exploring vulnerable areas of the earth.
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In 1960 a catastrophic, weeklong series of earthquakes struck Chile, resulting in the flooding of several hundred miles of coastline, the deaths of thousands of Chileans, and the displacement of millions more. For civilian observers, in the words of the New York Times and as quoted by Jacob Hamblin in Arming Mother Nature, the quake “gave tragic testimony that in this age of the conquest of the atom and of triumphs in outer space man is still helpless against the vast and still largely unpredictable forces that frequently go berserk in his immediate environment—hurricanes, volcanoes and earthquakes” (p. 141). Cold War scientists, engineers, and strategists on both sides of the Iron Curtain saw this vulnerability of man to natural catastrophe from a very different angle. To the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) the Chilean earthquake was an example of potential military destruction, if the explosive power of nuclear weapons could in the future be combined with knowledge of the dynamic nature of the oceans, continents, and climate. According to Hamblin, “Environmental cataclysms could become part of the alliance’s arsenal, with the help of a well-placed nuclear explosion” (p. 141). Hamblin provides many examples to illustrate what NATO and other like-minded organizations came to refer to as “environmental warfare,” which he describes as “a newly conceived class of weapons that utilized human knowledge of the natural environment to fight a global war, and to make America and its allies less vulnerable to catastrophic change” (p. 4). Arming Mother Nature tells the story of those Cold Warriors who imagined ways of bringing about and making use of environmental catastrophes, as well as ways of surviving such attacks. While the book primarily covers work done in the West, Hamblin indicates that similar strategies were pursued in the Soviet Union. Anyone who has spent time studying the rise of the earth sciences in the 20th century cannot help but be struck by an irony underlying this history. Researchers received unprecedented levels of government and military funding during the Cold War, largely because of the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union. Knowledge of the earth was a valuable tool in the search for nuclear-fuel sources, in the design of weapons guidance systems, and in the detection of distant nuclear tests. This support created what historian Ronald Doel has described as a “new intellectual map” for the earth sciences. This map offered a “new set of challenges, guided by military and national security needs, which elevated the fortunes of certain fields of the physical environmental sciences and decreased opportunities in others.” Work in these fields was pursued—at least from the perspective of its funders—to maintain the political status quo and to protect American democracy and capitalism. That it produced a new vision of a more vulnerable world—that it revealed the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, for example, or the threats to health and biodiversity posed by indiscriminate pesticide use—seems to have been a wholly unintended consequence. Hamblin’s book amplifies this irony, making it even more disturbing by demonstrating that the pursuit of environmental and ecological vulnerability was one of the main thrusts of work done in the name of Cold War earth science.
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