In a gilded command center on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, scientists are trying to extract moisture from the desert sky. But will all their extravagant cloud-seeding technology—planes spraying nanomaterials, lasers disrupting the atmosphere—really work on a large scale?
In the skies above Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When he comes to, he turns on some silver switches on a panel at his feet, turns two black controls, and then presses a red button marked FIRE.
A thin canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane opens, releasing a fine white powder. This powder—actually ordinary table salt coated with a nanoscopic layer of titanium dioxide—will rise in warm air, carrying it to the heart of the white convective clouds that form in this part of the Emirates, where the colorful sands of Abu Dhabi meets the mountains on the border with Oman. According to the theory, it will attract water molecules, forming tiny droplets that will collide and merge with other droplets until they grow large enough to fall from the sky as rain.
This is cloud seeding. It is one of hundreds of missions Newman and his pilots will fly this year as part of the UAE's ambitious ten-year drive to increase rainfall in its desert lands. Sitting next to him in the co-pilot's seat, I can see the red earth stretching to the horizon. The only water in sight is the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, perched on the side of a mountain below a sheikh's palace, shining like a jewel.
More than 50 countries have experimented with cloud seeding since the 1940s—to quell droughts, fill hydroelectric reservoirs, keep ski slopes covered with snow, or even be used as a weapon of war. In recent years there has been a renewed interest, partly due to scientific advances, but also because dry countries are facing the first impacts of climate change. Like other technologies designed to treat the symptoms of a warming planet (such as pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight into space), cloud seeding was once controversial but now seems attractive , maybe even imperative. Dry spells are getting longer and harsher: In Spain and South Africa, crops are drying up in the fields, and cities from Bogotá to Cape Town have been forced to ration water. In the past nine months alone, cloud seeding has been cited as a solution to air pollution in Pakistan, as a way to prevent forest fires in Indonesia, and as part of an effort to fill the Panama Canal, which is it dries up.
Apart from China, which keeps its extensive cloud-seeding operations in complete secrecy, the United Arab Emirates has been more ambitious than any other country in advancing the science of rainmaking. The nation receives about 5 to 7 inches of rain a year—roughly half the amount that falls in Nevada, America's driest state. The UAE began its cloud seeding program in the early 2000s, and since 2015 it has invested millions of dollars in the Rainfall Enhancement Program, which funds global research into new technologies.
Last April, when a storm dumped an entire year's worth of rainfall on the UAE in 24 hours, widespread flooding in Dubai was quickly blamed on cloud seeding. But the truth is murkier. There is a long history of people—tribal leaders, traveling con artists, military scientists, and more recently venture capital-backed technologists—claiming they can make it rain on demand. But cloud seeding cannot make clouds appear out of nothing; it can bring forth more rain than is already in the sky. Scientists still aren't sure they can make it work reliably on a large scale. The flooding in Dubai was most likely the result of a storm system in the region, exacerbated by climate change and the city's lack of adequate drainage systems.
The stated aim of the Rainfall Enhancement Program is to ensure that future generations, not only in the UAE but in arid regions around the globe, have the water they need to survive. The architects of the program argue that "water security is an essential element of national security" and that their country is "leading the way" in "new technologies" and "resource conservation." But the United Arab Emirates—known for lavish living and conspicuous consumption—has one of the highest per capita rates of water use in the world. So is it really on a mission to make a hotter, drier future more livable for everyone? Or is this small petrostate, whose political power and wealth have come from helping the industrialized world's dependence on fossil fuels, seek to gain even more wealth and power by selling the dream of a cure?
I came here on a mission of my own: to find out if this new wave of cloud seeding is the first step toward a world where we can actually control the weather, or another round of what's just smoke and vapor.
THE FIRST SYSTEMATIC ATTEMPTS TO MAKE RAIN
The first systematic attempts to make rain date back to August 5, 1891, when a train arrived in Midland, Texas, carrying 8 tons of sulfuric acid, 7 tons of cast iron, half a ton of manganese oxide, half a dozen scientists and several war veterans US civilians, including General Edward Powers, a civil engineer from Chicago, and Major Robert George Dyrenforth, a former patent attorney. Powers had observed that it seemed to rain more in the days following battles and had concluded that the "buddies" of artillery fire during combat caused air currents in the upper atmosphere to mix and release moisture. Powers thought he could make it rain on demand with loud noises, either by placing hundreds of balls in a circle and aiming them skyward, or by sending balloons loaded with explosives. His ideas, which he laid out in a book called "War and Weather" and which he lobbied for years, eventually led the US federal government to fund the Midland experiment.
