Published in
Cara magazine...

Celestial Harping
"They're like boys playing with a sharp stick, finding a sleeping bear and poking it in the butt to see what's going to happen" The race is on to control the very sky above your head. There are those who would control that most fragile of shields which rests over all of our heads - the Ionosphere. The military research program you are about to read about sounds more like it comes from an episode of Star Trek than anything else and does much to confirm that when it comes to the military only truth is stranger than fiction.

The Ionosphere
Life on earth exists against all the odds, given the continual storm of deadly radiation which our own sun fires at us. Coming between us and this potentially lethal onslaught is an overhead protective shield, known as the Ionosphere. The 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.

Military Uses for the Ionosphere
"That's E.M.P., Electro-Magnetic Pulse, nuclear blast sends it out for miles; everything electronic shuts down, including choppers and radios. Hell, we just shut down Maguire's field communications - that ought to put a pretty little dent in their response time". So said John Travolta's villainous character, Deakins, in the recent movie "Broken Arrow" - as the pulse from a nearby nuclear blast tore a helicopter from the sky directly above his head and destroyed it, only seconds after all of the chopper's electronic communication and stabilisation systems had gone haywire, sending it spiraling out of control.
Military forces have for a long time known about the many effects of the Electro-Magnetic Pulse given off by nuclear blast. They should - they've been experimenting with them since the 1950s. In 1957 an American scientist, James Van Allen, discovered new layers of radiation even further out from the earth than the Ionosphere. These layers included huge amounts of charged particles which had been trapped by the earth's magnetic fields. These belts were named after their discoverer, as the Van Allen Belts, making Van Allen a household name.

t the time of their discovery there was a suspicion that the Van Allen Belts were not entirely natural, that they had, perhaps, been caused by Russian nuclear explosions - in an attempt by the Russians to interfere with, and ultimately take control of, the Ionosphere. US scientists at that time theorised that disrupting the Ionosphere could have two primary effects - complete disruption of radio communications and, possibly, establishment of an impenetrable force-field of charged particles which would shield against cruise missiles - by interfering with their delicate and sophisticated guidance systems.

To determine whether there was in fact any Communist intrigue afoot, and to test their theories on the effects of Ionospheric disruption, the US military decided to undertake their own tests - exploding nuclear devices in our upper atmosphere. The largest of these was over 1.4 megatons in size - a bomb about 100 times the size of the one which obliterated Hiroshima. That experiment was deemed to be scientific successes, with the resultant EMP creating very visible effects on the Ionosphere, such as the creation of spectacular atmospheric light effects over Hawaii, large-scale disruption of communications, destruction of the solar cells in the British satellite Ariel, and the complete knock-out of the electrical power system in Hawaii.

These tests proved that the Ionosphere could be used to cause a variety of effects with potential military application. But upper-atmosphere explosion of nuclear devices was a somewhat blunt instrument, and offered no easy way to accurately control the effect upon the Ionosphere, and came with a by-product, radioactive fall-out, which could harm friend and enemy alike. Despite these shortcomings the US military continued to show their interest in EMP as a weapon. In October 1990 US columnist Jack Anderson reported that US military commanders were considering the detonation of a nuclear weapon at high altitude over Iraq, to generate an EMP which would damage Iraq's electronics and communications.

EMP - Back on the Agenda
In the late eighties the Atlantic Richfield Co., ARCO, contracted a physicist, Bernard Eastlund, to come up with some ideas for making productive use of the many billions of cubic meters of gas they were producing in Alaskan oil fields, and for which they had no use. They had already examined the possibility of piping it into mainland US but determined that it would be far too expensive.

Eastlund proposed that they use this massive energy resource to create a huge mass of radio waves which could be directed at the upper atmosphere, filling the Van Allen Belts with high energy particles, and effectively simulating some of the effects of an Electro Magnetic Pulse. He suggested that these particles would confuse the guidance systems of Soviet cruise missiles which would have to pass over the Pole in the event of a nuclear strike on the US. ARCO were excited, but not as excited as the US military who immediately pricked their ears to what Eastlund had to say - EMP was back on the agenda.

Quite apart from the availability of a huge and inexpensive energy resource in the form of ARCO's unwanted gas, Alaska's geographic location made it ideal for this sort of experimentation. Because of it's proximity to the North Pole, Alaskan skies play host to one of the most spectacular natural phenomenon known to man - the Aurora Borealis.

