Earlier this year, a spate of news stories in the United Kingdom featured the so-called “weaponization” of solar geoengineering, conjuring up a future in which Vladimir Putin attacks the country with a targeted stratospheric injection aimed at causing an environmental disaster. Not only is such a scenario currently unlikely from a scientific and technical point of view, it also distracts from a conversation about managing the more realistic security dynamics related to Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), techniques designed to cool the planet artificially by reflecting sunlight back into space. Research, development, and potential future deployment of climate interventions like SRM face a range of security challenges, including conspiracy theories and disinformation, intersections with existing tensions over transboundary resources, and the potential to deepen fissures in the already fractured geopolitical environment.
Recognizing these security risks does not amount to rejecting SRM, just as noting the risks of the energy transition does not justify clinging to fossil fuels. Instead, these security dynamics must be better understood, prepared for, and managed by both security actors and those funding and conducting SRM research.
Climate Change Today
First, a reminder of the current state of the climate crisis. Mother Nature needs no help from Putin in causing environmental harm in the United Kingdom or elsewhere. Climate change-driven hazards regularly compound domestic and international security risks to the country. For example, in 2022, record-breaking heatwaves and wildfires in the United Kingdom led to almost 3000 heat-related deaths and a 500% increase in public emergency response requests; the heat melted the runway at the military’s busiest airbase, and wildfires interrupted military training missions. Every year gets worse; the summer of 2025 was the hottest on record in the country, and across Europe, wildfires burned more than 1 million hectares, resulting in military deployments across the continent. Experts assess that climate change will increasingly threaten the UK’s food security, critical infrastructure, and overall economic well-being.
Militaries and security institutions already warn of grave climate consequences for their operations and broader security interests. In 2022, NATO called climate change the defining challenge of our time, and in 2024, the now-UK Deputy Prime Minister argued, “The threat [of climate change] may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or an imperialist autocrat. But it is more fundamental. It is systemic. It’s pervasive. And accelerating towards us at pace.”
This grave trajectory – and security institutions’ ongoing concerns regarding climate change – underscore the importance of evaluating the security dynamics surrounding SRM while also remaining mindful of the security risks posed by climate change itself.
Limitations of SRM as a Weapon
From a technical perspective, it is currently unlikely that a country could or would choose to weaponize solar geoengineering. Militaries are generally interested in precise tools that can reliably be targeted against enemies; as Josh Horton notes, SRM does not meet this definition.
In choosing to deploy solar geoengineering in the future, a country might ignore or accept potential negative effects of the technology on other countries or regions, but that is a different scenario from proactive weaponization. Regardless, the world is far from an imminent deployment of such technologies, and there are important security considerations related to research and experimentation that should be considered today. First, however, it’s necessary to understand the basic approaches to climate intervention that are most frequently discussed related to solar geoengineering, or Solar Radiation Modification (SRM).
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, or SAI, would involve releasing tiny particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet. Current research on SAI almost exclusively happens via computer modeling, though very limited real-world experiments have now been funded by the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. While more research is needed to fully understand the unintended secondary effects of SAI, including potential changes to the hydrological cycle, deliberately causing an environmental catastrophe in a specific, targeted geography via SAI would likely be difficult. Given the other options militaries or countries have at their disposal to cause harm, the slowness and uncertainty of SAI make it an unlikely choice of weapon, particularly given that a government could not deploy it without also affecting its own territory.
A more localized type of SRM, Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), is an effort to increase the reflective power of clouds that must be deployed in the location that an actor is trying to affect. Again, this would be difficult for a foreign actor to deploy proactively against another country, given the need for ships, port access, and other logistics, and MCB impacts dissipate relatively quickly if not sustained over time. Research suggests large-scale, aggressive MCB could have cascading secondary effects on the atmosphere and possible impacts in far-away geographies, though this would be difficult to harness or “weaponize” against a particular country or target. Australian researchers have minimally tested MCB through outdoor experiments aimed at protecting the Great Barrier Reef, but by and large, MCB is also mostly in early research stages.
Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique that sometimes erroneously gets lumped in with SAI and MCB under the generic term “geoengineering.” Cloud seeding is different in scale and scope, a short-term intervention to adjust rainfall or snowpack, and it is regularly deployed by national and sub-national governments, as well as private sector actors worldwide. The US military’s attempts to use cloud seeding on the battlefield in Vietnam led to the eventual adoption of the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), which bans the weaponization of weather modification. Even so, suspicions remain high about the technology, and it is often falsely blamed for extreme weather events.
