1994 is extremely out of date stuff. I heard HAARP was being operated
by private companies, the last one Israeli.
On Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:26:24 -0700 (PDT), jerry
<GeraldCNewton@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Project HAARP: The Military's Plan to Alter the Ionosphere
>
>by Clare Zickuhr and Gar Smith
>
>Fall 1994
>
>Clare Zickuhr, a former ARCO employee and ham radio operator based in
>Anchorage, is a founder of the NO HAARP campaign. Gar Smith is editor
>of the editor of Earth Island Journal.
>
>The Pentagon's mysterious HAARP project, now under construction at an
>isolated Air Force facility near Gakona, Alaska, marks the first step
>toward creating the world's most powerful "ionospheric heater."
>Scientists, environmentalists and native peoples are concerned that
>HAARP's electronic transmitters -- capable of beaming "in excess of 1
>gigawatts" (one billion watts) of radiated power into the Earth's
>ionosphere -- could harm people, endanger wildlife and trigger
>unforeseen environmental impacts.
>
>The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP), a joint
>effort of the Air Force and the Navy, is the latest in a series of a
>little-known Department of Defense (DoD) "active ionospheric
>experiments" with code-names like EXCEDE, RED AIR and CHARGE IV.
>
>"From a DoD point of view," internal HAARP do***ents state, "the most
>exciting and challenging" part of the experiment is "its potential to
>control ionospheric processes" for military objectives [emphasis in
>the original]. According to these do***ents, the scientists pulling
>HAARP's strings envision using the system's powerful 2.8-10 megahertz
>(MHz) beam to burn "holes" in the ionosphere and "create an artificial
>lens" in the sky that could focus large bursts of electromagnetic
>energy "to higher altitudes... than is presently possible." The
>minimum area to be heated would be 50 km (31 miles) in diameter.
>
>The initial $26 million, 320 kW HAARP project will employ 360 72-foot-
>tall antennas spread over four acres to direct an intense beam of
>focused electromagnetic energy upwards to strike the ionosphere. The
>Earth's ionosphere is composed of a layer of negatively and positively
>charged particles (electrons and ions) lying between 35 and 500 miles
>above the planet's surface. The next stage of the project would expand
>HAARP's power to 1.7 gigawatts (1.7 billion watts), making it the most
>powerful such transmitter on Earth. While the project's acronym
>implies experimentation with the Earth's aurora, HAARP's public
>do***ents make no mention of this aspect. For a project whose backers
>hail it as a major scientific feat, HAARP has remained extremely low-
>profile -- almost unknown to most Alaskans, and the rest of the
>country.
>
>A November 1993 "HAARP Fact Sheet" released to the public by the
>Office of Naval Research (ONR) stated that the Department of Defense
>(DoD)-backed project would "enhance present civilian capabilities" in
>communications and "provide significant scientific advancements."
>However, while previous DoD experiments with smaller high frequency
>(HF) heaters in Puerto Rico, Norway and Alaska were conducted to "gain
>[a] better understanding" of the ionosphere, internal HAARP do***ents
>obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that the
>project's goal is to "perturb" the ionosphere with extremely powerful
>beams of energy and study "how it responds to the disturbance and how
>it ultimately recovers...."
>
>The public fact sheet describes HAARP as "purely a scientific research
>facility which represents no threat to potential adversaries and would
>therefore have no value as a military target." However, while
>ionospheric experiments at the government's Puerto Rico transmitter
>site are managed by the civilian National Science Foundation, the
>Journal has learned that proposals for experiments on HAARP are to be
>routed through the Pentagon's Office of Naval Research.
