During the Cold War standoff of the 1960s, it was not only Americans who tried to create weapons capable of influencing the weather; the Soviet Union was no exception. To that end, the United Nations formally passed a convention banning the use of climate weapons in 1977, yet the two nations, busy with their arms race, continued doing as they pleased.
Although James Bond was fictional, British spies still stole quite a bit of intelligence from America and Russia. This included America's collection of weather reports from airports around the world, as well as the Soviet Union sending scientists to investigate the causes of extreme cold weather. After all, both Napoleon and Germany during World War II had, in a sense, been defeated by the cold.
If such weather could be artificially controlled, then Russia would possess an impregnable "wall of bronze and iron." Compared to America using cloud-seeding bombs and silver iodide to create floods and droughts, this extreme cold weather was more like a defensive weapon, perhaps part of the Soviet Union's capital defense plan. Fearing nuclear strikes, the Soviet Union had dug air-raid shelters several kilometers underground.
Corruption existed everywhere. Under the banner of the Star Wars program, plenty of people siphoned off budgets for weather weapons. No one knew whether those weather weapons actually worked. Vietnam's rainy season was already rainy to begin with, so it was impossible to tell whether artificial intervention had any effect. Perhaps Cuba had simply been due for a drought during that period.
The greatest feature of weather weapons was that no evidence could be found, because human power was insignificant before natural disasters.
Still, people could hear certain "inside stories" leaking from the Department of Defense, making them feel that this really was America's doing—that its experiments had succeeded. With