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For The Record  

FTR #128 Interview V with Dr. Nick Begich

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MP3 Side 1 | Side 2

This pro­gram con­cludes a series of inter­views with Dr. Nick Begich, the author (along with Jeane Man­ning) of Angels Don’t Play this HAARP: Advances in Tes­la Tech­nol­o­gy (soft-cov­er edi­tion, Earth­pulse Press, copy­right 1995.) Termed “a rev­o­lu­tion in mil­i­tary affairs,” this tech­nol­o­gy offers a num­ber of dif­fer­ent and, in some cas­es, ter­ri­fy­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties. After a read­ing of Dr. Begich’s farewell let­ter to his sup­port­ers and col­lab­o­ra­tors (he’s mov­ing on to oth­er projects), the dis­cus­sion cen­ters on the untime­ly and, to a cer­tain extent, mys­te­ri­ous death of Gael Flan­na­gan, one of Dr. Begich’s close friends and sources of inspi­ra­tion. Pri­or to her death, Ms. Flan­na­gan had been warn­ing Dr. Begich that she felt it was time for him to move on to oth­er projects. Most of the broad­cast is a review and syn­op­sis of mate­r­i­al pre­sent­ed in the pre­vi­ous four inter­views with Dr. Begich, avail­able from Spit­fire. (Record­ed in Jan­u­ary of 1999.)

Discussion

One comment for “FTR #128 Interview V with Dr. Nick Begich”

  1. Dan­ger! Russ­ian nukes in orbit! That was the gen­er­al mes­sage the Amer­i­can pub­lic got fol­low­ing a wave of alarm­ing reports about a new dia­bol­i­cal Russ­ian plot to put some sort of nuclear device in orbit. Or, rather, reports about an alarmed Repub­li­can Rep. Mike Turn­er of Ohio, the chair of the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee, who decid­ed to take this sto­ry pub­lic.

    So is Rus­sia about to launch some sort of space-based nuclear launch sys­tem? Nope. But there are plans to put a nuclear-pow­ered EMP device in orbit, poten­tial­ly as soon as some time this year accord­ing to unnamed gov­ern­ment sources. That’s the sto­ry that’s emerg­ing, which Rus­sia denies entire­ly. And while the verac­i­ty of these claims remains extreme­ly unclear, it’s worth not­ing that a sto­ry like this is some­thing we prob­a­bly should have expect­ed giv­en the ongo­ing mil­i­ta­riza­tion of the low-earth orbit (LEO) space thanks to the SpaceX Star­link clus­ter of thou­sands of microsatel­lites.

    As we’re going to see, it’s pri­mar­i­ly the LEO satel­lites that are seen as vul­ner­a­ble here. High­er orbit satel­lites, like GPS or nuclear com­mand and con­trol satel­lites, are often shield­ed against nuclear blasts and expect­ed to with­stand an EMP attack. Satel­lites in LEO, on the oth­er hand, tend not to have such pro­tec­tions, espe­cial­ly the thou­sands of rel­a­tive­ly small and light microsatel­lites that make up the Star­link clus­ter. But it’s not just Star­link’s satel­lites oper­at­ing in the LEO space. Mil­i­tary satel­lites like high-res­o­lu­tion spy satel­lites and sit­u­a­tion aware­ness satel­lites are also often found in low­er orbits.

    An orbital EMP attack could be a very big deal, mil­i­tar­i­ly speak­ing. So in terms of the pos­si­bil­i­ties, it’s not hard to see why the US gov­ern­ment might be con­cerned about Rus­si­a’s research in this area. But with US intel­li­gence indi­cat­ing that Rus­sia is still devel­op­ing this and actu­al­ly prepar­ing to launch it, the ques­tion of why the head of the US House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee decid­ed to raise pub­lic alarm about this kind of sce­nario remains. Espe­cial­ly since, as we’re also going to see, this pub­lic dis­clo­sure appar­ent­ly enraged intel­li­gence offi­cials because the intel­li­gence was based on extreme­ly sen­si­tive sources that could now be com­pro­mised. What’s the motive here?

