Show caption ‘My guess is that … we really will blow up everything by and by’ … Kurt Vonnegut. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Kurt Vonnegut The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic by Ginger Strand – review Artificial snow and cloud seeders: how weather experiments inspired Kurt Vonnegut Ben Jackson Sat 7 Nov 2015 16.00 GMT Share on Facebook

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In 1947, soon after he returned home from the war, Kurt Vonnegut was offered a job in the publicity department at General Electric. At the time, GE was a company growing in confidence. Its ads boasted that “military and naval power drove this enemy to defeat down a road built by research”. Irving Langmuir, the first Nobel prize-winning industrial scientist, was on staff. Its net sales were more than double the peak of the prewar years, and the steady stream of consumer products – televisions, refrigerators, motors and so on – that emerged from its factories made the company synonymous with postwar prosperity.

What GE wanted now was the type of person who could show the public it was trying “to do right voluntarily”. They didn’t want hack PR men; they wanted journalists who could place stories in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Time magazine. Vonnegut (pictured) took the job, and moved to GE’s campus in Schenectady, NY, where his brother Bernard had been working as a scientist since 1945. It is the intersection of their lives in the late 40s and early 50s that Ginger Strand examines in her entertaining book.

When Kurt arrived, Bernard was working on one of GE’s most high-profile projects: weather modification. Project Cirrus, as it was called, was led by Langmuir and his assistant, Vincent Schaefer, who had figured out that dumping dry ice into clouds – “cloud seeding” – could produce snow. It was Bernard himself who found that silver iodide had an even more durable effect.

Project Cirrus first made it snow over the Greylock Mountain in western Massachussetts in 1946. The headlines were ecstatic: “Rain to order”, “Snow made in a new way”, “Scientists get ready to do something about the weather.” But not everyone was so enthusiastic: the New York Sun wondered, “who wants to see a child look out the window at the crystals from fairyland on a winter morning and exclaim, ‘Oh, Mumsy! Look what General Electric is doing’?”

The media coverage soon turned to how this new ability to control the weather would affect warfare. The military had been interested in Project Cirrus from the start, and, as a means of limiting legal liabilities for GE, had taken charge of the experiments in 1947 (when the project acquired its code name). Langmuir believed that the type of control over the weather that his project could lead to would be even more significant than atomic weapons. The military speculated about the possibilities: what if they could have dissipated the fog that provided cover for German troops during the Battle of the Bulge? What if they could redirect hurricanes or produce droughts? In the American Magazine, Rear Admiral Luis de Florez concluded that weather was “the new superweapon”.

Strand’s conceit is that Bernard’s struggles with the implications of his discoveries played out in Kurt’s work. But Project Cirrus’s experiments were uneven at best. When they tried to redirect a hurricane that was heading safely out into the Atlantic, it did a hairpin turn and devastated Florida. The cloud seeding got the blame, but later research suggested a large area of high atmospheric pressure was in fact responsible. When New York called in the cloud seeders during its drought of 1949-50, it appeared to be so effective that farmers and country club owners started demanding injunctions against the city’s excessive rainmaking. A huge storm in 1950 became known as the “Rainmakers’ Flood”, and there were more than 130 legal complaints filed against New York City, whose tinkering with the weather was believed to be at fault. Once again, further research proved that it was an act of nature, not a manmade storm.

There’s little reason to think these experiments with weather left Kurt especially shaken. In an interview with the Paris Review he wasn’t exactly generous about his brother’s career: “He’s eight years older than I am. Funnier, too. His most famous discovery is that silver iodide will sometimes make it rain or snow.” In fact, Strand’s slightly blinkered focus on the achievements of Project Cirrus and Bernard might explain why she thinks the theme of Kurt’s Cat’s Cradle is nothing more demanding than that scientists have a duty to warn people about the potentially dangerous consequences of their discoveries.

It’s true that Kurt often complained that many scientists, at GE and elsewhere, seemed indifferent to the consequences of their discoveries, because they were interested only in “truth”. And it’s true also that this seemed irresponsible to him, in view of the consequences of recent scientific discoveries at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Kurt didn’t think scientists could discharge their responsibility simply by warning people about the dangers. If he had, he would have been perfectly comfortable with a policy of nuclear deterrence: after all, mutually assured destruction relies on both sides having at least a passable knowledge of the weapons on hand.

In reality, Vonnegut’s novels, especially Cat’s Cradle, make more demanding claims about the ethical responsibilities of scientists than Strand acknowledges. He loathed the policy of nuclear deterrence, advocated disarmament, and didn’t think that scientists had much business doing research that could only conceivably cause harm. He knew that the idea of scientists’ lack of responsibility worked very nicely for governments that wanted them to carry on inventing weapons. And he wasn’t much more at ease with the crusading spirit of scientific and technocratic evangelism that he found at GE than he was with the spirit of buck-passing that he also found there. He didn’t hold out much hope for us: in Fates Worse than Death he wrote: “My guess is that … we really will blow up everything by and by”. No doubt Strand is right to locate the origin of many of his concerns in his time at GE, and there is certainly a lot to be said for her interesting book, but Kurt Vonnegut had more on his mind than the weather.