Ever gotten home and realized that the charming floor to ceiling wall of windows in your bedroom is not quite the best insulation from the cold air that you just walked through on the exterior? Wish you could manipulate the weather as easily as say, cranking up your heat? The heat is no weapon against some of the temperatures I’ve been facing the last couple of days. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. And that’s a good thing because I learned today that weather manipulation, or I should say the use of weather as a weapon, is a clear violation of international agreement. In 1977 the United Nations signed a resolution the prohibits changing the weather for hostile purposes. The grounds for the agreement was the potential that too many civilians could be harmed.

Like other agreements prohibiting specific war tactics, this in no way should imply that such research is not happening. While some claim the fair strategy is instead to better forecast the weather by anticipating it and exploiting it, others will acknowledge that if technology were to advance in such a way that allowed for the manipulation of the weather, it would be a weapon that no military would want to be without.