Sunday, November 21, 2010

Is HAARP Enabling WMDs of the 21st Century?

The next generation of US weapons development effort has been brought into sharp focus by the latest controversy over the US military funded HAARP research project in Alaska. This controversey started when a Pakistani scientist Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy sharply criticized the contents of a Dawn newspaper article by another Pakistani scientist Dr. Atta ur Rahman citing allegations that HAARP project is aimed at deliberately altering weather patttens adversely, and triggering earthquakes in different parts of the world by the US at will.

What has been forgotten in this debate is that the genesis of the US weapons research agenda that has been pursued for at least a decade lies in the following statement by former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former US Senator Sam Nunn:

"Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations...It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts.

Manipulating forces of nature is clearly a part of the current weapons research being pursued in America.

I think Dr. Ata is well within the realm of science in speculating about HAARP's ability to effect weather patterns and seismic activity.

Here are some of the arguments that support Dr. Ata's concerns:

1. Major seismic activity is often preceded by extreme weather phenomena induced by ionospheric disturbances - like thunderstorms with extensive lightning discharges. Before the release of tectonic stresses, there are large changes in ground potential, and these interact with the atmosphere and eventually with the ionosphere. It is conceivable that humans could manipulate the coupling in the reverse direction - from the ionosphere via the atmosphere to the lithosphere.

2. HAARP's transmitter's 3.6 MW is not a "puny" amount of power, especially when it is focused like a laser beam to trigger tectonic instability in specific spots, thereby releasing the energy already stored in tectonic plates.

I expect there to be a whole new generation of weapons coming out by mid-century from the research being done now at advanced US weapons labs in collaboration with the academia. Such weapons, including space-based weapons and cyber weapons which may now seem like the stuff of science fiction, will be very different in terms of their outer-space locations, the mechanisms they use to wreak havoc, and the kind of extraordinay but targeted damage they may cause without the "enemy" having any clue of what hit them and from where they got hit.

In 2008, the Center for Defense Information released their survey of the Pentagon’s 2009 budget, highlighting research that could lead to arms in space. By the absolute most conservative estimate, we’re talking $520 million dollars a year. The real number is likely several multiples of that, according to Noah Schactman of Wired.com.

The current military space projects mostly involve ways to disable potentially hostile satellites; many have other uses, as well. They include a giant laser, to help spot targets in orbit (and to improve space imaging, in the meantime); micro satellites, that could disable another country’s orbiters (or repair our own); a series of jammers, to block enemy satellite signals; and missile interceptors, based in space.

At first glance, an anti-missile might not seem like a space weapon project. But, as last year's satellite shoot-down showed, the same gear used to intercept a missile can also be repurposed to blast a satellite. Especially if the gear is already in space. Space provides line of sight and secure communications. It also povides clear tacking of hostile objects. Command and control is likely to move from earth to space. There will be space stations as command platfoms at various distances from the earth's surface that will command robotic and manned systems on land and sea as they evade enemy attacks and attack enemy platfoms.

The new generation of weapons will avoid the kind of widespread fall-out on "friendly" nations in the "enemy" neighborhood that results from the current generation of WMDs like the thermonuclear bombs.

Some analysts, like George Friedman of Stratfor (Next 100 Years), have explored the nature of high-tech warfare that will determine the outcome of WW III they anticipate to be fought in this century. Friedman refers to military bases in space that would be used to attack enemy bases in space and on the ground as part of the space warfare in this century. Here are two video clips of George Friedman talking about it:





Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Is America Young and Barbaric?

Cyber Warfare in South Asia

Pakistani Drones in America

Foreign Origin of India's Agni Missiles

Mockery of Pakistani Sovereignty

India, Israel UAV Partnership

New York Times

India's UAV Technology Center

NPR Radio

Electronic Warfare

Wargames

America's High-tech Warfare

It's not Your Father's Military

11 comments:

satwa gunam said...

@riaz

Similar article with reference to various patents in uspto on this science methods were mentioned in pakalert.wordpress.com. However there is no place for confirmation or denial available.

All are available as only source of conspiracy at this point of time.

