One of the peculiar things that happens up there on Mt. Washington and in the top of a thunderstorm is the formation of liquid water droplets, which are colder than freezing but they do not turn to ice. These droplets are said to be supercooled. Schaefer found in his experiments at General Electric that a small pellet of dry ice, the size of a pea, when dropped into air containing a cloud of supercooled water droplets could produce untold billions of small ice nuclei. So he carried some dry ice up in an airplane and dropped it into the top of a cloud with supercooled water droplets, and a trail of snow was seen falling from the bottom of the cloud. Many others tried the same experiment and some had similar results. The snow turned to rain as it came down to warmer levels, and the process was called “rainmaking.” There is one disturbing fact. Before dry ice will work on a cloud, it must be very near the point of making rain without any outside help. But many of the rainmakers believe that dry ice makes more rain fall or causes it to fall sooner than it would otherwise. Thus, as the cloud moves along, the rainmaker may be able to cause a shower in a certain place, whereas the cloud might have moved far away before it began to rain. In this story the important point is that some of the experimenters believe that dry ice or some other chemical will cause the rain to fall but will make it much less likely that nature’s process will develop to the point of producing hail. The news of all this rainmaking in the West aroused intense interest on the part of a young man named Gordon Clouser. He thought he might be able to prevent hail, and if he succeeded, he might stop tornadoes. In the Midwest there is an old story about a farmer who knocked the life out of a tornado by hitting it with a two-by-four. On hearing this story, many people have gotten the idea that the government might destroy a tornado by gunfire. More recently there have been serious proposals that these vicious local storms with funnel clouds and violent winds be destroyed by guided missiles. There is no evidence that any of the plans offered so far would be successful in breaking up hailstorms or tornadoes, but they are extremely small when compared with hurricanes, and the government has received thousands of proposals that these great storms be wiped out or rendered harmless by gunfire.