    But let’s also not for­get about one of the oth­er major cat­a­stro­phes that will now log­i­cal­ly fol­low any sort of orbital EMP event: Kessler syn­drome. You can’t dis­able all of those LEO satel­lites with­out induc­ing mas­sive num­bers of col­li­sions. Recall how Star­link is pred­i­cat­ed on the idea that its satel­lites won’t have inde­pen­dent orbits but instead will have to be ready to adjust course when nec­es­sar­i­ly. Orbital adjust­ments that won’t be an option after an EMP fries the satel­lites hard­ware. Inter­est­ing­ly, we see an oblique ref­er­ence to Kessler syn­drome from one of the unnamed US offi­cials quot­ed in the fol­low­ing CNN piece, who points out how, “It’s not a new con­cept and, as a con­cept, dates back to the late Cold War....the big fear with any even­tu­al EMP device in orbit [is] it might ren­der large por­tions of par­tic­u­lar orbits unus­able” by cre­at­ing a mine­field of dis­abled satel­lites that “would then prove dan­ger­ous to any new satel­lites we might try to put up to replace or repair the exist­ing satel­lites.” This offi­cial did­n’t use the term Kessler syn­drome, but that’s what they were describ­ing.

    Will Rus­sia be will­ing to use an orbital EMP that could induce a Kessler syn­drome sce­nario? Pre­sum­ably only as a last resort since Kessler syn­drome could impact the satel­lites of Rus­sia and its allies too. But with Star­link only set to grow in scope (don’t for­get it’s not even close to its goals of 42k satel­lites), it’s not hard to imag­ine Rus­sia real­ly is work­ing on such a device. After, as that unnamed US offi­cial also indi­cate, this is a long-known form of nuclear attack that dates back to the Cold War. Of course, one major dif­fer­ence between the Cold War and today is the sheer vol­ume of satel­lites in LEO, which is only poised to explode in com­ing years. Star­link did­n’t exist even a decade ago, not all its com­peti­tors to come. The risk of Kessler syn­drome is only grow­ing.

    And that brings us to anoth­er very fas­ci­nat­ing angle about this whole uproar over the pos­si­bil­i­ty of orbital EMP attacks. Because when the US was look­ing into this pos­si­bil­i­ty a decade ago, the focus appeared to be less on Kessler syn­drome and more on anoth­er con­se­quence of any sort of orbital nuclear event. Radi­a­tion that lingers in orbit, poten­tial­ly dam­ag­ing satel­lites much like the debris of Kessler syn­drome. While radi­a­tion from high-earth orbits tends to dis­si­pate with­in days, LEOs are par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble to lin­ger­ing radi­a­tion that can last for years. But US researchers had a rather exot­ic tool was pro­posed as a pos­si­ble solu­tion: HAARP. Yep, the High Fre­quen­cy Active Auro­ral Research Pro­gram (HAARP) up in Alas­ka was pro­posed as a means of knock­ing the LEO radi­a­tion out of orbit as a kind of post-nuclear atmos­pher­ic scrub­bing ser­vice.

    That’s all part of the fas­ci­nat­ing con­text around what is still kind of a mys­tery: why did the chair of the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee risk a high­ly sen­si­tive source to make this sto­ry pub­lic? We don’t know. But we can be pret­ty sure it has a lot to do with the incred­i­ble orbital risk cre­at­ed by the US’s deci­sion to allow for the cre­ation of a mil­i­ta­rized Star­link satel­lite con­stel­la­tion that did­n’t exist a decade ago:

    CNN

    Exclu­sive: Rus­sia attempt­ing to devel­op nuclear space weapon to destroy satel­lites with mas­sive ener­gy wave, sources famil­iar with intel say

    By Katie Bo Lil­lis, Jim Sciut­to, Kristin Fish­er and Natasha Bertrand, CNN
    Updat­ed 7:57 AM EST, Sat Feb­ru­ary 17, 2024

    CNN — Rus­sia is try­ing to devel­op a nuclear space weapon that would destroy satel­lites by cre­at­ing a mas­sive ener­gy wave when det­o­nat­ed, poten­tial­ly crip­pling a vast swath of the com­mer­cial and gov­ern­ment satel­lites that the world below depends on to talk on cell phones, pay bills, and surf the inter­net, accord­ing to three sources famil­iar with US intel­li­gence about the weapon.

