July 2023.
As part of the program Regional Initiative to Combat Disinformation “Western Balkans Anti-Disinformation Hub: Exposing Malign Influences through Watchdog Journalism”, we present you a new analysis of fake news and disinformation narratives.
Weather (un)opportunities as a weapon
https://rt.rs/opinion/sinisa-ljepojevic/42990-sinisa-ljepojevic-vreme-oruzje/
The supercell storms that swept through the entire region of the Western Balkans and Serbia during the second half of July, which caused enormous material damage and took away human casualties, have awakened new and old conspiracy theories about weather control for military purposes. The daily newspaper “Alo” reported on the front page that “superstorms” originated from the laboratory. Allegedly, analyses of icicles from Italy showed the content of aluminium, strontium and heavy metals, which, for analyst Saša Borojević, is a sign that the gutter was created in the laboratory.
Siniša Ljepojević, a journalist of the Russian state media Russia Today (RT), writes in his text that in the modern world, everything has turned into a weapon, even the weather forecast. He adds that the recent high summer temperatures across Europe gave a chance to “climate catastrophism” and the activation of the politics of fear as a weapon to control people and their lives.
The text states that “the environment of recent heat and storms coincides with a secret project of the US Department of Defense from 1997, which was declassified”. “It’s a project to use time control technology for military purposes, translated as a climate weapon, called ‘Time as Power Augmentation: Owning Time in 2025,’” writes Russia Today.
In addition to RT, the daily newspaper Alo also wrote about the report “Owning Time in 2025”, in which lists the possibilities of geoengineering to cause precipitation or storms, cause drought, eliminate clouds or change the global climate.
“The US Navy has been developing a weapons project that affects the climate for decades. They set themselves the task of mastering the ability to change the climate conditions on earth in 2025,” writes Alo in the same tone as RT.
Sinisa Ljepojević’s text further explains that in the study, climate weapon technology is called “time modification” and assesses that it could be a more important weapon than the atomic bomb.
“There is a belief in scientific circles that the Americans started to develop these technologies more intensively only when they obtained scientific knowledge in Russia in the 1990s, during the time of Boris Yeltsin. It is believed that the Americans practically stole a part of that scientific archive… Expert circles suspect that the Americans also used climate weapons in Ukraine, which led to an unusually mild winter in that area. But at the same time, it led to colder weather in Western Europe – until the end of May, there was no spring,” says Ljepojević.
What RT and ALO fail to mention is that the study was conducted as an examination of the capabilities and technologies that the United States will need in order to remain dominant in air and space power in the future. It is also not mentioned that the document itself states that the views expressed in the study in no way reflect the official position of the USA.
New storms have brought old fake news that mostly leads to HAARP, the on-call culprit for every storm for years now. As the Istinomer portal has already written, in the previous 30 years that theories about HAARP have been circulating, as a “military machine responsible for some of the most devastating natural disasters, no relevant evidence has ever been attached.
HAARP (High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) was created as a joint project of the US Air Force and the US Navy in 1993. Although many conspiracy theorists see the HAARP program as a means of managing weather events, the program states on its website that the goal of its existence is to “allow scientists to understand better the processes that continuously occur under the natural stimulation of solar radiation.”
Author: Sofija Popović