The Aurora Borealis
The Earth's upper atmosphere is continually battered by a mass of superheated gas which is spewed out from our sun, carrying with it masses of negatively and positively charged ions - described in a recent "Time" article as "millions of tons of matter moving (towards the Earth) at 1.6 kilometers an hour".

As this "solar wind" nears our Earth it first encounters the Magnetosphere, the outer reaches of the magnetic field which surrounds our planet. The Magnetosphere operates as a giant umbrella, deflecting most of these deadly particles around the earth. Many, however, get through. Some become trapped in the belts of radiation surrounding the earth, the Van Allen Belt. Others continue Earthwards and are stopped by the Ionosphere, which prevents them from reaching the planet's surface and everything on it - protecting from what would be lethal effects. Still more get sucked down by the magnetic field at the North Pole, causing spectacular light displays by exciting oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere - these spectacular and ever changing light displays over Alaska are known as Aurora Borealis, or "Northern Lights".

The Northern Lights over Alaska mirror the extreme turbulence at this point in the Ionosphere, which is much less stable there than over other parts of the world. The Ionosphere also dips much closer to the earth over the North Pole than anywhere else on earth. The proximity of the Ionosphere to the earth over the Pole greatly reduces the energy required to inject radio waves into the Ionosphere, whilst it's greater instability makes it easier for relatively small injections of energy to cause disproportionately large disruptions in the Ionosphere over the Pole.

Ionospheric Heaters
Getting a go ahead from ARCO to explore the idea further, Eastlund immediately began to work on patenting his ideas, building in details of any possible applications his proposal might have. ARCO eventually got the US military so interested that one of their subsidiary companies, APTI, were contracted to build a device designed to try out some of Eastlund's ideas. In 1993 APTI began construction of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska with funding from the US Air Force and US Navy. HAARP is a device known as an Ionospheric Heater

An Ionospheric Heater is really just a very large radio transmitter designed to heat up small sections of the Ionosphere. It does this by employing the same effect a microwave oven uses to heat and cook food - the radio frequencies cause the particles in the ionosphere to vibrate and rub against one another, causing a generation of heat. The major difference between your microwave oven and an ionospheric heater is that the beam of radio frequencies output from HAARP is many millions of times more powerful, and the beam can be very accurately focused and directed - to any spot the in the ionosphere the users require.

HAARP was not the first Ionospheric Heater. A number of installations have been in use in the former Soviet Union, Norway, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Some commentators have connected the depletion in the ozone layer in the Southern hemisphere with the operation of similar devices in the former USSR. Whilst HAARP was not the first Ionospheric Heater, it was designed to be the largest one ever built - much more powerful than earlier similar devices.

The HAARP ionospheric heater will eventually comprise more than 100 separate antenna, each about seventy feet tall, and will cover at least thirty acres. The physical scale of the project is stunning, and even as a piece of scientific sculpture HAARP is quite striking, particularly at dusk, when the colourful Alaskan sky causes dramatic reflections across the field of shiny antennae. HAARP is not one of those secret so-called "black budget" projects. It is openly funded by the US Navy and US Air Force it is described officially as: "...a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes."

But many major figures in the scientific community; many Alaskans living in the shadow of HAARP; the native Indian population of Alaska who are concerned about the effect of HAARP on their environment; a growing anti-HAARP protest group and others have speculated that the project may have more to do with military objectives than "scientific study of the Ionosphere". The range of uses to which HAARP can potentially be put seems to grow daily, if those in the scientific community opposed to HAARP are anything to go by.

POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS OF HAARP:
Missile Shield
As mentioned earlier, by injecting high levels of charged particles into the ionosphere the guidance systems of cruise missiles could be confused such that hey are rendered useless. The heating effect is also purported to raise the portion of the Ionosphere it is heating, exposing incoming missiles to unexpected drag forces which could cause self-detonation. Both of these effects provide an effective invisible shield against nuclear attack. As shown by the destruction of the British satellite Ariel in the 1957 nuclear test a device which could recreate the effects of an EMP could also effectively knock out communications satellites, although satellite manufacturers like Hughes Aircraft in the US have already announced a new generation of EMP-proof satellites.

