarks on the Present State of Meteorological Science,” read at the Meteorological Society of London and published in its Transactions, no. 1 (1839). Also quoted in part by Paul N. Edwards, who used it as the inspiration for the title of his excellent book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), 431.
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832; Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17. For the first major work on air pollution, see John Evelyn’s Fumifugium (1661), which outlines a history of pollution in London since medieval times, as well as solutions such as removing polluting industries from the city and using vegetation as a remedy. Available at →.
James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia University Press, 2010), 53, 169.
First Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, vol. 1 (Smithsonian Institution, 1848), 25 →.
I have previously mapped the decentralization of warfare through an analysis of military outpost architecture in The Centre Cannot Hold (AEAC, Queen’s University / K. Verlag, 2015). See also, in the same volume, “The Listening Ear: British Coastal Wireless Interception Stations and After” by David Murakami Wood, Canada Research Chair in Surveillance Studies.
For a substantive political history of computation in the Cold War, see Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996).
For an online archive documenting the scouting, construction, and daily operation of a DEW Line station, as well as the station’s interface with local Inuit communities, see Parks Canada historian David Neufeuld’s BAR-1 DEW Line Archive, coded and hosted by myself as of my 2009 DEW Project →.
Daniel Heidt and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, The Joint Arctic Weather Stations: Science and Sovereignty in the High Arctic, 1946—1972, 1st ed. (University of Calgary Press, 2022), 67.
The role of JAWS and DEW Line stations in protecting national sovereignty in the uninhabited archipelago (JAWS was significantly farther north than the DEW Line and any Indigenous communities) was supplemented by the forcible relocation of Inuit communities to northern sites far beyond their traditional territory and the sustenance of their regular flora and fauna. The Canadian government apologized and offered modest financial restitution in 2010 →.
“Canada: The Borderline Case,” originally delivered as part one of McLuhan’s 1967 Marfleet Lectures at the University of Toronto, and later published in The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, ed. David Staines (Harvard University Press, 1977). In light of the present essay, it would be interesting to update McLuhan’s “Hot” and “Cold” media with a theory of “Warm” media, i.e., media that is sensorily engaging and socially interactive.
For current tracking of competing claims and filings, see the “Arctic Map Series” created by Durham University’s IBRU: Centre for Borders Research →.
Roger Revelle, “International Discussions of IGY (International Geophysical Year),” in Second Supplemental Appropriation Bill, 1956: Hearings Before Subcommittees of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Eighty-fourth Congress, Second Session (US Government Printing Office, 1956), 465–74 →.
Roger Revelle and Hans E. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase in Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades,” Tellus, no. 9 (1957).
The New Yorker commissioned Carson to write a series of essays in the summer of 1962 under the title “Silent Spring,” which were later collected and published as a book. Carson was a marine biologist with a previous award-winning book titled the Sea Around Us (1954) that also fittingly highlighted the ocean’s pull toward a planetary understanding of climate change as pointed out by Revelle.
Due to the classified nature of military intelligence and operations, creating a comprehensive timeline is difficult. The following account is primarily gleaned from policy documents and from reports published in the civilian sphere by military think tanks, complimented by only a few declassified reports discovered through references and FOIA requests. It is important to remember that, according to Peter Galison, the ratio of classified to nonclassified publishing is five to one. Thus we can safely assume that there are blind spots in this text, as there most likely are earlier unknown texts addressing climate issues within the military intelligence sphere. See Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004).
The Schwartz and Randall report, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” was commissioned by Andrew Marshall for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment in 2003 →.
Four out of five of the of the “future global strategic shocks” in the report were climate related (the outlier being a pandemic): “Abrupt Climate Change,” “Methane Catastrophe,” “Thermo-Haline Disturbance,” and “Mega-Volcanic or Seismic Event” resulting in climate and agriculture collapse. See United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, Global Strategic Trends 2007—2036 (Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre: January 2007), 77–79.
UN Press Release, “Security Council Holds First-Ever Debate on Impact of Climate Change on Peace, Security, Hearing Over 50 Speakers” →.
Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen (German Advisory Council on Global Change), Climate Change as a Security Risk (Earthscan, 2007) →.
“China’s National Defense 2008” (State Council Information Office, Jan. 2009), 4. The paper contextually highlighted China’s new policy towards international integration, so one wonders if the casual mention of climate change, along with General Xiong Guangkai’s speech the same year in London, was a performance for an international community that had recently proclaimed climate change as the international problem of 2007.
