HAARP: The Military's Plan to Alter the Ionosphere
by Clare Zickuhr and Gar Smith
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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 documents 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 documents, 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 documents 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 documents 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 document 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 document 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 shield" 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 document, 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
document 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
Hiroshima-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 assessment. "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] transporting 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 report 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 report, 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
document: "The desired world-class facility... will cost on the order
of $25-30 million." The Senate Committee's April report, 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, Washington, 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 assessing 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.
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