The Committee to Nuke Elysium

The city can be seen as a machine for living in, and one of its mechanisms is this: if I live in the city, an ambulance is fifteen minutes away, but if I live in the country, it’s fifty minutes away. Corrections to those numbers, like traffic density and stresses on the health provider, apply to both, but the simple fact is that the hospitals are in the big towns and cities, and the closer you are to the hospitals the better your chances are. Until the weather drowns the comms system or the land you’re on starts to slip due to a year’s worth of saturation or your town just ends up underwater. I paraphrased Bruce Sterling’s bit, while I was on my feet at the gig: the cities will be filled with old people who are afraid of the sky. But I recalled something else. Since the 1960s, Russia has been guaranteeing good weather for its Red Square parades and state holidays by controlling the weather. Here in England, in fact, it’s long been held that the Russians have pushed their rain this way. No-one ever called them on it, of course, because they were entirely capable of sending things larger and harder than rain through the air towards us instead. Also, obviously, we’re paranoid about rain. What is the international legality of that? I mean, if you could exert serious control over weather. Is there a legal framework for saving your cities from destructive weather by pushing that weather somewhere else? What’s the right of response if you find yourself suddenly deluged by the rainfall that nature had originally aimed at a city that couldn’t take it? Saving Wales by chucking eight feet of water at Ireland?