Chapter Seventeen
NUCLEAR EXCAVATION - CREATING THE BAY


The University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in its zeal for recognition as a leader in geophysics and engineering, has a marred history. "Project Chariot" was a program proposed as part of "Project Plowshare" which was designed to find peaceful uses for nuclear energy. This project was researched by Dan O'Neill and reported in his 1994 book, The Firecracker Boys.

 

The project was promoted by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, which planned to detonate six thermonuclear bombs underground to excavate a harbor at Cape Thompson, Alaska. The plan of the project organizers was that if this application of nuclear technology could be tested on United States soil these technologies could be easily promoted in other friendly countries. This would enable, for example, easy excavation of a new Suez or Panama Canal, both of which were in the minds of program planners. Project Plowshare was another Jules Verne story which was only too true.

The idea that a few activists could stop these types of experiments, even during the peak of the "Cold War", was amazing. Equally outstanding are the ongoing efforts of "NO HAARP" members in slowing and perhaps preventing the environmental vandalism contemplated by these new military planners.

  • Is the HAARP project another error in the judgment of the military, using the University and others in Alaska?

  • Are they playing with the same incredible level of power that Edward Teller tried to sell Alaska in the past with Project Plowshare?

Dr. Teller returned to Alaska in 1987 to promote the Star Wars defense initiative. He was proposing to install a laser-like weapon on the North Slope of Alaska, These new system details were not openly discussed, because "Star Wars" systems are classified. From the tone, and content, of his presentations however, we deduce that what he was promoting in 1987 may have been a new and complex weapon system the HAARP project.

When Dr. Bernard Eastlund, the inventor of much of the innovative HAARP technology, described his ideas they sounded a lot like Star Wars. He said his invention would allow many of the same effects achieved with satellite deployed systems, but from the ground.

 

The use of ground, rather than satellite systems, was explained by Eastlund in a recent interview when he said,

"In other words, you radiate energy up there in such a way that you accelerate the electrons without using a machine up there. That's the advantage" 167.

This allows steering, focusing, modulating, and otherwise manipulating, to the will of the operator, provided the operator knows the frequencies and wave forms necessary to change the electromagnetic structure of ionospheric chemicals and conditions. The ability to manipulate the ionosphere is critical to a planetary shield, which was one of the applications defined by Dr. Eastlund and referred to in his, and the other, patents assigned to APTI.

167 Interview with Dr. Eastlund by Jeane Manning, February 20, 1995.

The advantage of a ground based system is its limited vulnerability to attack. To position a ground based Star Wars system within the United States would mean that a country wishing to destroy it would have to enter the territory of the United States, which would be an overt act of war. The use of this system will have possible ramifications throughout the world.

 

Those transmitters already operating have been reported by some to have had negative effects beyond the borders of the countries using them. 168,169

 

168 Scorched Earth: The Military's Assault on the Environment, by William Thomas, New Society Publishers, Chapter 11.

169 Super-Memory: The Revolution, by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, pages 292-304.

 

Even though firing up these new heaters would violate the interests of the majority of humans on the planet, by impinging on internationally recognized free spaces, the project moves forward in the interest of "science" and one country's "national security".

 

At whose expense, and under whose control, is the naturally occurring global shield - the ionosphere - being vandalized?

Eastlund went on to talk about his patents and what he envisioned by putting so much energy into the ionosphere. He discussed creating a "mirror" and bouncing radio waves off of it in order to gain a number of effects. These are the same effects described in the February 1990 HAARP document170 put out by the military and in a later 1991 report buried by them171.

 

In these two reports they disclosed the development of an "Artificial Ionospheric Mirror (AIM)". In fact, a careful reading of the Eastlund patents and the nine other patents uncovered in our research and the HAARP Documents read as though they were written by the same person.

 

As Eastlund said,

"If you read my patent, one of the things I do is put a burst up and make the mirror, and there's a way of doing a lot of things with a ground-based system. At the time, SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars) was a very big program. Everybody wanted to put things up in space to do these things; this was a real alternative approach to it, a ground based system." 172

Dr. Eastlund's system was Star Wars without the vulnerability of satellites, but with a lot of other implications. In August 1991, Peter Koert was granted a patent for a system which could produce an Artificial Ionospheric Mirror composed of a plasma layer which could be tilted. In his patent he cites the earlier work of Dr. Eastlund. 173

 

Koert was also one of the "key personnel" identified in the contracts between APTI and the United States military for building the HAARP transmitter. 174 The HAARP system provides a "proof-of-concept" system for demonstrating this technology. The patent issued to Koert was one of several of his patents useful to the HAARP project, all of which were assigned to APTI, as shown in the United States government's own records.
 

170 HAAR PHF Active Auroral Research Program, Joint Program Plans and Activities, AirForce Geophysics Laboratory, Navy Office of Naval Research, February 1990.
171 PL/GP Technical Memorandum No.195; "Presentations from the HAARP Workshop on Ionospheric Heating Diagnostics, 30 April - 2 May1991, Phillips Laboratory (AFSC), Hanscom AFB, MA. 01731-5000"; Editor, Major Drew Fisher; October 22,1991.

172 Interview with Dr. Eastlund by Jeane Manning, February 20,1995.

173 United States Patent Number 5,041,834.

174 Office of Naval Research Contract Number N00014-92-C-0210.
 

In February, 1995, the Star Wars missile defense shield was supposed to be dead. The United States House of Representatives by a 218 to 212 voted to kill the program.175

 

Yet HAARP continues on while the motives of the military are hidden from the world.

In 1962, Project Plowshare was stopped because the project was identified as too risky and unnecessary. It was discontinued because the scientists were able to conduct their "proof-of-concept" experiments in Nevada (where objections were not presented by the populace, and the damage not disclosed by the government until decades later). It was also finally admitted by the government that these uses were unsafe and had to be cast aside, in the end, as international disarmament talks conducted through the 1960's and 1970's.

 

So ended the concept of nuclear excavation and Dr. Teller's "safe" use of nuclear energy. Perhaps its time we took a harder look at HAARP?

175 GOP's Military Revamp Stumbles on 'Star Wars', by David Hess, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, reported in the Anchorage Daily News, February 16,1995, pg. A3.
 

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