    ...

    Repub­li­can Rep. Mike Turn­er of Ohio, the chair of the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee, set off a fren­zy in Wash­ing­ton on Wednes­day when he issued a state­ment say­ing his pan­el “had infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing a seri­ous nation­al secu­ri­ty threat.” By Fri­day, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden had pub­licly con­firmed that Turn­er was refer­ring to a new Russ­ian nuclear anti-satel­lite capa­bil­i­ty — but offi­cials have stead­fast­ly refused to dis­cuss it fur­ther, cit­ing the high­ly clas­si­fied nature of the intel­li­gence.

    The weapon is still under devel­op­ment and is not yet in orbit, Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have empha­sized pub­licly. But if used, offi­cials say, it would cross a dan­ger­ous rubi­con in the his­to­ry of nuclear weapons and could cause extreme dis­rup­tions to every­day life in ways that are dif­fi­cult to pre­dict.

    This kind of new weapon — known gen­er­al­ly by mil­i­tary space experts as a nuclear EMP — would cre­ate a pulse of elec­tro­mag­net­ic ener­gy and a flood of high­ly charged par­ti­cles that would tear through space to dis­rupt oth­er satel­lites wing­ing around Earth.

    ...

    And there has been a stream of intel­li­gence report­ing in recent months relat­ed specif­i­cal­ly to Russia’s efforts to devel­op nuclear-pow­ered anti-satel­lite capa­bil­i­ties, accord­ing to one defense offi­cial.

    But Rus­sia has recent­ly made progress in its efforts to devel­op a nuclear EMP — a relat­ed but far more alarm­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

    ...

    The intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, Biden said, had “found out there was a capac­i­ty to launch a sys­tem into space that could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly do some­thing that was dam­ag­ing” but that it “hadn’t hap­pened yet.”

    “It’s not a new con­cept and, as a con­cept, dates back to the late Cold War,” said one US offi­cial. But, they said, “the big fear with any even­tu­al EMP device in orbit [is] it might ren­der large por­tions of par­tic­u­lar orbits unus­able” by cre­at­ing a mine­field of dis­abled satel­lites that “would then prove dan­ger­ous to any new satel­lites we might try to put up to replace or repair the exist­ing satel­lites.”

    ...

    It was not imme­di­ate­ly clear whether the device as designed could impact GPS and nuclear com­mand and con­trol satel­lites, which oper­ate in a high­er orbit than the vast con­stel­la­tion of com­mer­cial and gov­ern­ment satel­lites whizzing through low-Earth orbit. Those larg­er satel­lites are designed to be impreg­nable to a nuclear blast, but a for­mer top space offi­cial at the Pen­ta­gon told CNN that “they could be vul­ner­a­ble” depend­ing on how close they were to the EMP, how old they are and how big the blast.

    ‘Last-ditch weapon’

    Experts say this kind of weapon could have the poten­tial to wipe out mega con­stel­la­tions of small satel­lites, like SpaceX’s Star­link, which has been suc­cess­ful­ly used by Ukraine in its ongo­ing war with Rus­sia.

    This would almost cer­tain­ly be “a last-ditch weapon” for Rus­sia, the US offi­cial and oth­er sources said — because it would do the same dam­age to what­ev­er Russ­ian satel­lites were also in the area.

    ...

    Sev­er­al sources famil­iar with the mat­ter said that the expo­sure of the intel­li­gence was extreme­ly dam­ag­ing because the source was incred­i­bly sen­si­tive. Accord­ing to those sources, the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty is now scram­bling to fig­ure out how to pre­serve its access.

    Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials con­tend that if Rus­sia were to field a nuclear EMP, it would be the first-ever vio­la­tion of the Out­er Space Treaty of 1967, which bans sta­tion­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion in out­er space.

    ...

