These limitations would drastically affect Project STORMFURY, an ambitious hurricane modification program conducted from 1962 through 1983 by the Weather Bureau (eventually the NOAA), the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation. The basic idea behind STORMFURY was to heat the atmosphere over a greater distance from the hurricane’s eye, reducing the pressure gradient near the center of the storm, thereby reducing its wind speed. To achieve that end, scientists seeded the clouds away from the storm’s core with silver iodide (AgI), whose crystals are an especially efficient freezing nuclei, causing supercooled water droplets to change to ice crystals. By inducing freezing of the supercooled water held in the upper clouds away from the storm’s eye, a sufficient quantity of latent heat might be released to reduce noticeably the surface pressure gradient.

On August 19, 1963, Hurricane Beulah formed east of the Lesser Antilles. By August 24, the storm had been seeded twice, its maximum winds dropping by more than thirty knots. The cyclone’s eye wall dissipated, then re-formed ten miles farther away from the center of the storm. Unfortunately, a causal relationship could not be established, and STORMFURY, strangled by the new seeding restrictions, eventually lost all funding.

It wasn’t until 2016 that President Ennis Chaney reestablished funding for these vital experiments. Years later, three scientists would unite to take STORMFURY’s experiments one step further.

Essentially, a hurricane is fueled by the latent heat released by the condensation of water vapor to liquid cloud droplets. STORMFURY’s scientists chose to draw the hurricane’s latent heat away from the eye, hoping to disrupt its vortex by spreading its energy out over a greater distance. Dr. Lowell Krawitz, a meteorologist at MIT, wanted to attack the power train of the cyclone at its source by cooling the interior eye wall, thereby inhibiting condensation and convection. His delivery system—the Navy’s antiquated fleet of Trident nuclear submarines. Under Krawitz’s plan, vertical missile silos that once held Trident D-5 nuclear missiles would be refitted and converted into pressurized ejection systems, powered by the subs’ nuclear reactors. By ascending within a super-cane’s eye while still at sea, a cooling agent could be injected directly into the eye wall. While stopping a hurricane was not feasible, reducing its wind speed from 200 to 130 miles an hour would reduce its energy by more than 50 percent—something that could save countless lives and billions of dollars should the cyclone ever reach land.

What Dr. Krawitz needed was a compound that would both cool and expand.

Enter Dr. David Mohr and his colleague, Barry Perlman, two scientists who had spent the last twenty years working on liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engines. Together, they had developed several variants of cryogenic nitrogen gas used to cool fuels. A chance meeting with Dr. Krawitz led them to experiment with a nitrogen-hybrid gas, which, when introduced to a lower pressure region, would expand exponentially as it cooled.