SRM in a Fraught Security Context
Like all responses to climate change, SRM research, development, and potential deployment will both shape and be shaped by the broader international security context, which includes sharpening strategic competition, the sidelining of multilateral institutions, and an inward, nationalist turn by many states. Earlier this year, the Munich Security Conference argued we are living in a world of “multipolarization” – where more states and actors than ever before can influence global events, yet polarization between and within states makes tackling global challenges together more difficult than ever. The UK’s 2025 Strategic Defense Review noted the threats facing the world are “more serious and more unpredictable” than at any time since the Cold War, highlighting Russian aggression. Meanwhile, the United States’ volatile leadership, including economic and political attacks against traditional allies and international institutions, has further scrambled the geopolitical chessboard.
A related characteristic of today’s strategic environment is the prevalence of hybrid or grayzone threats, where actors regularly leverage disinformation, cyber threats, economic warfare, and covert infrastructure attacks against perceived enemies or competitors. The European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats notes that states like Russia and China pursue hybrid threats because they are, “…a cost-efficient way to achieve [their] objectives and affect the processes and institutions of democratically governed states. Hybrid threat actors seek to avoid both accountability for, and countermeasures against, their hostile activities.” In many cases, hybrid threat approaches rely on civilian actors or research to mask state activity. This is another significant complication of today’s security environment into which SRM enters.
Implications for SRM Security Dynamics
What does this backdrop mean for the security dynamics of SRM? Security actors, many of whom currently lack understanding of SRM’s technological parameters, may view nascent SRM research efforts suspiciously and as escalatory. Opaque research efforts, especially those that involve military or intelligence actors or infrastructure, will be of most concern. Three concerning security dynamics that emerge at the nexus of today’s security landscape and SRM include: the prevalence of conspiracy theories and disinformation, the exacerbation of existing transboundary resource tensions, and the deepening of fissures between states in an already fractured geopolitical environment.
Conspiracy Theories and Disinformation
Long a fringe conspiracy theory in the United States, the false claim that airplanes are releasing toxic chemicals through contrails (i.e., “chemtrails”), has gained traction in more mainstream domestic politics in recent years. Florida and Tennessee have passed legislation to ban “geoengineering,” while at the federal level, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has introduced similar legislation in the US Congress, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has given credence to the theory in press interviews and on social media.
While ignoring or dismissing such uninformed and false claims is tempting, they have serious security implications, particularly when advocated by senior government officials. Domestic disinformation on geoengineering in the United States amplifies and provides opportunities for foreign malign influence from Russia and China. As mentioned earlier, Russia regularly propagates false theories regarding US weather weapons and has launched online social media campaigns to undermine its neighbors’ responses to extreme weather events. China, meanwhile, ran a clandestine social media campaign after the Maui wildfires in 2023, blaming a US military weather weapon for the blazes. Underscoring the connection between domestic and foreign disinformation, when a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson was asked about this campaign, she deflected, claiming the theory about ‘weather weapons” came from the United States first.
False claims related to geoengineering also contribute to domestic extremism and violence. In the United States, meteorologists report increasing harassment and death threats from people who believe government weather modification is creating storms, while the anti-government militia organization, Veterans on Patrol, has threatened attacks against National Weather Service (NWS) infrastructure because they believe NWS Doppler radar stations are “weather weapons.” In the wake of the devastating flooding in Texas in July 2025, Veterans on Patrol founder Michael Meyer posted the following on his Telegram channel: “Due to the recent weather weapon deployed against Texas, which resulted in a high number of child murders, efforts to eliminate this military treason are being escalated.” The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has warned its personnel to be on high alert to these threats, and an Oklahoma radar station was attacked and knocked offline in early July.
Exacerbating Existing Transboundary Resource Tensions
SRM research and development also intersect with existing transboundary resource tensions, particularly over water. Though agreements over shared water basins have historically contributed to peace in many locales, as climate change alters water tables and precipitation patterns, new strains among and within countries are growing. The Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology finds that violent incidents linked to water resources are rising globally. Take South Asia, for example, where China, India, and Pakistan share multiple major river basins, and climate change is already increasing both drought risk and flooding in different parts of the region. This year, water became a particular point of tension between India and Pakistan after New Delhi “suspended its obligations” under the Indus Water Treaty in response to terrorist attacks in Kashmir, and Pakistan accused India of “weaponizing” water during late August and early September by opening dams on shared rivers during extreme precipitation. Meanwhile, India has long accused China of worsening downstream droughts and floods by manipulating water levels in rivers through its extensive dam-building.