Powers and Dyrenforth's team gathered at a local cattle ranch and prepared for an all-out assault on the skies. They made mortars out of pipe sections, inserted dynamite into cut rat holes, and wrapped bushes with rackarock, an explosive used in the coal mining industry. They built electrically charged kites and filled balloons with a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, which Dyrenforth thought would fuse into water when exploded. (Skeptics pointed out that it would be easier and cheaper to attach a water jug to the flask.) The group faced technical difficulties; at one point, an oven caught fire and had to be rescued by a cowboy and pulled into a water tank to be extinguished. By the time preparations for the experiment were completed, it had started to rain naturally. Still, they pressed on, launching a barricade of explosions on the night of August 17 and claiming victory when the rain fell again 12 hours later.
It was doubtful how much credit they could get. They had arrived in Texas just at the beginning of the rainy season, and the rainfall that fell before the experiment had been predicted by the US Weather Bureau. As for Powers' idea that rain followed battles—well, battles tended to start in dry weather, so it was just the natural cycle that wet weather often followed.
Despite skepticism from serious scientists and derision in some sections of the press, Midland's experiments lit the fuse for half a century of rainmaking pseudoscience. The Met Office soon found itself in an ongoing media battle to refute the efforts of self-styled rainmakers who began operating across the country.
The most famous of these was Charles Hatfield, known as either the Moisture Accelerator or the Ponzi of the Skies, depending on who you ask. Originally a sewing machine salesman from California, he reinvented himself as a weather guru and made dozens of deals with desperate cities. When he arrived at a new location, he would build a series of wooden towers, mix a secret mixture of 23 chemicals aged in barrels, and drop it into the cauldron atop the towers to evaporate into the sky. Hatfield's methods smacked of black magic, but he had a knack for playing the odds. In Los Angeles, he promised 18 inches of rain between mid-December and late April, when historical rainfall records suggested a 50 percent chance of that happening anyway.
While these charlatans and frauds lined their pockets, scientists were slowly figuring out what really made it rain—something called cloud condensation nuclei. Even on a clear day, the sky is filled with particles, some no bigger than a pollen grain or a virus thread. “Every cloud droplet in the Earth's atmosphere formed on top of an existing aerosol particle,” one cloud physicist told me. The types of particles vary by country. In the UAE, they include a complex mix of sulfate-rich sands from the Empty Quarter desert, salt spray from the Persian Gulf, chemicals from the oil refineries that dot the region, and organic materials from as far away as India. Without them, there would be no clouds at all—no rain, no snow, no hail.
Most raindrops begin as airborne ice crystals, which melt as they fall to the ground. But without cloud condensation nuclei, even ice crystals won't form until the temperature drops below -40 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, the atmosphere is filled with pockets of supercold liquid water that is below freezing but has not turned into ice.
In 1938, a meteorologist in Germany suggested that seeding these areas of cold water with artificial cloud condensation nuclei could promote the formation of ice crystals, which quickly grow enough to fall, first as snowflakes, then as snowflakes. rain After World War II, American scientists at General Electric latched onto this idea. One group, led by chemists Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, discovered that solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, would do the job. When Schaefer dropped dry ice grains into his refrigerator used as an improvised cloud chamber, he found that water readily formed around the crystalline structure of the particles. When he witnessed the effect a week later, Langmuir jotted down three words on his notepad: "Weather Control." Within months, they were dropping pellets of dry ice from planes over Greylock Mountain in Western Massachusetts, creating a 3-mile-long line of ice and snow.
Another GE scientist, Bernard Vonnegut, had come up with a different seeding material: silver iodide. It has a remarkably similar structure to an ice crystal and can be used for planting in a wider range of temperatures. (Vonnegut's brother Kurt, who was working as a publicist at GE at the time, would write the book "Cats' Crusade," a book about a planting material called ice-nine that causes all the water on the ground to freeze at once. )
After these successes, GE was bombarded with requests: Winter carnivals and movie studios wanted artificial snow; others wanted clear skies for search and rescue. Then, in February 1947, everything stopped. The company's scientists were ordered to stop talking publicly about cloud seeding and direct their efforts to a classified US military program called Project Cirrus.
