Israel vs. Iran: Geopolitics and Climate Warfare (Part 1)
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Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent on weather control, invisible war, and the struggle for the atmosphere.
In late April 2026, a message posted on the official X account of the Iranian embassy in Afghanistan—since deleted—triggered a wave of online commentary. It claimed that an Iranian military strike against a secret installation in the United Arab Emirates had significantly altered climatic conditions across the Middle East, resulting in several weeks of intense rainfall as well as a drop of five degrees in temperatures in Iraq and Iran.
Published through an official diplomatic channel before being removed, this message crossed a threshold in the information war.
Yet public statements of this kind are regularly made by Iranian officials. In July 2018, during a national conference on population protection, Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, commander of Iran’s civil defense, openly accused the State of Israel of disrupting precipitation during the drought that struck the country in 2018. The newspaper Le Monde commented on these statements as follows:
The news agency close to the authorities, ISNA, relayed his remarks as Iran faced a severe drought. ‘Climate change in Iran is suspicious. (…) Foreign interference is suspected of having influenced climate change. Scientific centers in the country have conducted a study on this subject, and their results confirm this hypothesis,’ the officer explained. ‘Israel and another country in the region have joint teams working to ensure that clouds entering Iranian skies are unable to release rain,’ the commander stated, again cited by ISNA. ‘In addition to this, we are facing a phenomenon of cloud and snow theft,’ General Jalali added.
To support his claims, the officer cited “a four-year study” supposedly demonstrating “that above 2,200 meters in altitude, all mountainous areas between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean are covered with snow—except in Iran.”
These statements reinforced earlier accusations made by former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2011. At the time, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran accused Western nations of using their technology to force clouds to release rain over their own continent. This is what prevents rain from falling in other regions, such as Iran.
So are these claims merely fanciful, serving only political purposes and information warfare? Or do technological means exist to influence weather and/or climate? If so, are these methods already in use, and do they have—or could they have—a real and significant impact? Is it possible that prolonged droughts, or, conversely, abnormally intense rainfall or even storms, could be artificially generated and thus employed as tactical and covert vectors of a truly invisible war?
As we shall see in this multi-part study, accusations of weather warfare have a real factual basis, and the militarization of climate is a real issue. It is a question that led the United Nations to theoretically prohibit, as early as the 1970s, the use of the environment and weather for military purposes.
Indeed, at the time—and in a documented manner—the United States had resorted to cloud seeding as an environmental weapon. The U.S. attempted, for example, to prolong the monsoon season over North Vietnam from 1967 to 1972, and also to dry out the Cuban sugar cane harvest in 1969.
In 1970, in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, the influential Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928–2017) made the observation that technology would provide the leaders of major nations with techniques capable of conducting secret warfare of which only minimal security forces would be aware. Techniques such as the modification of weather conditions could be used to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.
As early as 1958, on the question of weather modification, the future President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson had already made the following remarks: “From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf stream and change temperate climates to frigid.”
Then again in 1962: “It lays the predicate and foundation for the development of a weather satellite that will permit man to determine the world’s cloud layer and ultimately to control the weather; and he who controls the weather will control the world.”
Since that time, geoengineering has expanded massively and is now widely deployed in both military and civilian domains.
Israel and the United Arab Emirates at the Forefront of Geoengineering
For Iran, accusing the United Arab Emirates of “rain stealing” is not unfounded, as the UAE regularly practices cloud seeding and is therefore the most advanced country in the Middle East in this field.
Thus, according to The New York Times, the UAE is the “unquestioned regional leader” in the Middle East region, since “[a]s early as the 1990s, the country’s ruling family recognized that maintaining a plentiful supply of water would be as important as the nation’s huge oil and gas reserves” in preserving its financial power worldwide. “Nine pilots rotate on standby, ready to bolt into the sky as soon as meteorologists focusing on the country’s mountainous regions spot a promising weather formation—ideally, the types of clouds that can build to heights of as much as 12,192m.”
But the power truly at the forefront in the field of geoengineering is Israel, in particular through the Israeli-American company Stardust Solutions, which has raised 60 million U.S. dollars to conduct experiments in stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI).
Stardust Solutions is a venture-backed startup, founded in 2023 by the Israeli researchers Yanai Yadov—former deputy scientific director of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission—Amiad Spektor, and Eli Waxman. This for-profit company is registered in Delaware, United States. Its headquarters are located near Tel Aviv, in Israel.
It sets itself the almost demiurgic objective of stabilizing the Earth’s temperature and explains on its website:
Earth’s climate has fluctuated wildly throughout history. Mankind has built civilization in a ‘Goldilocks zone’—a moment in history when Earth was neither too hot, nor too cold. Yet, 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the changes are accelerating. We are deviating from that safe zone. This means more extreme weather, mass migration, crop failures, and resource conflicts. These are not distant projections. They are unfolding now, accelerating faster than our capacity to respond.
Humanity needs a different class of solution. One that works at planetary scale. One that can be deployed this decade, not in some distant future. One that buys us time and protects us from overheating.
Throughout all of human history, we have stewarded and shaped our environment and built a world that could sustain billions of people. Humanity fixed the ozone hole, eradicated diseases, and built systems that transformed the world.
Earth’s hottest year can be behind us, not looming ahead.