    Rus­sia has with­drawn from sev­er­al arms con­trol treaties in recent years, leav­ing the post-Cold War arms con­trol archi­tec­ture all but gut­ted.

    ———-

    “Exclu­sive: Rus­sia attempt­ing to devel­op nuclear space weapon to destroy satel­lites with mas­sive ener­gy wave, sources famil­iar with intel say” By Katie Bo Lil­lis, Jim Sciut­to, Kristin Fish­er and Natasha Bertrand; CNN; 02/17/2024

    “This kind of new weapon — known gen­er­al­ly by mil­i­tary space experts as a nuclear EMP — would cre­ate a pulse of elec­tro­mag­net­ic ener­gy and a flood of high­ly charged par­ti­cles that would tear through space to dis­rupt oth­er satel­lites wing­ing around Earth.”

    An orbital EMP. That appears to be the gen­er­al design of the new Russ­ian super-weapon that had Repub­li­can Rep. Mike Turn­er of Ohio, the chair of the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee, whipped up into such a state of alarm. A weapon still under devel­op­ment. So why the imme­di­ate alarm? That’s unclear, but it’s pret­ty obvi­ous which part of the US’s orbital infra­struc­ture Rep Turn­er and oth­ers are going to be most con­cerned about: the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satel­lites. As experts warn, this kind of EMP attack has the poten­tial to wipe out the entire mega-clus­ter. And not just dis­able the clus­ter but also cre­ate a mine­field of dis­abled satel­lites “would then prove dan­ger­ous to any new satel­lites we might try to put up to replace or repair the exist­ing satel­lites.” In oth­er words, Kessler syn­drome.

    But this kind of threat also isn’t new and Rus­si­a’s report­ed device is still under devel­op­ment. Beyond that, intel­li­gence offi­cials are appar­ent­ly livid over the sto­ry because this intel­li­gence was based on a high­ly sen­si­tive source. So what prompt­ed the chair of the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee to make this big pub­lic uproar? That’s still a mys­tery:

    ...
    The weapon is still under devel­op­ment and is not yet in orbit, Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have empha­sized pub­licly. But if used, offi­cials say, it would cross a dan­ger­ous rubi­con in the his­to­ry of nuclear weapons and could cause extreme dis­rup­tions to every­day life in ways that are dif­fi­cult to pre­dict.

    ...

    “It’s not a new con­cept and, as a con­cept, dates back to the late Cold War,” said one US offi­cial. But, they said, “the big fear with any even­tu­al EMP device in orbit [is] it might ren­der large por­tions of par­tic­u­lar orbits unus­able” by cre­at­ing a mine­field of dis­abled satel­lites that “would then prove dan­ger­ous to any new satel­lites we might try to put up to replace or repair the exist­ing satel­lites.”

    ...

    Experts say this kind of weapon could have the poten­tial to wipe out mega con­stel­la­tions of small satel­lites, like SpaceX’s Star­link, which has been suc­cess­ful­ly used by Ukraine in its ongo­ing war with Rus­sia.

    ...

    Sev­er­al sources famil­iar with the mat­ter said that the expo­sure of the intel­li­gence was extreme­ly dam­ag­ing because the source was incred­i­bly sen­si­tive. Accord­ing to those sources, the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty is now scram­bling to fig­ure out how to pre­serve its access.
    ...

    Also note which satel­lites are NOT at the same kind of risk from an EMP attack: the high­er-orbit satel­lites like GPS or nuclear com­mand and con­trol satel­lites, which are designed to with­stand a nuclear blast. This is real­ly a LEO-tar­get­ing weapon. Of course, if Kessler syn­drome is some­how induced in low­er orbits, that could poten­tial­ly impact satel­lites in high­er orbit as debris is cre­at­ed and there may not be any way to safe­ly launch replace­ments for fail­ing high-orbit satel­lites. But in terms of imme­di­ate dan­ger, it’s pos­si­ble this EMP weapon could be used with­out, for exam­ple, dis­abling GPS ser­vices. Hope­ful­ly:

    ...
    It was not imme­di­ate­ly clear whether the device as designed could impact GPS and nuclear com­mand and con­trol satel­lites, which oper­ate in a high­er orbit than the vast con­stel­la­tion of com­mer­cial and gov­ern­ment satel­lites whizzing through low-Earth orbit. Those larg­er satel­lites are designed to be impreg­nable to a nuclear blast, but a for­mer top space offi­cial at the Pen­ta­gon told CNN that “they could be vul­ner­a­ble” depend­ing on how close they were to the EMP, how old they are and how big the blast.
    ...