Over the next five years, Project Cirrus conducted more than 250 cloud seeding experiments as the United States and other countries explored ways to use weather as a weapon. Schaefer was part of a team that dropped 80 pounds of dry ice into the heart of Hurricane King, which had ripped through Miami in the fall of 1947 and was heading out to sea. After the operation, the storm made a sharp turn landward and slammed into the Georgia coast, where it caused one death and millions of dollars in damage. In 1963, Fidel Castro reportedly accused the Americans of planting Hurricane Flora, which lingered over Cuba for four days, resulting in thousands of deaths. During the Vietnam War, the US Army used cloud seeding to try to soften the ground and make it impenetrable to enemy soldiers.
A few years after the end of that war, more than 30 countries, including the US and the USSR, signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Military Use or Modification of the Environment for Other Hostile Purposes. By then, interest in cloud seeding had begun to wane anyway, first among the military, then in the civilian sector. "We didn't really have the tools—the numerical models and also the observations—to really prove it," says Katja Friedrich, who studies cloud physics at the University of Colorado. (This did not stop the USSR from planting clouds near the Chernobyl nuclear explosion site in the hope that they would dump their radioactive contents on Belarus instead of Moscow.)
To really put planting on sound scientific footing, they needed to better understand precipitation at all scales, from the micro-physics of nucleation to the global movement of air currents. At the time, scientists couldn't do the three things needed to make the technology viable: identify target areas of supercold liquid water in clouds, deliver seed material to those clouds, and verify that it it was doing what they thought it was doing. How could you tell if a cloud dropped snow because of seeding, or if it would have snowed anyway?
USA AND PROJECT SNOWIE
In 2017, armed with more powerful computers running the latest generation of simulation software, researchers in the US were finally ready to answer this question, through the Snowie project. Like GE chemists years earlier, these experimenters dropped silver iodide from airplanes. The experiments took place in the Rocky Mountains, where prevailing winter winds brought moisture up to the peaks, causing clouds to reliably form at the same time each day. The results were impressive: The researchers could extract 100 to 300 acre-feet of additional snow from each storm they seeded. But the most powerful evidence was anecdotal. As the plane flew up and down at an angle to the prevailing wind, it sprayed a zigzag pattern of planting material into the sky. This was reflected by a zigzag pattern of snow on the weather radar. "Mother Nature doesn't make zigzag patterns," says a scientist who worked on the Snowie project.
In nearly a century of cloud seeding, it was the first time anyone had shown the full chain of events from seeding to precipitation reaching the ground.
NATIONAL METEOROLOGY CENTER IN UAE
The UAE National Meteorological Center is a glass cube rising from a featureless piece of land surrounded by a jumble of dusty highways on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi. Inside, I meet Ahmad Al Kamali, the center's chief operating officer—a young man with a neat beard and dark-rimmed glasses. He studied at the University of Reading in the UK and worked as a forecaster before specializing in cloud seeding operations. Like all the Emirati men I meet on this trip, he is wearing a kandura—a loose white garment with a fringe secured by a loop of thick black cord.
We take the elevator to the third floor, where I find the cloud seeding control mission. With gold detailing and a marble floor, it looks like a luxury hotel lobby, except for the large radar map of the Gulf that fills one wall. Forecasters—men in white, women in black—sit at banks of tables and scan satellite images and radar data looking for clouds to plant. Near the entrance is a small glass pyramid on a pedestal, about a foot wide at its base. It's a holographic projector. When Al Kamali turns it on, a small animated cloud appears inside. A plane circles it and it starts raining. I start to think: How much of this is theater?
The impetus for cloud seeding in the UAE came in the early 2000s, when the country was in the midst of a construction boom. Dubai and Abu Dhabi were a sea of cranes; the population had more than doubled in the previous decade as expats flocked there to take advantage of the good weather and low income taxes. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family—currently the vice president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates—thought that cloud seeding, along with desalination of seawater, could help replenish the waters of underground and filling the country's reservoirs. (Globally, Mansour is perhaps best known as the owner of Manchester City soccer club.) As the Emiratis were setting up their program, they called in some experts from another dry land for help.
