China’s ambition to manipulate the skies by creating artificial rain and snow that will cover more than half of its territory has raised concerns over the risk that the country may turn the weather-control program into a weather weapon.

The State Council released a document in early December that outlined the development of the nationwide weather-control project up to 2025. It aimed to make use of technology to bring rain and snow in the next five years on at least 5.5 million square kilometers of land. By 2035, the related industries, technologies and services should have reached advanced global standards, according to the blueprint.

The use of technology to make the skies do the bidding of man is not new. In fact, China is one of dozens of countries using “cloud seeding” to try to create favorable conditions for agricultural crops or to prevent natural disasters. The method involves spraying chemicals such as silver iodide or liquid nitrogen into the clouds to cause condensation and produce water droplets.

In the 1950s, the technique was already being deployed in the United Kingdom. During the Vietnam War, the American military prolonged the rainy season for more than six months, leading to the deaths of 10,000 people.

China is known for launching a localized cloud seeding project in 2008 to result in rainfall in the surrounding areas of Beijing so that the capital itself could hold the opening ceremony of the Olympics under clear blue skies.

Its latest ambition, to be spread over five years, has prompted speculation. Bloomberg columnist Adam Minter wrote about the potential military application of such technology. For neighboring countries that suffered water shortages, the technology could bring diplomatic pressure or even the risk of China turning it into a weapon, he added.

Concerns on the Chinese determination to develop artificial rain and snow were also recorded in India, where the agricultural sector was extremely dependent on the weather and would find China’s man-made conditions a hindrance to making forecasts, CNN reported. A military commentator would not rule out the possibility of China developing a weather weapon through its massive weather modification project.

However, according to Larry, a host on a YouTube military discussion channel, current conflicts between China and its neighbors should be about water resources instead of weather weapons.

Larry said that, to trigger severe water crises in Southeast Asian states, all China needed to do was to close the gates at its dams on the Lancang River in Yunnan province and in Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo to stop the flow of water downstream, and then apply cloud seeding technology to cause rain to fall upstream instead of downstream.

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