    So is Rus­sia plan­ning on with­draw­ing from the Out­er Space Treaty of 1967 before it launch­es this thing? Maybe, but this is prob­a­bly a good time to recall how Pres­i­dent Trump uni­lat­er­al­ly with­drew from the INF treaty in 2019 and then in Novem­ber of 2020 also with­drew the US from the Open Skies treaty. Also note that when Rus­sia with­drew from the Com­pre­hen­sive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) back in Novem­ber of 2023, that was a treaty the US nev­er rat­i­fied. There’s been quite a few changes to the glob­al nuclear sta­tus quo late­ly and it’s not just Rus­sia doing the chang­ing:

    ...
    Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials con­tend that if Rus­sia were to field a nuclear EMP, it would be the first-ever vio­la­tion of the Out­er Space Treaty of 1967, which bans sta­tion­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion in out­er space.

    ...

    Rus­sia has with­drawn from sev­er­al arms con­trol treaties in recent years, leav­ing the post-Cold War arms con­trol archi­tec­ture all but gut­ted.
    ...

    Giv­en all the appar­ent alarm over these devel­op­ments, one might arrive at the con­clu­sion that this is a new threat the US has­n’t faced before. But, of course, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of space-based EMP attacks was part of Cold War and some­thing the US mil­i­tary has stud­ied for decades. What’s new in this sit­u­a­tion is the pres­ence of the Star­link satel­lite clus­ter that did­n’t exist a decade ago. A clus­ter increas­ing­ly being used in mil­i­tary con­texts against Rus­sia. That’s the big orbital devel­op­ment in recent years. And let’s also not for­get how Star­link is new in the sense that it does­n’t even both­er to put all its satel­lites into inde­pen­dent orbits but instead relies on real-time orbital adjust­ments to avoid col­li­sions...adjust­ments that obvi­ous­ly would­n’t hap­pen in the event of an EMP attack that fries the elec­tron­ics. An EMP attack that dis­ables Star­link — or any attack that dis­ables Star­link for that mat­ter — real­ly could lead to a Kessler syn­drome sce­nario sim­ply as a result of dis­abling those orbital adjust­ment ser­vices that are now nec­es­sary thanks to the den­si­ty of objects in this space.

    But why the appar­ent sense of urgency on this mat­ter? Is Rus­sia plan­ning on launch­ing such a device soon? Yep, and it could hap­pen as soon as this year. At least that’s what we were hear­ing from more unnamed US offi­cials in reports this week. Rus­sia denies work­ing on any such device at all. And as the fol­low­ing Reuters arti­cle asks, it’s unclear why Rus­sia would need to rely on some­thing like a space EMP, risk­ing set­ting off a nuclear space race, when it had plen­ty of con­ven­tion­al means of dis­abling low earth orbit satel­lites already. But, again, that just under­scores the poten­tial rel­e­vance of Star­link in this mat­ter. One of the major sell­ing points of Star­link is its abil­i­ty to con­tin­ue oper­at­ing even if large num­bers of indi­vid­ual satel­lites are tak­en down. Per­haps con­ven­tion­al means of dis­abling satel­lites aren’t good enough in the age of microsatel­lites clus­ters and we’re look­ing at the response:

    Reuters

    Nukes in space: What have Rus­sia and the Unit­ed States said?

    By Guy Faulcon­bridge and Arshad Mohammed
    Feb­ru­ary 21, 2024 1:16 AM CST
    Updat­ed

    MOSCOW/WASHINGTON, Feb 21 (Reuters) — Uniden­ti­fied sources in the Unit­ed States say Rus­sia is devel­op­ing a space-based anti-satel­lite nuclear weapon but Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin said he oppos­es nuclear weapons in space and Moscow has flat­ly denied the U.S. asser­tions.