In 1989, a team of researchers in South Africa were studying how to improve the formation of raindrops. They were taking cloud measurements east of the country when they noticed a cumulus cloud that was raining when all other clouds in the area were dry. When they sent a plane into the clouds to take samples, they found a much wider range of droplet sizes than in other clouds—some as much as half a centimeter in diameter.
The finding highlighted that it is not just the number of points in a cloud that matters, but also the size. A cloud of droplets that are all the same size will not mix because they all fall at the same speed. But if you can get larger droplets in, they will fall faster, colliding and joining other droplets, forming larger droplets that have enough mass to leave clouds and become rain. African researchers found that while clouds in semi-arid areas of the country contain hundreds of water droplets in every cubic centimeter of air, they are less efficient at creating rain than maritime clouds, which have about one-sixth as many droplets, but more changes in droplet size.
So why did this cloud have bigger dots? It turned out that the chimney of a nearby paper mill was spewing out particles of debris that attracted water. Over the next few years, African researchers conducted long-term studies looking for the best way to recreate the paper mill effect on demand. They settled on common salt—the most hygroscopic substance they could find. Then they developed cartridges that would release a steady stream of salt crystals when ignited.
Those cartridges were the forerunners of what Emiratis use today, produced locally at the Weather Modification Technology Factory. Al Kamali shows me some: They are tubes a foot long and two inches wide, each holding a kilogram of planting material. One type of cartridge holds a mixture of salts. The other type holds salts coated with a nano layer of titanium dioxide, which attract more water in drier climates. Emiratis call them Ghaith 1 and Ghaith 2, ghaith being one of the Arabic words for "rain." While the language has another close synonym, matar, it has negative connotations—rain as punishment, torment, rain that breaks the banks and floods the fields. Ghaith, on the other hand, is rain as mercy and prosperity, showers that end drought.
CLOUD SEEDING FLIGHT EXPERIENCES
The day after my visit to the National Meteorological Center, I take a taxi to Al Ain to go on that cloud seeding flight. But there is a problem. When I leave Abu Dhabi that morning there is a low-lying fog that stretches across the country, but by the time I arrive at Al Ain's small airport—about 100 miles inland from the coastal cities—it has dissipated, leaving a clear sky. sober. There are no clouds to plant.
After passing the tight security cordon and arriving at the gold-painted hangar (the airport is also used for military training flights), I meet Newman, who agrees to take me on the flight anyway to show me what would happen on a mission to really. He wears a blue cap with the UAE Rainfall Improvement Program logo. Before moving to the UAE with his family 11 years ago, Newman worked as a commercial airline pilot on passenger jets and split his time between the UK and his native South Africa. He has exactly the kind of calming presence you want from someone you're about to board a small plane with.
Each planting mission begins with a weather forecast. A team of six operators at the meteorological center scan satellite images and data from the Emirates' network of radars and weather stations and identify areas where clouds are likely to form. Often, this is in the area around Al Ain, where the mountains on the border with Oman act as a natural barrier to moisture coming in from the sea.
If it looks like rain, cloud-seeding operators radio the hangar and put some of the nine pilots in standby mode—either at home, in what Newman calls "cottage standby," or at the airport or on a flight model in the air. As clouds begin to form, they begin to show up on weather radar, changing color from green to blue to yellow and then red as the droplets grow and the cloud's reflectivity increases.
When a mission is approved, the pilot writes a flight plan while the ground team prepares one of four modified Beechcraft King Air C90 aircraft. There are 24 cartridges attached to each wing—half Ghaith 1, half Ghaith 2—for a total of 48 kilograms of planting material in each flight. Timing is of the essence, says Newman as we taxi towards the runway. Pilots must reach the cloud at the optimal moment.
Once airborne, Newman climbs to 6,000 feet. Then, like an eagle traveling on thermals, he goes hunting for updrafts. Cloud seeding is mentally challenging and sometimes dangerous work, he says through the headset, over the roar of the engines. Real missions last up to three hours and can get pretty rough as the plane moves through the clouds. Pilots usually try to avoid turbulence. Planting missions require them.