>
>A February 1990 Air Force-Navy do***ent acquired by the Journal lists
>only military experiments for the HAARP project, including:
>"Generation of ionospheric lenses to focus large amounts of HF energy
>at high altitudes... providing a means for triggering ionospheric
>processes that potentially could be exploited for DoD purposes...;
>Generation of ionization layers below 90 km [56 miles] to provide
>radio wave reflectors ("mirrors") which can be exploited for long
>range, over-the-horizon, HF/VHF/UHF surveillance purposes, including
>the detection of cruise missiles and other low observables." The
>do***ent concluded that "the potential for significantly altering
>regions of the ionosphere at relatively great distances (1000 km or
>more ) [621 miles] from a heater is very desirable" from a military
>perspective.
>
>One of HAARP's less-publicized goals is to find ways to disrupt the
>global communications capabilities of adversaries while preserving US
>defense communications. The Pentagon also wants to know if HAARP could
>bounce signals to deeply submerged nuclear subs by heating the
>ionosphere to trigger bursts of Extremely Long Frequency (ELF) radio
>waves.
>
>Patents held by ARCO Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), the ARCO
>subsidiary that was contracted to build HAARP, describe a similar
>ionospheric heater invented by Bernard Eastlund that claimed the
>ability to disrupt global communications, destroy enemy missiles and
>change weather (see sidebar). One of ARCO's patents identifies Alaska
>as a perfect site for a transmitter because "magnetic field lines...
>which extend to desirable altitudes for this invention, intersect the
>Earth in Alaska."
>
>While HAARP officials deny any link to Eastlund's inventions, Eastlund
>has told National Public Radio that a secret military project was
>begun in the late-1980s to study and implement his work and, in the
>May/June 1994 issue of Microwave News, Eastlund claimed that "The
>HAARP project obviously looks a lot like the first step" toward his
>vision of surrounding the entire planet with a "full, global ****eld"
>of charged particles that could explode incoming enemy missiles.
>
>The military implications of HAARP were further underscored in June,
>when ARCO sold APTI to E-Systems, a defense contractor noted for its
>work in counter-surveillance.
>
>Electromagnetic Guinea Pigs
>
>HAARP surfaced publicly in Alaska in the spring of 1993, when the
>Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began advising commercial pilots
>on how to avoid the large amounts of intentional (and some
>unintentional) electromagnetic radiation that HAARP would generate.
>Despite the protests of FAA engineers and Alaska bush pilots (for whom
>reliable communications can be a matter of life or death) the Final
>Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) gave HAARP the green light.
>Ironically, the FEIS also concluded that the project's radio
>interference would be too intense to allow HAARP to be located near
>any military facilities.
>
>On November 11, 1993, Inupiat tribal advisor Charles Etok Edwarden,
>Jr., wrote to the White House on behalf of the Inupiat Community of
>the Arctic Slope and the Kasigluk Elders Conference. "Many of us are
>not happy with the prospect of ARCO altering the Earth's neutral
>atmospheric properties," Edwardsen wrote. "We do not wish to be
>anyone's testing grounds, as the Bikini Islanders have been...."
>referring to Pacific Islanders subjected to radiation exposure from US
>atomic bomb testing. Edwardsen has appealed to President Clinton to
>deny further funding to HAARP.
>
>In the past, the EPA has accused the USAF of "sidestepping" the
>nonthermal hazards of electromagnetic pollution from powerful radar
>transmitters. Over the past three decades, numerous US and European
>studies have linked electromagnetic exposure to a range of health
>problems including fatigue, irritability, sleepiness, memory loss,
>cataracts, leukemia, birth defects and cancer. Electromagnetic
>radiation can also alter blood sugar and cholesterol levels, heart-
>rate and blood pressure, brain waves and brain chemistry.
>
>Wildlife advocates also have cause to be concerned. The HAARP site
>lies 140 miles north of the town of Cordova on Prince William Sound,
>on the northwest tip of Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
>Since ordinary radar is known to be deadly to low- flying birds,
>HAARP's powerful radiation beam could pose a problem for migratory
>birds because the transmitter stands in the path of the critical
>Pacific Flyway. In addition, HAARP's ability to generate strong
>magnetic fields could conceivably interfere with the migration of
>birds, marine life and Arctic animals that are now known to rely on
>the Earth's magnetic fields to navigate over long distances.