Politico devoted a lengthy article to the founding of this Israeli weather-engineering company, which is at the forefront of its field. The title and presentation of that article are revealing:
The Strange and Totally Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun and Reverse Global Warming: A 25-person startup is developing technology to block the sun and turn down the planet’s thermostat. The stakes are huge—and the company and its critics say regulations need to catch up.
Evidently, Stardust Solutions invokes the pretext of climate urgency to advance its meteorological research and experiments, and to make them acceptable to the general public. The article reports on an online meeting between the company’s CEO and János Pásztor, a former senior United Nations climate official:
(…) It was Jan. 31, 2024. The chief executive of an Israeli-U.S. startup, to whom Pasztor had only just been introduced, was telling him the company had developed a special reflective particle and the technology to release millions of tons of it high into the atmosphere. The intended effect: to dim the light of the sun across the world and throw global warming into reverse. The CEO wanted Pasztor, a former senior United Nations climate official, to help. The company called itself Stardust Solutions.
(…) The Stardust CEO, Yanai Yedvab, was a nuclear physicist who was once deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, and he jumped straight to the point. He wanted Pasztor to advise him on how to build public credibility, which would be necessary to land the government contracts for sunlight reflection that the company and its investors were banking on.
The website Geoengineering Monitor, which documents and analyzes the activities of major contemporary geoengineering actors, outlines the activities of Stardust Solutions:
The researchers have been conducting indoor trials since 2022 and testing SAI hardware outdoors since 2024. Starting in 2026, the company intends to conduct SAI field trials by releasing its proprietary reflective particles from aircraft flying at around 18 kilometers above sea level. The exact location of the trials has not yet been publicly disclosed.
Stardust claims to have developed a new type of reflective particle for SAI and is seeking to patent it. The nature of these particles has not yet been revealed, but the company announced that it would publish its key findings in early 2026. The company raised US$60 million in venture capital in October 2025 for its field trials—the largest funding round ever for an SRM company. Since its foundation, Stardust has raised a total of US$75 million.
Among the principal investors in Stardust Solutions are:
the Israeli-Canadian Awz Ventures, a capital fund with strong ties to Israeli military and intelligence agencies, Lowercarbon Capital, led by tech billionaire, venture capitalist and former Google executive Chris Sacca; the Dutch holding company Exor; former Facebook executive Matt Cohler; and the US firms Future Positive, Future Ventures, Never Lift Ventures, Starlight Ventures, Nebular and Lauder Partners. Other investors include the British groups Attestor, Kindred Capital, Orion Global Advisors, and the early-stage venture capital fund Earth.Now. In the future, Stardust intends to pursue government contracts for SAI deployment.
The website Geoengineering Monitor recalls the principle and the dangers of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) and Solar Radiation Management (SRM):
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is the most prominent Solar Radiation Management (SRM) approach. It involves spraying large quantities of tiny, reflective particles, such as sulphate aerosols, into an upper layer of the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space.
SAI is associated with significant potential risks and uncertainties, including damage to human health, ecosystems and the ozone layer, reduced agricultural yields and significant changes to rainfall patterns. Other unintended consequences of the deployment of the technology cannot be ruled out because climate models are not able to capture the full complexity of atmospheric interactions and processes. This is partly because many of these interactions and processes are not yet fully understood.
Another major risk of SAI is the so-called termination shock. In order to mask the warming effects of greenhouse gases, SAI deployment would require particle concentrations to be maintained through regular injections. However, abruptly terminating SAI deployment would result in rapid temperature increase and changes in precipitation, causing major impacts to ecosystems.
Let us recall here that, apart from the outdated and little—or not—applied ENMOD Convention—the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques—there exists no liability regime suited to geoengineering.
The Reality and Deployment of Geoengineering
Stratospheric aerosol injection is a reality that is not only widely documented but also regularly discussed by some of the most influential decision-makers.
For example, by former CIA director John O. Brennan, during a 2016 conferenceat the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he specifically warned about the lack of “global norms and standards” in the field of geoengineering.
John Brennan brought up “the array of technologies, often referred to collectively as geoengineering, that potentially could help reverse the warming effects of global climate change.”
He then went on to specify:
One that has gained my personal attention is stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI: a method of seeding the stratosphere with particles that can help reflect the sun’s heat in much the same way that volcanic eruptions do. An SAI program could limit global temperature increases, reducing some risks associated with higher temperatures, and providing the world economy additional time to transition from fossil fuels. This process is also relatively inexpensive. The National Research Council estimates that a fully deployed SAI program would cost about $10 billion yearly.
One could easily multiply examples of statements by officials publicly outlining the reality of climate or weather control programs. I cite others in my digital book available here.
Techniques for the artificial modification of weather (and, over the longer term, of climate) are in fact varied. Cloud seeding is now a widely practiced method. The Soviets were already using it, and China regularly states that it employs such techniques on its own territory and is working on large-scale weather control projects. This was the case during the 2008 Olympic Games, when Chinese authorities announced that they could prevent rain during the opening ceremony by deploying “50,000 researchers, with a budget of 100 million dollars,” working on the issue.
In 2019, the official news agency Xinhua News Agency stated that “weather modification had helped ‘reduce by 70 percent the damage caused by hail in the western region of Xinjiang, a key agricultural area.’”
(translated from the French)
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