When we reach the right altitude, Newman radios the ground to get permission to fire the cartridges. There are no hard and fast rules about how many pellets to put in each cloud, one planting operator told me. It depends on the strength of the updraft reported by the pilots, how things look on the radar. It sounds more like art than science.
Newman lights one of the salt pellets, and I turn to my seat to see: It burns with a white-gray smoke. It allows me to fire one of the nano-coated cartridges. It's somewhat anti-climactic: the green cap of the tube opens and the material pours out. It reminds me of someone sprinkling shredded cheese on spaghetti.
There is an evangelical enthusiasm in the way some of the pilots and plant operators talk about it—the rush of pushing a button on the instrument panel and watching the clouds explode before their eyes. Like the gods. Newman shows me a video on his phone of a cloud he had just seeded throwing huge raindrops onto the plane's front windows. Operators swear they can see the clouds changing on the radar.
But the jury is still out on how effective hygroscopic seeding is. The UAE has invested millions in developing new technologies to improve rainfall—and surprisingly little in verifying the impact of the planting it's currently doing. After the first feasibility work in the early 2000s, the next long-term analysis of the program's effectiveness didn't come until 2021. It found a 23 percent increase in annual rainfall in planted areas, compared with historical averages, but warned that "climate variability-related anomalies" can affect this figure in unexpected ways. As Friedrich notes, you can't necessarily assume that rainfall measurements from, say, 1989 are directly comparable to those from 2019, given that climate conditions can vary greatly from year to year or decade to decade. .
DISCUSSION ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF HYGROSCOPIC SEEDING
The best evidence for hygroscopic seeding, experts say, comes from India, where for the past 15 years the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has been conducting a slow and patient study. Unlike the UAE, India uses one aircraft for seeding and another to take measurements of the effect this has on the cloud. In hundreds of seeding missions, the researchers found an 18 percent increase in the formation of raindrops within the cloud. But the thing is, whenever you want to try to make rain in a new place, you have to prove that it works in that area, under those particular conditions, with that unique mix of aerosol particles that might be present. What works in, say, the Western Ghats mountain range is not even applicable to other areas of India, says the lead researcher, let alone other parts of the world.
If the UAE wanted to reliably increase the amount of fresh water in the country, committing to more desalination would be the safest bet. In theory, cloud seeding is cheaper: According to a 2023 paper by researchers at the National Weather Service, the average cost of rainfall generated by cloud seeding is between 1 and 4 cents per cubic meter, compared to about 31 cents per cubic meter of water from desalination at the Hassyan Seawater Reverse Osmosis plant. But each mission costs up to $8,000, and there's no guarantee the rainwater will end up where it's needed.
One researcher I spoke to, who has worked on cloud seeding research in the UAE and asked to speak on background because he still works in industry, was critical of the quality of the Emirati science. According to him, there was a tendency to spread "white lies"; officials tell their superiors what they want to hear despite the lack of evidence. The country's leaders already think cloud seeding is working, this person argued, so for an official to admit otherwise now would be problematic. (The National Weather Service did not comment on the claims.)
By the time I leave Al Ain, I begin to suspect that what happens there is as much about optics as it is about actually improving the rainfall. The UAE has a history of making big announcements about the latest technologies—from flying cars to 3D-printed buildings to robot police officers—with little final product.
Now, as the world transitions away from the fossil fuels that have been the country's main source of wealth for the past 50 years, the UAE is trying to position itself as a climate leader. Last year, they hosted the annual United Nations climate change conference, and the head of the National Center for Meteorology was chosen to lead the World Meteorological Organization, where he will help shape the global consensus that forms around cloud seeding and shapes other large-scale climate modification. (He could not be reached for an interview.)
The UAE has even started exporting its cloud seeding expertise. One of the pilots I spoke to had just returned from a trip to Lahore, where the Pakistani government had requested Emirati cloud seeders to bring rain to clear the polluted skies. It rained—but they couldn't take the credit. "We knew it was going to rain and we just went and planted the rain that was going to come anyway," he said.