>
>The HAARP fact sheet states that "most of the energy of the high-
>power beam would be emitted upward rather than toward the horizon."
>Later on, however, the fact sheet notes that care will have to be
>taken "to reduce the percentage of time large signal levels would be
>transmitted toward large cities." The closest large cities are
>Fairbanks and Anchorage.
>
>Even if HAARP's beam were to be directed primarily at the ionosphere,
>people on the ground would still have reason to be concerned.
>According to DoD consultant Robert Windsor, clear damp nights,
>downdrafts and temperature inversions can cause "ducting" and "super-
>refracting" that can send energy beams streaming back to Earth with "a
>significant -- up to tenfold -- increase in field intensity."
>
>In addition to their main beams, all electromagnetic transmitters
>produce large swaths of "sidelobe" radiation along their flanks. US-
>based PAVE PAWS over-the-horizon radars, for example, use
>approximately one megawatt of power to send a 420-430-megahertz (MHz)
>beam on a 3000-mile-long sweep. At the same time, the "incidental"
>sidelobe radiation from these Pentagon radars can disable TVs, radios,
>radar altimeters and satellite communications over a 250-mile range.
>PAVE PAWS radiation can also disrupt cardiac pacemakers seven miles
>away and cause the "inadvertent detonation" of electrically triggered
>flares and bombs in passing aircraft. At peak power, the energy
>driving HAARP could be more than a thousand times stronger than the
>most powerful PAVE PAWS transmitter.
>
>HAARP's High-Level Hazards
>
>HAARP project manager John Heckscher, a scientist at the Department of
>the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, has called concerns about the
>transmitter's impact "unfounded." "It's not unreasonable to expect
>that something three times more powerful than anything that's
>previously been built might have unforeseen effects," Heckscher told
>Microwave News. "But that's why we do environmental impact
>statements."
>
>The July 1993 EIS does, in fact, admit that HAARP is expected to cause
>"measurable changes in the ionosphere's electron density, temperature
>and structure," but argues that these disruptions are insignificant
>"when compared to changes induced by naturally occurring processes."
>
>Subjecting the ionosphere to HF bombardment can ionize the neutral
>particles in the upper atmosphere. The HAARP Fact Sheet notes that
>"ionospheric disturbances at high altitudes also can act to induce
>large currents in electric power grids" on the ground, causing massive
>power blackouts. According to the 1990 Air Force- Navy do***ent, power
>levels of one gigawatt and above "can drastically alter [the
>ionosphere's] thermal, refractive, scattering and emission character."
>While the ionosphere over the government's smaller HF transmitter in
>Puerto Rico is relatively "stable," the do***ent notes that the
>ionosphere above Alaska is "a dynamic entity" where added bursts of
>electromagnetic energy could trigger exaggerated effects.
>
>Writing in Physics and Society (the quarterly newsletter of the
>American Physical Society), Dr. Richard Williams, a consultant to
>Princeton University's David Sarnoff Laboratory, denounced ionospheric
>heating tests as irresponsible and potentially dangerous.
>
>"Trace [chemical] constituents in the upper atmosphere can have a
>profound effect" on the formation of ozone molecules, Williams stated.
>It is known that altering the temperature of the ionosphere can affect
>the chemical reactions that produce ozone. Referring to the Montreal
>Protocol (the international agreement to protect the ozone layer from
>ozone-depleting chemicals), Williams warned that activating HAARP's
>ionospheric heater "might undo all that we have accomplished with this
>treaty."
>
>"Look at the power levels that will be used -- 10**9 to 10**11 watts!"
>Williams told the Journal in a recent interview. "This is equivalent
>to the output of ten to 100 large power-generating stations. A ten-
>billion-watt generator, running continuously for one hour, would
>deliver a quantity of energy equal to that of a Hiro****ma-sized atomic
>bomb."