Anonymous said...

How might one go about trying to trigger a major earthquake from a remote location? Consider what follows below as a first cut at a spoof column in a popular science magazine - one with enough plausible elements to not be rejected out of hand by people with some training in science or engineering.

First of all, an earthquake is a rapid release of pre-existing seismic stress. Most earthquakes occur by rupture along geological faults. The most powerful earthquakes tend to occur at boundaries between different tectonic plates. Because of friction at plate boundaries, the earth's crust in the vicinity of a plate boundary goes through long periods [months, years, decades or centuries] of deformation, with accompanying buildup of seismic stress. The accumulated stress energy is eventually rapidly released - over seconds or minutes - in an earthquake, as the crust ruptures along some section of the plate boundary, and adjacent sections of plate move rapidly past one another.

The energy released during a major earthquake can be very large - equivalent to, for example, that in millions of hydrogen bombs. However, triggering or initiating an earthquake does not require anywhere near this amount of energy. Our method will be to (1) make use of a pre-existing fault - preferably at a plate boundary - along which stresses have been building up for a while without recent release in a major earthquake (2) initiate rupture at a single location along the fault (or at a few carefully chosen locations), with the aim of having the rupture propagate along the fault from the point(s) of initiation.

Can promising faults be located? Certainly. Geologists and civil engineers have been monitoring the relative motion across faults for decades using instrumentation on the ground. In our times it ought to be possible to do it (and it is probably being done) using earth-orbiting satellites. Systematic observation over a period of time along and in the vicinity of a fault - together, perhaps, with a knowledge of the type of rock involved - ought to provide the data needed to map the buildup of stresses along the fault, and therefore to suggest promising points for rupture initiation.

Are earthquakes known to have been initiated by human activity? Yes. The building of dams, mining, and oil drilling, are all activities known to have caused earthquakes. For instance, the construction of the Koyna Dam has been associated with a severe earthquake in Maharashtra in the 1960s. Note that most past incidents of earthquake triggering by human activity were probably inadvertent. Deliberate triggering at a hand-picked site should be possible in at least some cases using a comparatively modest amount of energy to fracture a sufficient quantity of rock in just the right place. This may of course be much easier when the chosen fault is on dry land, rather than under deep ocean.

Can an adequate amount of energy be directed to the correct point from a remote location? What should the source of this energy be? Rather than generate most of the energy ourselves, we might aim to make use of the very large quantities of energy in the earth's ionosphere and/or magnetosphere, diverting some of it to our target locations.

Is this feasible? Unclear. It's well-known that over-the-horizon radio transmission makes use of refraction by the ionosphere. We would need to direct a tight beam of energy to our chosen rupture locations - certainly non-trivial. I would guess that this task - even if doable in principle - is probably not achievable using modest numbers of components that a small organization could buy off the shelf. A government with very deep pockets and plenty of trained scientific manpower is a different matter.

Anonymous said...

part 1

China and India Exposed

Pranab Bardhan

Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley and the author, most recently, of Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Rise of China and India.



BERKELEY – Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's forthcoming trip to India, following hard on the heels of President Barack Obama's recent visit, will provide another opportunity for the media to gush about the growing global economic clout of China and India. We can be sure that the soft underbellies of both economies will be kept hidden from view.

After a couple of centuries of relative stagnation, these two countries, containing nearly two-fifths of the world's population, have experienced remarkably rapid income growth in the last three decades. In manufacturing and services (particularly software, business processing, etc.), respectively, China and India have made huge strides internationally, and their acquisition of global companies has attracted considerable attention.

But some dubious assertions have, through constant repetition in recent, often breathless, accounts about the two economies, become part of conventional wisdom. Much of what really goes on inside these two large countries is often left out.

For example, in terms of value added (the value of output after deducting the cost of materials and components), China, contrary to popular impression, is not yet the manufacturing center of the world. The Chinese produce about 15% of value added in world manufacturing, while the United States contributes about 24% and the European Union about 20%.

Anonymous said...

part 2
Similarly, while India's information technology-enabled services have gained an international reputation, the total number of people employed in this sector is less than 0.5% of India's workforce. As such, it cannot, by itself, transform the Indian economy.