From the steps of the Emirates Mandarin Oriental Palace in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates certainly doesn't look like a country running out of water. As I walk up the long road to the hotel on my second day in town, I can see the water fountains and the lush green grass. The sprinklers are on. I'm here for a ceremony for the fifth round of research grants being awarded by the UAE Rainfall Enhancement Research Program. Since 2015, the program has awarded $21 million to 14 projects developing and testing ways to improve rainfall, and is about to announce its next set of grantees.
In the great hall, local officials are divided loosely by gender. I drink watermelon juice and work in the room, talking to previous grant winners. There's Linda Zou, a Chinese researcher based at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi who developed the nano-coating seeding particles in the Ghaith 2 cartridges. There's Ali Abshaev, who comes from a cloud seeding dynasty (his father runs Russia's Hail Prevention Research Center) and has built a machine to spray hygroscopic material into the sky from the ground. It's like "an upside down jet engine," explains one researcher.
Other projects have looked at “terrain modification”—whether planting trees or building earth barriers in certain places can encourage cloud formation. Giles Harrison, from the University of Reading, is exploring whether electrical currents released in clouds can cause raindrops to stick together. There is also a lot of work on computer simulation. Youssef Wehbe, a UAE program officer, gives me a brief interview about the future vision: pairs of AI-powered drones, one taking measurements of clouds and the other printing planting material tailored specifically to that particular cloud. —in real time, so to speak.
I am particularly drawn to one of this year's grant winners. Guillaume Matras, who worked at French defense contractor Thales before moving to the UAE, hopes to make it rain by shooting a giant laser into the sky. Wehbe describes this approach as "high risk." I think he means "it might not work," not "it might set the whole atmosphere on fire." Anyway, I digress.
RESEARCH IN ZAYED MILITARY CITY MILITARY AREA
So after my cloud-seeding flight, I take a shuttle to Zayed Military City, a military base between Al Ain and Abu Dhabi, to visit the government-funded research lab where Matras works. They take my passport at the compound gate, and before I can enter the lab myself, they ask me to secure my phone in a locker that's also a Faraday cage—completely sealed off from incoming and outgoing signals.
After donning a hairnet, lab coat and tinted safety glasses, Matras shows me into a lab where I see something extraordinary. Inside a wide black box, about the size of a small TV, is an extremely powerful laser. A technician turns it on. Nothing happens. Then Matras leans forward and opens a lens, focusing the laser beam.
There is a loud noise, like the roar of an electric motor. It's the sound of air being destroyed. A very thin thread, perhaps half an inch wide, appears in the air. It looks like a bird thread, but it is bright blue. It is plasma—the fourth state of matter. If you increase the laser size and power, you can ignite a small part of the atmosphere. Man-made lightning. Naturally my first question is to ask what would happen if I put my hand in it. "Your hand would turn into plasma," says another researcher, completely serious. I put my hand back in my pocket.
Matras says these laser beams will be able to improve precipitation in three ways. First, acoustically—like the old collision theory, it's thought that the sound of airborne atoms exploding can shock nearby raindrops into coalescing, growing larger, and falling to the ground. Second: convection—the jet will create heat, generating sticky currents that will force the droplets to mix. (I am reminded of an unrealized 1840s plan to create rain by igniting large parts of the Appalachian Mountains.) Finally: ionization. When the beam is turned off, the plasma will reform—the nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules inside will reassemble into random configurations, creating new particles for the water to cluster around.
The plan is to scale this technology to something the size of a shipping container that can be placed on the back of a truck and driven to where it's needed. It seems crazy—suddenly I'm very aware that I'm on a military base. Can't this big portable laser be used as a weapon? "Yes," says Matras. He grabs a pencil, the tip sharpened to a point. "But anything can be a weapon."
Those words weigh on me as I head back into town, past lush golf courses and hotel fountains and workers drinking from plastic bottles. Once again, there is not a cloud in the sky. But maybe that doesn't matter. For the UAE, so eager to project its technological might in the region and the world, it is almost irrelevant whether cloud seeding works. There is soft power in being visible to be able to bend the weather to your will—in 2018, an Iranian general accused the UAE and Israel of stealing his country's rain.
Anything can be a weapon, Matras had said. But there are military weapons, and economic weapons, and cultural and political weapons as well. Anything can be a weapon—even the idea of one.