>
>"Of course," Williams added, "they will operate in a pulsed mode
>[producing a series of short, powerful bursts], rather than
>continuously." The HAARP fact sheet states that the HF beam, which
>operates in the 2.8-10 MHz band, will only be used 4-5 times a year
>for several weeks at a time over a 20-year period. Nonetheless,
>Williams argued, to proceed without a full public discussion of
>HAARP's potential impacts runs the risk of committing "an
>irresponsible act of global vandalism. With experiments on this
>scale," Williams concluded, "irreparable damage could be done in a
>short time. The immediate need is for open discussion."
>
>Dr. Daniel N. Baker, director of the University of Colorado's
>Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, offered a less- alarming
>*****sment. "The natural input of energy to the magnetosphere from the
>sun is very commonly 10**11 - 10**12 watts," Baker told the Journal.
>"Thus, HAARP may be a small fraction of the energy that flows into the
>region." Baker added that the ionosphere is, by nature, a "highly
>dynamic and fluctuating" environment that is able to "flush" away
>energy disturbances in a matter of hours or days.
>
>Of course, in nature, one cannot simply "flush" something away without
>anticipating potential "downstream" consequences. Caroline L.
>Herzenberg, an environmental systems engineer at the Argonne National
>Laboratory, has suggested that, by "changing the chemical composition
>of the atmosphere; [and] trans****ting plumes of particulates or plasma
>within the atmosphere," HAARP may violate the 1977 Environmental
>Modification Convention, which bans all "military or any other hostile
>use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-
>lasting, or severe effects...." The US ratified the convention in
>1979.
>
>"X-Raying" the Earth?
>
>On June 14, a Senate committee re****t noted that the Deputy Secretary
>of Defense had called for increasing HAARP funding from $5 million to
>$75 million in the 1996 defense budget. The sudden increase would be
>used to promote a disturbing new mission for HAARP.
>
>Instead of just pouring its vast energy into the skies, the
>transmitter's power would be aimed back at the planet to "allow earth-
>penetrating tomography over most of the northern hemisphere" -- in
>effect, turning HAARP into the world's most powerful "X-ray machine"
>capable of scanning regions hidden deep beneath the planet's surface.
>According to the Senate re****t, this would "permit the detection and
>precise location of tunnels... and other underground shelters. The
>absence of such a capability has been... a serious weakness for [DoD]
>plans for precision attacks on hardened targets...."
>
>Meanwhile, construction on the larger HAARP facility -- with a
>potential effective radiated power of 1.7 GW (1.7 billion watts) -- is
>set to begin in 1995. This expanded version would require additional
>funding from Congress. According to the 1990 project do***ent: "The
>desired world-class facility... will cost on the order of $25-30
>million." The Senate Committee's April re****t, however, predicts that
>the cost "could be as much as $90 million."
>
>What You Can Do
>
>Write Congress to demand a review of HAARP's environmental impacts.
>Request that the National Telecommunications and Information
>Administration [NITA, c/o US Department of Commerce, Wa****ngton, DC
>20230] reject the HAARP frequency/power request pending the outcome of
>a Congressional inquiry. Queries and contributions may be sent to NO
>HAARP c/o Jim Roderick, PO Box 916, Homer, AK 99603.
>
>"Visibility is a crude criterion for *****sing environmental
>damage.... An unprecedented amount of energy can produce an
>unprecedented reaction. Experimenting with [the ionosphere] is a very
>delicate thing. A localized event can spread around the Earth fairly
>quickly." -- Prof. Dick Williams
>
>Copyright 1995, Earth Island Journal. Articles may be freely reprinted
>with prior permission. Please credit Earth Island Journal and send
>samples.
>
>Clare Zickuhr, a former ARCO employee and ham radio operator based in
>Anchorage, is a founder of the NO HAARP campaign. Gar Smith is editor
>of the editor of Earth Island Journal.
|
