What ever happened to environmental modification { EnMod } ?

Question

After 3 weeks of research into Environmental modification or EnMod I found many things suprising and thought I would share and see what is you take on this - Environmental modification or EnMod was researched in the beginning of the 1970s and portions of the U.S. government and/or military viewed weather and climate modification research as having transitioned from the "basic research" stage to the "operational" stage. Experiments were occurring - or had occurred - in 22 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Iran, Israel, Kenya, Italy, France, South Africa, Congo and the U.S.S.R. Airborne seeding programs were undertaken to combat drought in the Philippines, Okinawa, Africa and Texas. Fog clearing had become a standard operation at airports, as had hailstorm abatement, which had been proven successful in several parts of the world. Forest fire control had been carried out in Alaska and watershed seeding was widely practiced, while lake storm snow redistribution was under extensive investigation. By 1973 there were over 700 degreed scientists and engineers in the U.S. whose major occupation was environmental modification (EnMod).

And then it all changed. In 1978 The United States became a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (EnMod Convention or ENMOD for short). The EnMod Convention prohibits the use of techniques that would have widespread, long-lasting or severe effects through deliberate manipulation of natural processes and cause such phenomena as earthquakes, tidal waves and changes in climate and weather patterns.

Independent journalist Keith Harmon Snow wrote a massive report entitled: "Out of the Blue: Black Programs, Space Drones & The Unveiling of U.S. Military Offensives in Weather as a Weapon." In it he tells us: "In 1976, U.S. government officials outlined 50 experimental projects and 20 actual pilot programs costing upwards of $100 million over the next eight years. It was an explosive subject, up [through] the 1970s but, after 1977, EnMod interest seemed to disappear almost overnight. In other words, after decades of intense research and development, after billions of dollars of investment, after major institutions and governmental bodies were created and charged with oversight of EnMod and its many peripheral issues, and after the entire reorganization of the U.S. Government to channel and guide and map out the future of this new and promising military and civilian 'technology' - said to be more important than the atom bomb - everything stopped.
Or did it?
It was as if a huge curtain fell over the subject as all research, all institutional interests, huge salaries and thousands of jobs - vanished. And the mass media stopped reporting anything and everything as if struck by plague. That - sudden and total silence - is perhaps the most telling and suspicious indication of the secrecy and denial that the EnMod arena was shackled with. Today it is almost as if it never happened."

Could it be that the US government said, "Oh gee, we can't do that any more" and just gave up on military EnMod - or did the whole program go "black"?

Answer 1

A more likely scenario:

The US pours 100s of millions of dollars into whacky pie-in-the-sky weather control programs that turn out to do basically nothing.

Rather than admit that, they sign the treaty and 'scrap' the programs.

The ABM treaty was similar. The technology just wasn't there to make ABMs work, but money was spent on them none the less, rather than just say "oops, we wasted a lot of money" we made 'giving up' ABMs a big deal.

Now, the technology is here, and we're making ABMs.

Only difference is, 'weather control machines' are still science fiction.