When I was a teenager, a kid in the neighborhood who was heavily into electronics, and who incidentally is now an electronics engineer for a local TV station, set up a full-scale radio broadcasting studio in his basement, using a home-made transmitter and a technique called "carrier current", capable of sending the signals over the city power transmission lines so it was impossible for the FCC to trace where the signal was coming from except as far as the nearest power line.
For that whole summer we broadcast programs that could be picked up on a regular AM radio all over town on a regular schedule while the FCC tried fruitlessly to find out who we were. We ran up what would have been a $2.5,000,000 fine if we had ever been caught, and only quit when we had to go back to school in the fall. We called ourselves, "Your Underground Radio Station. Which was appropriate since we were located in a basement.
Now, except for political revolutionary groups and resistence movements in occupied countries during wartime, I have never heard of any other illegal radio station with regularly scheduled programing. Most people just naturally take it for granted that a radio station must have a license to broadcast. Hardly anyone questions that. It is regarded as a fact of nature. And the need for a license is not just a matter of a government wantinmg to control and tax something. It really IS based on a fact of nature.
There is a limit to the amount of room available in the portion of the spectrum that can be used for broadcasting, so there must be a means to prevent too many stations from crowding the spectrum and interfering with each other. Requiring a license to operate and allowing only one license-holder to use each usable frequency is the only possible way to have any useable broadcasting at all.
Of course it was not always so. In the early days of radio, for the first few years after radio was invented, anyone was free to build and operate a broadcasting station at will with no regulation at all. But that changed in a few years when the spectrum began to get too crowded for that, and laws were passed to allocate parts of the spectrum to licensed operators so they would not block out each others' signals. Otherwise, since the radio spectrum is a resource of limited extent, the resulting chaos would render all radio impossible.
Cloudbusting is still in the stage of a free-for-all, with no controling agency to allocate cloudbusting priviliages to qualified operators and ensure that their operations are in the public interest. The difference is that radio was regulated within a few short years of its' inception, while cloudbusting has now been around for 60 years.
It is reasonable to ask why this is so. Why has no body of laws been enacted to prevent the rather obvious harm to the public that unlicensed cloudbusting can cause?
Other new technologies, such as the airplane and the automobile, were licensed and regulated within a few years of their invention also. Most new technologies and inventions rather quickly are subjected to control by the authorities. Cloudbusting, like firearms, which existed for centuries before anyone thought to regulate them, seems to be among the very few exceptions.
That is going to have to change. And it is going to have to change soon. Already, countless lives have been lost due to the ignorance of inexperienced cloudbuster operators.
In one single cloudbusting project in East Africa, more than 20,000 people died from diseases carried by large numbers of insects that bred in the puddles of standing water left all over the landscape in the wake of out-of-season rains brought by a "successful" cloudbusting operation to "green the desert" in a nearby country. If the same amount of rain had fallen at the right time of year, there would have been no such epidemic because migratory birds would have been there to eat the insects, but at the time of year when the birds were not there, epidemics resulted.
A short telephone consultation with an ecologist would have alerted the cloudbuster operator to the dangers, but I know of no instance of any cloudbuster operator ever bothering to consult an ecologist. And this despite there already being several laws on the books, in almost all countries, that would require such consultations for any project that could reasonably be expected to impact the environment.
At the present time, anyone, anywhere in the world, who feels like taking up cloudbusting can do so without regard for any environmental protection laws or the safety of the public. Although there are laws in several places that clearly require anyone intending to engage in weather modification to obtain a permit, nobody has ever done so. And nobody has ever been prosecuted for disregarding these laws.
But a teen-ager caught using a home-made radio transmitter to broadcast home-made programing to people who want to listen to it would be subject to a huge fine, more than his expected lifetime earnings.
Just as there is a limited amount of broadcast band available to use for radio broadcasting, and a too-crowded spectrum would cause interference that would render all broadcasts useless, so there is a limit to the number of cloudbusters that can be used in a given area without interfering with each other and ruining the results. The effective range of a typical cloudbuster operation is up to several hundred kilometers, and long-range side-effects have been noted at much greater distances than that.
Regulation will have to take into account the great range of cloudbuster operations and prevent compound or conflicting operations from accidentally disrupting, augmenting, or counter-acting each other. That would require, among other things, that all proposed operations be made public in advance, probably on a specially dedicated website that anyone could access to see if any cloudbusting is planned for today, and if so, where it is being done and what the proposed operation is intended to accomplish.
In a very large country, such as the United States, Canada, Russia, China, or Australia, there might be room for several cloudbusters to operate without too much risk of overlaping effects. But in other places, such as Central Europe or the Balkans, there might be no room for more than one cloudbuster to serve several countries.
Co-ordinated operations by several cloudbusters working together might also be done. This would involve a much greater area, and therefore the co-operation of several governments unless an international regulatory body is formed. Again, the experience gained by the international agreements that regulate international activities such as aviation, shipping, and radio broadcasting will point the way to international co-operation in the field.
Any effective regulation will require some means of detecting covert operations. A cloudbuster is too cheap and too simple to build for the safety of the public to depend on nobody happening to attempt an illegal operation. An investigation agency of some sort will be needed to track down cases of suspected cloudbusting and gather evidence needed to successfully prosecute the case.
Unlike radio broadcasting, an operating cloudbuster does not put out any signal that can be detected and traced. But the behavior of the atmosphere is sometimes a clue to if there has been a cloudbuster at work or not. From watching the weather maps it is often possible to note anomolies that indicate cloudbusting. The methods of observation and deduction that have been pioneered by a few workers in the field can be developed into a new branch of orgonomic science: Forensic Orgonomy, the art and science of detecting cloudbusters at work.
Cloudbusting must be used responsibly, and only by people who understand both the science behind it and the biological environment upon which the cloudbuster exercises its' effects. And without that condition being met, it is among the very worst dangers threatening the earth.