Communications Disruption
The first thing to go when the Ionosphere is flooded with charged particles is the ability of the Ionosphere to bounce communications signals back and forth. This would have been the intent in considering detonation of a nuclear device over Iraq in 1990. Some scientists claim that devices like HAARP could, however, also allow the creators of such communications disruption to establish their own medium which could be used to hold up their communications capabilities despite the chaos they may have wreaked on the communications capabilities of their intended targets.

Weather control and modification
In his patents Eastlund included weather modification and control in the large number of applications he foresaw when he applied for his patents. Weather modification is already a well established, if controversial, practice in the US, particularly in some of the drier states. To induce rain in these states rainmakers "seed" clouds with flares loaded with chemicals, to increase the presence of certain chemical elements in the upper atmosphere. Weather modification sounds futuristic, but it does have a pedigree as a political weapon. According to a book on Cuba by Warren Hinckle and William Turner the CIA deployed futuristic weather modification technology to ravage Cuba's 1970 sugar crop, undermining the Cuban economy. US planes purportedly overflew the island, seeding the clouds with crystals which caused torrential rains and killer floods over non-agricultural areas and left Cuban cane fields arid.

Atmospheric heaters like HAARP also have the capability to change the chemical composition of those portions of the upper atmosphere it excites. By heating the upper atmosphere concentrations of chemical components like Ozone or Nitrogen can be modified, resulting in a variety of meteorological effects. Indeed in a variety of semi-secret projects over the past twenty years the US military is even purported to have experimented with the manipulation of lightning and hurricanes.

"Non-lethal" Weaponry
Military forces worldwide have been focusing much of their attention in recent years in the development of what they call "non-lethal weaponry" . The title itself is something of a contradiction in terms. The "non-lethal" term is used to referred to a very wide range of relatively new weapons, which are not designed to kill, but rather to subdue or control (although used incorrectly they are just as lethal as any other weapons).

The "non-lethal" term covers weapons like plastic bullets, familiar to many for their use in Northern Ireland; sticky foam guns which project a highly viscous foam which is designed to cover the victim and completely immobilise them; pepper and CS gases (in controversial use now by Police in Britain); bullet replacements consisting of small plastic and rubber sacks, and Electro Magnetic Pulse weapons. Rumours of prototypes for EMP based weapons have littered the press in recent years, with claims of huge investments in their development. When they do become commonplace they will have more in common with Captain Kirk's "phaser" than with any current projectile-based weapons.

It is already well-established that excess exposure to electromagnetic radiation can cause confusion, nausea, disorientation and mood swings. The most common public face of the effects of EMP are the many cases documented in the press of cases where residents living close to radio transmitters or high-tension electricity pylons have taken legal suits against the owners of those installations. A wide variety of conditions in humans and animals are being blamed on this radiation - these include cancers of various kinds, leukemia, birth defects, fatigue, memory loss and others. It has been established by the scientific community that EMP can certainly cause difficulties with heart rate, cholesterol levels, blood pressure and brain wave activity, and there is no doubt that there is research afoot to produce weaponry which will take advantage of these "qualities".
Over 25 years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to US President Jimmy Carter, and a well respected political scientist, writer and commentator wrote: "Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behaviour...accurately timed, artificially excited electronic strokes 'could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the earth...In this way, one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period...'...the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades". We've had 25 years since that statement to move this technology forward. Those responsible for HAARP deny outright that any of it's objectives relate to the production of weaponry of any kind.

Ground Penetrating Radar
The US military have been working for many years to try to perfect a radar device which would allow them to distinguish features many tens of meters underground. This sort of capability would allow remote verification of arms agreements and assessment of potential military capability, by providing the wherewithal to "see" missiles in subterranean silos. HAARP can be used to excite the Ionosphere such that it reflects Extremely Low Frequency waves back at the surface of the Earth. These waves penetrate the earth, reflecting off any feature they encounter underground. The first time HAARP was tested for this capability it was extremely successful - sensors on the surface allowed scientists to accurately view old mine tunnels up to thirty meters underground

"Poking the sleeping bear"
There is no doubt that some of the potential applications for HAARP are laudable. What's more, technologists will readily point out that many of the advanced technologies whose benefits we all enjoy are the result of the spin-offs from the huge spend by major military powers on projects such as HAARP. But you're bound to wonder whether anyone should be allowed to interfere with the balance of something quite as vital to the survival of the human race as the Ionosphere? Many say not.