    Who has said what and what would such a weapon mean?

    WHAT DOES THE U.S. SAY?

    The Unit­ed States believes Rus­sia is devel­op­ing a space-based anti-satel­lite nuclear weapon whose det­o­na­tion could dis­rupt every­thing from mil­i­tary com­mu­ni­ca­tions to phone-based ride ser­vices, a source famil­iar with the mat­ter said on Tues­day.

    The source, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, said it was his under­stand­ing the sys­tem would involve a nuclear explo­sive device placed into orbit.

    ...

    The New York Times report­ed on Sat­ur­day, with­out cit­ing sources, that in recent weeks a warn­ing has cir­cu­lat­ed from Amer­i­ca’s spy agen­cies that Rus­sia may be plan­ning a new secret mil­i­tary satel­lite launch and that the key ques­tion was whether it would use it to put an actu­al nuclear weapon into space.

    Bloomberg on Tues­day report­ed Rus­sia could deploy a nuclear weapon or a mock war­head into space as ear­ly as this year. It also cit­ed unnamed sources as say­ing the Unit­ed States believes Rus­sia does not plan to det­o­nate a device but that there was risk of an acci­den­tal explo­sion, dis­abling scores of satel­lites.

    ...

    WHAT DID MOSCOW SAY?

    “Our posi­tion is clear and trans­par­ent: We have always been cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly against and are now against the deploy­ment of nuclear weapons in space,” Putin told Sergei Shoigu, his defence min­is­ter at a tele­vised meet­ing in the Krem­lin.

    ...

    Com­ment­ing on the weapons in space alle­ga­tions, Shoigu said there were no plans of the kind out­lined by the uniden­ti­fied sources in the Unit­ed States.

    “First­ly, there are no such projects — nuclear weapons in space. Sec­ond­ly, the Unit­ed States knows that this does not exist,” Shoigu told Putin.

    He accused the White House of try­ing to scare U.S. law­mak­ers into allo­cat­ing more funds for Ukraine as part of Wash­ing­ton’s plan to inflict what he said was a strate­gic defeat on Rus­sia.

    ...

    WHAT WOULD NUKES IN SPACE MEAN?

    ...

    But it is unclear why Rus­sia would need to use nuclear weapons to destroy a satel­lite, when con­ven­tion­al weapons could do the job, or whether the Unit­ed States has been devel­op­ing nuclear capa­bil­i­ties in space.

    If Rus­sia did devel­op such a weapon, then the Unit­ed States would be forced to do some­thing sim­i­lar and per­haps Chi­na too — and so there would be a risk of some sort of nuclear space race.

    Rus­sia and the Unit­ed States togeth­er hold about 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, and both have advanced mil­i­tary satel­lites orbit­ing the Earth.

    In the ear­ly years of the Cold War, after Rus­sia leaped ahead in the space race and both sides devel­oped inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­siles, the West pro­posed a treaty to out­law nuclear weapons in space. The even­tu­al result was the 1967 Out­er Space Treaty.

    The Unit­ed States casts Rus­sia and Chi­na as its biggest nation-state com­peti­tors and says both are devel­op­ing a range of new weapons sys­tems, includ­ing nuclear, cyber and space capa­bil­i­ties.

    Rus­sia says the post-Cold War dom­i­nance of the Unit­ed States is crum­bling and that Wash­ing­ton has for years sown chaos across the plan­et while ignor­ing the inter­ests of oth­er pow­ers. Moscow says the Unit­ed States too is devel­op­ing a host of new weapons.

    ———-

    “Nukes in space: What have Rus­sia and the Unit­ed States said?” by Guy Faulcon­bridge and Arshad Mohammed; Reuters; 02/21/2024

    “Bloomberg on Tues­day report­ed Rus­sia could deploy a nuclear weapon or a mock war­head into space as ear­ly as this year. It also cit­ed unnamed sources as say­ing the Unit­ed States believes Rus­sia does not plan to det­o­nate a device but that there was risk of an acci­den­tal explo­sion, dis­abling scores of satel­lites.”