Chinese growth is widely regarded as furiously export-driven, but domestic investment has in fact been the major component. Even at the height of global trade expansion in 2002-2007, exports (in value-added terms) accounted for only a little more than one-quarter of GDP growth, whereas domestic investment contributed a substantially larger share.

Moreover, contrary to popular belief, much of the dramatic poverty reduction in China over the last three decades was due not to integration into the global economy, but to domestic factors like growth in the agricultural sector (where mass poverty was concentrated). This is attributable largely to public investment in rural infrastructure, and, in the initial period, to institutional changes in agrarian production organization and an egalitarian distribution of land-cultivation rights.

Expansion of exports of labor-intensive manufactures has nonetheless lifted many Chinese out of poverty. That is not true of India, where exports are still mainly skill- and capital-intensive. Economic reform clearly has made the Indian corporate sector more vibrant and competitive, but most of the Indian economy is not in the corporate sector (public or private). Indeed, 92% of the labor force is employed in the informal sector.

Indian poverty reduction has been significant, but not substantial. However, in terms of non-income indicators of poverty – for example, child mortality, malnutrition, and school dropouts – India's performance has been dismal (in some respects worse even than in sub-Saharan Africa).

In the financial media, China and India have become poster children for market reform and globalization, even though in matters of privatization, property rights, deregulation, and lingering bureaucratic rigidities, both countries have in many ways departed from economic orthodoxy. According to the US-based Heritage Foundation's widely cited Index of Economic Freedom, China and India are relegated to the group described as "mostly unfree." Out of a total of 157 countries in 2008, China ranked 126th and India 115th.

Anonymous said...

part 2
Moreover, contrary to popular belief, much of the dramatic poverty reduction in China over the last three decades was due not to integration into the global economy, but to domestic factors like growth in the agricultural sector (where mass poverty was concentrated). This is attributable largely to public investment in rural infrastructure, and, in the initial period, to institutional changes in agrarian production organization and an egalitarian distribution of land-cultivation rights.

Expansion of exports of labor-intensive manufactures has nonetheless lifted many Chinese out of poverty. That is not true of India, where exports are still mainly skill- and capital-intensive. Economic reform clearly has made the Indian corporate sector more vibrant and competitive, but most of the Indian economy is not in the corporate sector (public or private). Indeed, 92% of the labor force is employed in the informal sector.

Indian poverty reduction has been significant, but not substantial. However, in terms of non-income indicators of poverty – for example, child mortality, malnutrition, and school dropouts – India's performance has been dismal (in some respects worse even than in sub-Saharan Africa).

In the financial media, China and India have become poster children for market reform and globalization, even though in matters of privatization, property rights, deregulation, and lingering bureaucratic rigidities, both countries have in many ways departed from economic orthodoxy. According to the US-based Heritage Foundation's widely cited Index of Economic Freedom, China and India are relegated to the group described as "mostly unfree." Out of a total of 157 countries in 2008, China ranked 126th and India 115th.

Anonymous said...

part 3
Although socialist economic policies in both countries inhibited initiative and enterprise, a positive legacy of that period cannot be denied. It is arguable, for example, that Chinese socialism provided a strong launching pad for growth, particularly in terms of a solid base of education and health, rural electrification, a safety net enabled by equitable distribution of land rights, regional economic decentralization, and high female participation in the labor force. Moreover, a major part of the socialist legacy in both countries is the cumulative effect of the state's active role in technological development.

Unlike in India, where the private corporate sector is the most dynamic sector, in China state-controlled companies are some of the globally more successful. Even in famous private Chinese companies like Lenovo and Huawei Technologies, the ownership structure is highly convoluted, and the boundaries of state and private control rights blurred. The recent purchase of Volvo by the private Chinese automaker Geely generated much publicity, but most of the money was put up by municipal governments.

