Dyeing the Antarctic

A distinguished physicist at Princeton, Hungarian by birth, drafted a plan based on an analysis of the world's weather --- something which in the 1980s was of great concern to the American public (some of his colleagues, who did not have the same excellent contacts in the White House and the Pentagon, said he had done it to get attention) --- to color the ice fields of the Arctic and Antarctic. A senior department head at the Pentagon, known as the "Prince of Darkness," expressed an interest in the project.

There was obviously potential (with respect to the opposing superpower) in being able to have a long-term influence on the weather. Military control of the world's climate, if demonstrable thanks to such a scheme, would mean a rapid increase in authority no matter what the new capacity might be good for.

The white surfaces of the poles reflect sunlight back into the coldness of space. If, however, the vast ice and snow expanses were to be colored (this would be done by spraying dust particles from aircraft), then the planet would "swallow" energy.

This pact between a scientific warrior and a financially solvent military apparatus foundered on a weakness characteristic of the diabolical. A demon can be distracted, that is, he can track no more than two and a half crises on the globe at any one time. Thus the plan, which would have heated up or cooled down the earth (we do not really know what effect a unilateral warming of both polar surfaces would have on world climate, since any effect produces a counter-effect somewhere else), failed due to the inconsistency of the Tempter, which is true of the majority of his pacts.