10.07
Supporters
Power emitted
The critics’ views have been rejected by HAARP’s defenders, who have pointed out that the amount of energy at the project’s disposal is minuscule compared to the colossal energies dumped into the atmosphere by solar radiation and thunderstorms. A University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute scientist has compared the HAARP to an “immersion heater in the Yukon River.”
Since the ionosphere is inherently a chaotically turbulent region, HAARP’s defenders state any artificially induced changes would be “swept clean” within seconds or minutes at the most. Ionospheric heating experiments performed at the Arecibo Observatory’s ionospheric heater and incoherent scatter radar have shown that after periods of modification (up to an hour), the ionosphere returns to normal within about the same period of time it had been heated.
Open activities
Furthermore, supporters of HAARP argue that its activities have been, since its establishment, extremely open. All activities are logged and publicly available. Scientists without security clearances, even foreign nationals, are routinely allowed on site. The HAARP facility regularly hosts open houses, during which time any civilian may tour the entire facility.
In addition, scientific results obtained with HAARP are routinely published in major research journals (such as Geophysical Research Letters, or Journal of Geophysical Research), written both by university scientists (American and foreign) or by US Department of Defense research lab scientists.
Weapon
The objectives of the HAARP project became the subject of controversy in the mid-1990s, following claims that the antennas could be used as a weapon. A small group of American physicists aired complaints in scientific journals such as Physics and Society, charging that the HAARP could be seeking ways to destroy or disable enemy spacecraft or disrupt communications over large portions of the planet. The physicist critics of the HAARP have had little complaint about the project’s current stage, but have expressed fears that it could in the future be expanded into an experimental weapon, especially given that its funding comes from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
These concerns were amplified by Bernard Eastlund, a physicist who developed some of the concepts behind the HAARP in the 1980s and proposed using high-frequency radio waves to energize the ionosphere in order to disable incoming missiles, thus “knocking out” out enemy satellite communications. The US military became interested in the idea as an alternative to the laser-based Strategic Defense Initiative[dubious – discuss]. However, Eastlund’s ideas were eventually dropped as SDI itself mutated into the more limited National Missile Defense of today. The contractors selected to build HAARP have denied that any of Eastlund’s patents were used in the development of the project.
After the physicists raised early concerns, the controversy was stoked by local activism. In September 1995, a book entitled Angels Don’t Play This HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology by Nick Begich Jr., son of Congressman Nick Begich and brother of Senator Mark Begich, claimed that the project in its present stage could be used for “geophysical warfare”.
In August 2002, a critical mention of HAARP technology came from the State Duma (parliament) of Russia. The Duma issued a press release on the HAARP written by the international affairs and defense committees, signed by 90 deputies and presented to then President Vladimir Putin. The statement claimed:
The U.S. is creating new integral geophysical weapons that may influence the near-Earth medium with high-frequency radio waves … The significance of this qualitative leap could be compared to the transition from cold steel to firearms, or from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons. This new type of weapons differs from previous types in that the near-Earth medium becomes at once an object of direct influence and its component.
However, given the timing of the Russian intervention, it is possible that it was related to a controversy at the time concerning the US withdrawal in June 2002 from the Russian-American Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This high level concern is paralleled in the April 1997 statement by the U.S. Secretary of Defense over the power of such electromagnetic weaponry. Russia owns and operates an ionospheric heater system as powerful as the HAARP, called ‘Sura,’ which is located roughly 150 km (93 mi) from the city of Nizhny Novgorod.