Actual military documents show little interest in climate change but acknowledge changing environmental factors playing a role in a broad spectrum of emerging concerns—especially in the Arctic, where there is a competition for resources. In 2007, in a controversial media stunt, Russia sent a submarine to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to plant a Russian flag at the North Pole. The mission was called “Arktika 2007” and was partly a lobbying tactic amidst controversial claims to seabed jurisdiction for deep-sea mining and offshore oil extraction. Also, two nonmilitary reports from the time, focusing on “Climate Doctrine” and Arctic policy, inferred connections to climate shifts in the Arctic and called for increasing Arctic security forces and infrastructure: “National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation to 2020” (approved by Presidential Decree no. 537, May 12, 2009); “Climate Doctrine of the Russian Federation” (Presidential Order no. 861-rp, December 17, 2009); “Foundations of State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Arctic to 2020 and Beyond” (September 18, 2008, directive no. Пр-1969).
US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (February 2010) →.
John Platt, “Social Traps,” American Psychologist 28, no. 8 (1973).
Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968).
US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 85.
In the IPPC’s Fifth Assessment Report of 2014, which included a new initiative and chapter devoted entirely to “Human Security,” a special case study considered the 2003 explosion of violence in Dafur, Sudan as an example of climate change–caused conflict. But since the conflict was local, the report resisted placing too much weight on climate causation since neighboring governments remained stable. The Arab Spring, with its multiple political conflicts across unconnected regimes, is considered a stronger argument for climate change as a threat multiplier. The report also draws attention to “geopolitical competition over access to Arctic resources that escalates into dangerous tensions and crises (high confidence).” See W. N. Adger et al., “Human Security,” in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects, Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. C. B. Field et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 773, 778.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Douglas Berenson, “Pentagon Officials Consider Asking for Waiver for US Forces: DOD Officials Warn Climate Change Treaty Could Harm Military Readiness,” Inside the Pentagon 13, no. 41 (October 9, 1997).
Neta C. Crawford, Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, 2019) →.
Petraeus’s quip is from a widely quoted June 7, 2011 memo promoting a report from the US Department of Defense’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy, Plans & Programs, Energy for the Warfighter: The Department of Defense Operational Energy Strategy, June 14, 2011 →.
Marijn Nieuwenhuis and Mikko Joronen, “Colonial Pyrotechniques in Palestine: Arboricide and Fiery Dispossessions,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, October 26, 2025).
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins (Princeton Architectural Press, 1994). 37. Peter Sloterdijk’s widely referenced Terror from the Air (2002) popularizes Virilio’s thesis.
See Fleming’s chapter “Weather Warriors” in Fixing the Sky for a detailed account of military experimentation in weather modification in the twentieth century.
“Weather Control Called ‘Weapon’” and “Weather Bill in Senate,” New York Times, December 10, 1950, 68.
Howard T. Orville, “Weather Made to Order?” Collier’s, May 28, 1954.
James P. Espy, The Philosophy of Storms (C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1841). 494.
“Paradoxers” was a nineteenth-century term equivalent to today’s Silicon Valley’s “disrupters.” See Mark W. Harrington, “Weather Making, Ancient and Modern,” National Geographic, April 25, 1894.
Deborah Shapley, “Weather Warfare: Pentagon Concedes 7-Year Vietnam Effort,” Science 184, no. 4141 (1974).
For the first committee hearings uncovering domestic activities, see US Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment, ”Weather Modification,” 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, January 25 and March 20, 1974 (US Government Printing Office, 1974) →; for the second committee on international relations, particularly in light of conversations with the USSR, see US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, ”Weather Modification as a Weapon of War,” 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, on H. Res. 116 and 329, September 24, 1974 (US Government Printing Office, 1974) →. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 31/72, “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques,” in 31st Session: Volume I: Resolutions and Decisions, 21 September—22 December 1976, A/31/39 (United Nations, 1976).
Col. Tamzy J. House et al., Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 (US Air Force, August 1996) →.
The 2008 decision was inspired by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP10), 2010. Decision X/33: Biodiversity and Climate Change, Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity →.
Holly Jean Buck, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Verso, 2019).
ENMOD before COP10; the Haida Gwaii Indigenous people in Western Canada ocean fertilizing in 2012; David Keith selling his Carbon Engineering Ltd. to Occidental Petroleum, which is building the world’s largest carbon capture installation, etc.
See Kim Stanley Robinson’s hard science fiction novels that deal with geoengineering, most recently The Ministry for the Future (2021), in which a fictional Indian state unilaterally implements “solar radiation management” after a heatwave kills ten million citizens.
See →.
“Iran General Says Israel Steals Clouds, Causes Drought,” Newsweek, July 2, 2018. The same article recounts how Iran’s military was helping the country’s Ministry of Energy in its own domestic cloud-seeding operations.
Holly Jean Buck, “Para-Environmentalism as Popular Atmospheric Politics,” presented at Shaping Atmospheres Symposium, organized by Ala Roushan and Charles Stankievech, University of Toronto, November 7, 2024.
Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” (1946), in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin, 1999), 325.
NVIDIA Corporation, “NVIDIA Announces Earth Climate Digital Twin,” press release, March 18, 2024 →.
See Simulation, Exercise, Operations, ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2015).
Michel Serres, Hermès V: Le passage du Nord-Ouest (Éditions de Minuit, 1980).