Powerful political families run many Chinese state-owned enterprises. Indeed, there is some evidence that the overwhelming majority of multi-millionaires in China are relatives of high-ranking Communist Party officials. And, thanks to the large pool of savings generated by Chinese households and state-owned companies, the Chinese economy can for the time being bear the waste and misallocation implied by such crony capitalism.

Without political reform, the long-run viability of such a system is in doubt. Premier Wen himself indicated as much in a speech in August that was widely noted abroad, but largely blacked out in Chinese media. The global media should now go further, and begin to examine the many features of the rise of China and India that depart from the simplistic narrative of the triumph of market reform.

Anonymous said...

pak rail ditches crappy chinese locos

LAHORE - Pakistan Railways has offered five routes in the Punjab to the Korean Railways to operate trains under its open access policy.
General Manager (Operations) Isfaq Khattak told this to newsmen after a meeting with an eight-member Korean delegation at PR Headquarters here on Monday.
‘Korea will improve Pakistan Railways infrastructure and rolling stock, impart training to the staff besides provision of six locomotives on experimental basis as a pilot project’.
The GM said that Korea has offered 3000 horsepower capacity locomotives that could run at a speed of 120 kilometres per hour. After evaluating the performance of these locomotives, order for more would be placed.
Korea has also been offered to bring its rolling stock for the operation of trains on Lahore-Faisalabad, Lahore-Gujrat, Lahore-Gujranwala, Lahore-Kasur and Lahore-Wagha routes under open access policy. Korea would also upgrade the signaling system and other infrastructure at these routes.
The Korean delegation would send feasibility report about the proposal after returning home.
“Pakistan Railways has been earning Rs40 billion daily at present. We can double our income if supplied with 200 locomotives,” said the General Manager and added that a summary had been sent to the prime minister for increasing rail fares that had not been revised for the last two years though prices of diesel increased many times.
Ishfaq said that the PR had acute shortages of locomotives and needed 200 locomotives urgently.
During their a week long stay in Pakistan, the Korean delegation would also visit Mughalpura Workshop, Carriage Shop and Central Diesel Locomotive Workshop besides it would also visit to Rawalpindi and Karachi rail offices.

Zen, Munich said...

Sick..I think Americans would try every dirty trick as long as that country remain hostage to Israeli bankers and weapon industry. They could try stimulating acid rain in troublesome areas like tribal Pakistan..But if what is written about this is true, then this is probably the singlemost advancement since aeroplanes in the military and would give them a unique advantage..

Shams said...

US Bill S-517 (109th) Passed by George W. Bush in 2005 Project: Weather Modification Program
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s109-517
Weather Modification Hearing, United States Senate Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment of the Committee on Foreign Relations, March 20, 1974


US Project PopEye / Motorpool Congressional Hearing Report (Vietname / Laos Heavy Rains and Flooding w/Silver Iodide Seeding)
Keefer, Edward C. Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-1968 Volume XXVII Laos United States Government Printing Office, 1998.
http://www.sunshine-project.org/enmod/popeye
http://www.sunshine-project.org/enmod/US_Congr.html
Dr. Edwin Berry's Trip to to Asian Pacific during the operation POPEYE that caused major flooding of the entire country of Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia. http://www.kimberry.com/ARCHIVES/edwin_x_berry/ed_in_philippines_1969.html

Pictures of Actual Weather Modification Operation to Cause Flooding, posted by USAF pilots involved
http://www.awra.us/gallery-jan05.htm

HAARP - High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/20/951/Are_We_in_a_HAARP_Earthquake_War.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcHPAR_5TEc&feature=player_embedded#!
In short, HAARP is designed to irradiate a small space in the ionosphere in a manner that would overheat it, cause low atomospheric pressure below, and that would cause cyclones and major, major flooding - such as the one in Pakistan last year. HAARP can also be used to point a 1 billion watts of VHF into the ionosphere, which would push the ionosphere up, and reflect the signal back to a distant spot on earth. That level of energy will cause reverberations in earth and below earth, similar to an earthquake.

Read the papers at HAARP website at http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/.

Riaz Haq said...

From Newsweek by Julian Assange of Wikileaks:

It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, D.C., including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel.

