Conclusion -80- 



life by the President plus the secretaries of Defense, Interior, Agriculture, 

 and Commerce, or their designees. The bill was referred to the Committee 

 on Interstate & Foreign Commerce on October 8, 1951, and reported out 

 with amendments on May 12, 1952. 



The General Electric attitude toward legislation was summed up at 

 the above hearings by Vice President and Director of Research, C. G. Suits, 

 and by Schaefer and Vonnegut, who accompanied him to the hearings. Said 

 Suits, in part: 



"These facts which underlie experimental meteorology 

 are not in the controversial area; they have been demonstrated 

 and proven. What controversy has arisen has been concerned 

 with such matters as (1) the economic importance of induced 

 rainfall- -by 'induced rainfall' I mean artificially induced rain- 

 fall — (2) whether long-range effects of cloud seeding exist, 

 and (3) whether induced rainfall may not have occurred nat- 

 urally in the absence of seeding. There is a great mass of 

 information bearing on these questions, and it would not be 

 possible to discuss it all here. 



"It is my considered opinion, however, that the results of 

 the most recent work are of the very greatest importance to the 

 Nation. We have at hand a means of exerting a very considerable 

 degree of control of weather phenomena. Precisely how much 

 control can be accomplished will come from further study. Much 

 work remains to be done, and it would be a national tragedy if 

 legislation did not provide a proper frame work for developing 

 the full potentialities of weather modification methods. It would 

 be hard to imagine anything more important to the country than 

 weather modification and control." 



Another extract from the Suits statement: 



"I wish to be very clear on one point. The work my com- 

 pany has done in this field, initially at our own expense and more 

 recently under a Signal Corps contract with the participation 

 of the Office of Naval Research and the United States Air Force, 

 has had no single practical application within the Company. The 

 work originated as an unexpected result of one of the many fun- 

 damental investigations which we undertake in the search for 

 , new knowledge. It was continued because the leaders of my com- 

 pany and responsible representative of the Government believed 

 that the possibilities of weather modification might be of great 

 importance to the Nation as a whole. On December 27, 1950 my 