Given the uncertainty around how SRM deployments may affect the South Asian monsoon and precipitation more generally, perceptions about other regional actors’ SRM-related activities could further exacerbate these tensions. India’s accusations about China’s cloud seeding and weather modification programs preview such dynamics. Last year, India’s defense minister suggested that the increase in natural disasters in states along the India-China border might be the result of Chinese interventions, stating, “Many experts believe that these natural disasters are an outcome of climate change. Climate change in the country is not just a weather-related phenomenon; the matter is related to national security. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has taken it very seriously and will seek help from friendly countries to study and rule out any involvement of any enemy country on this issue.”
More broadly, the international relations literature on escalation dynamics is instructive for understanding how SRM research and development might shape security relations among rival states. Robert Jervis’s Perception and Misperception in International Politics highlights two models: the “spiral” model, where mutual misperceptions drive inadvertent conflict, and the “deterrence” model, where threats fail to restrain aggression. State-led SRM research could trigger similar intra-state dynamics, with mistrust fueling miscalculation, aggressive behavior in other domains, or even hasty or ill-conceived deployment.
Deepening Geopolitical Fissures
In an era of increased geopolitical competition and intensifying climate-driven hazards, Western or Global North approaches to SRM have the potential to further drive divisions and make cooperation on other security or international challenges more difficult.
With development budgets shrinking and commitments to climate finance retreating, low income countries (LICs) increasingly regard many high-income, developed countries as unreliable partners. That frustration already manifests in geopolitics—whether in votes against European and US positions on Ukraine, closer ties among countries in Africa and Latin America with Russia and China, or the expansion of generally anti-Western blocs like the BRICS. If SRM is perceived as another project that serves the North while endangering the South, it could deepen or harden these fractures. In July, at the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN), African environment ministers signaled opposition to solar geoengineering, calling for a non-use agreement. They stated, “such technologies pose significant and uncertain environmental, ethical, and geopolitical risks, and must not be considered as viable options within the multilateral environmental agenda.”
There is a less discussed, alternative geopolitical dynamic that is also worth considering: If wealthy countries are seen as gatekeeping a technology that might protect vulnerable communities, it could reinforce the charge of hypocrisy. This flips the traditional SRM moral hazard critique, which argues SRM distracts from cutting emissions, on its head: if SRM could offer near-term relief to those bearing the brunt of climate disasters, how can rich countries justify standing in the way? Geopolitically, a restrictive approach by the West could offer opportunities for China or others to step in to propose partnerships with LICs on SRM research and development. This dynamic has already played out in the development context, with China swooping in to take over key programs that the United States has abandoned after dismantling USAID.
The bottom line is that if LICs or developing country governments perceive the developed world’s approach (whether supportive or oppositional) to SRM as unhelpful to their countries, it is not only a justice and equity challenge, but also a security and geopolitical one.
A Path Forward
Managing and minimizing risks from these dynamics requires understanding how and when SRM might affect geopolitics, contribute to conflict or escalation miscalculations, or fuel destabilizing disinformation. The SRM research and advocacy community must not shy away from engaging with and analyzing security issues but instead face them head-on, and seek collaboration with academics, analysts, and practitioners in the international relations (IR) and security fields who can bring different insights and perspectives to the conversation. Failing to manage or anticipate these dynamics may derail the research programs the community advocates for.
At the same time, military and security actors must be educated on the technical parameters of SRM to form a realistic assessment of how such technology fits into the broader security landscape. As this technology develops, state deliberations about SRM programs will inevitably include military and security stakeholders. Their perspectives must be rooted in a firm scientific baseline. Shaping that scientific baseline to minimize security and geopolitical concerns of the type outlined above will require transparency in SRM research programs, which should be civilian-led and include efforts to build capacity in LICs.
The geopolitical and security landscape will remain fraught in the years ahead, with climate change as a persistent driver of instability. These dynamics cannot be ignored or wished away, but neither should solar radiation management be baselessly cast as an emerging weapon. Such framings risk distorting policy debates and entrenching counterproductive narratives. A more constructive path lies in adopting a balanced, sober assessment of how SRM research intersects with global security concerns—acknowledging the risks while avoiding exaggeration—in order to foster approaches that are both pragmatic and responsible.