While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch. Two years later, in the wake of his early 2013 visits to China, North Korea and Burma, it would come to be appreciated that the chairman of Google might be conducting, in one way or another, “back-channel diplomacy” for Washington. But at the time it was a novel thought.

I put it aside until February 2012, when WikiLeaks—along with over thirty of our international media partners—began publishing the Global Intelligence Files: the internal email spool from the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor. One of our stronger investigative partners—the Beirut-based newspaper Al Akhbar— scoured the emails for intelligence on Jared Cohen.

The people at Stratfor, who liked to think of themselves as a sort of corporate CIA, were acutely conscious of other ventures that they perceived as making inroads into their sector. Google had turned up on their radar. In a series of colorful emails they discussed a pattern of activity conducted by Cohen under the Google Ideas aegis, suggesting what the “do” in “think/do tank” actually means.

Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and “corporate responsibility” work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s “director of regime change.”

According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky.
---------

Looking for something more concrete, I began to search in WikiLeaks’ archive for information on Cohen. State Department cables released as part of Cablegate reveal that Cohen had been in Afghanistan in 2009, trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto U.S. military bases. In Lebanon, he quietly worked to establish an intellectual and clerical rival to Hezbollah, the “Higher Shia League.” And in London he offered Bollywood movie executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into their films, and promised to connect them to related networks in Hollywood.

---------

If the future of the Internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in Europe—for whom the Internet embodies the promise of an alternative to U.S. cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.

A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.

Extracted from When Google Met Wikileaks by Julian Assange published by OR Books. Newsweek readers can obtain a 20 percent discount on the cover price when ordering from the OR Books website and including the offer code word NEWSWEEK.

http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447

Riaz Haq said...

#China to expand #weather modification program to cover area larger than #India.The program will help with disaster relief, agricultural production, emergency responses to forest and grassland fires, and dealing with unusually high temperatures or droughts https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/03/asia/china-weather-modification-cloud-seeding-intl-hnk/index.html

China's enthusiasm for the technology has created some alarm, particularly in neighboring India, where agriculture is heavily dependent on the monsoon, which has already been disrupted and become less predictable as a result of climate change.


As a concept, cloud seeding has been around for decades. It works by injecting small amounts of silver iodide into clouds with a lot of moisture, which then condenses around the new particles, becoming heavier and eventually falling as precipitation.
A study funded by the US National Science Foundation, published earlier this year, found that "cloud seeding can boost snowfall across a wide area if the atmospheric conditions are favorable." The study was one of the first to ascertain definitively that cloud seeding worked, as previously it had been difficult to distinguish precipitation created as a result of the practice from normal snowfall.
That uncertainty had not stopped China investing heavily in the technology: between 2012 and 2017, the country spent over $1.34 billion on various weather modification programs. Last year, according to state news agency Xinhua, weather modification helped reduce 70% of hail damage in China's western region of Xinjiang, a key agricultural area.
And while other countries have also invested in cloud seeding, including the US, China's enthusiasm for the technology has created some alarm, particularly in neighboring India, where agriculture is heavily dependent on the monsoon, which has already been disrupted and become less predictable as a result of climate change.
-----------

China this week revealed plans to drastically expand an experimental weather modification program to cover an area of over 5.5 million square kilometers (2.1 million square miles) -- more than 1.5 times the total size of India.

According to a statement from the State Council, China will have a "developed weather modification system" by 2025, thanks to breakthroughs in fundamental research and key technologies, as well as improvements in "comprehensive prevention against safety risks."
In the next five years, the total area covered by artificial rain or snowfall will reach 5.5 million sq km, while over 580,000 sq km (224,000 sq miles) will be covered by hail suppression technologies. The statement added that the program will help with disaster relief, agricultural production, emergency responses to forest and grassland fires, and dealing with unusually high temperatures or droughts.
China has long sought to control the weather to protect farming areas and to ensure clear skies for key events -- it seeded clouds ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to reduce smog and avoid rain ahead of the competition. Key political meetings held in the Chinese capital are notorious for enjoying beautiful clear skies, thanks both to weather modification and the shutting down of nearby factories.