    The device could be launched as soon as this year. That’s what we’re hear­ing from more anony­mous sources, which is pre­sum­ably the basis for the appar­ent urgency. And while the US does­n’t believe Rus­sia has plans to detone such a device, it’s the risk of an acci­dent that has them con­cerned. Rus­sia, in turn, denies all reports of work­ing on any such device at all.

    But then we get this impor­tant ques­tion raised in the arti­cle: why would such a device be need­ed at all when Rus­sia pre­sum­ably has plen­ty of con­ven­tion­al means of dis­abling LEO satel­lites. And why risk set­ting off some sort of nuclear space race with the US and Chi­na? It’s a reminder that this is the kind of sto­ry the US, or Chi­na, could use as a pre­text for launch­ing space nukes of their own, whether the sto­ry is based on real intel­li­gence or not. But also keep in mind that the emer­gence of Star­link real­ly has changed the game in terms of orbital mil­i­tary games­man­ship. Star­link’s strate­gic val­ue is in how it can still work even if large num­bers of indi­vid­ual satel­lites are dis­abled. An orbital EMP device might be deemed mil­i­tar­i­ly nec­es­sary in that case if the whole clus­ter needs to be shut down some­how. And, in turn, an orbital EMP device per­haps would­n’t be seen as nec­es­sary had the US not uni­lat­er­al­ly allowed for one of its key defense con­trac­tors, Space X, to cre­ate Star­link in the first place:

    ...
    But it is unclear why Rus­sia would need to use nuclear weapons to destroy a satel­lite, when con­ven­tion­al weapons could do the job, or whether the Unit­ed States has been devel­op­ing nuclear capa­bil­i­ties in space.

    If Rus­sia did devel­op such a weapon, then the Unit­ed States would be forced to do some­thing sim­i­lar and per­haps Chi­na too — and so there would be a risk of some sort of nuclear space race.
    ...

    Are we look­ing at a real sto­ry? A sto­ry about the con­se­quences of Star­link and the mil­i­tary advan­tages it promis­es upset­ting the orbital bal­ance enough to pro­voke Russ­ian space nukes? Or are we look­ing at anoth­er attempt to hype up the ten­sions or maybe even give the US an excuse to launch a counter space-nuke of its own? Time will tell as always. But it’s not like orbital EMPs are a new kind of dan­ger. If we see a nuclear space race emerge, it’s some­thing the US has spent a lot time think­ing about already. Many decades. With decades of research already under its belt.

    So, to get an idea of the US’s think­ing on these mat­ters pre-Star­link, here’s a 2014 piece in For­eign Pol­i­cy dis­cussing exact­ly these con­cerns. Con­cerns pri­mar­i­ly focused on LEO satel­lites since, as the arti­cle notes, most high-orbit satel­lites — like GPS or nuclear com­mand and con­trol satel­lites — have been hard­ened against EMP attacks. It’s the LEO satel­lites that are pri­mar­i­ly at risk. And while hard­en­ing LEO satel­lites is an option, it’s an expen­sive one that makes those satel­lites larg­er, heav­ier, and there­fore more expen­sive to pro­duce and launch.

    As the arti­cle also notes, the con­se­quences of an EMP attack would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly just be imme­di­ate. Unlike high-orbits, where radi­a­tion tends to dis­si­pate with­in days, low­er orbits can retain that radi­a­tion in orbit for years. But there’s one very fas­ci­nat­ing poten­tial solu­tion for at least remov­ing the radi­a­tion that would be stuck in low orbit: HAARP. Yes, the US’s HAARP facil­i­ty up in Alas­ka could poten­tial­ly be used to effec­tive­ly knock the radi­a­tion in low orbit back down to earth:

    For­eign Pol­i­cy

    Mil­i­tary Looks to Shield Its Satel­lites from Elec­tro­mag­net­ic Attacks

    Elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse attacks are one of those things that keep some mil­i­tary offi­cials wide awake at night — and put oth­ers sound­ly asleep. It all depends on who you’re talk­ing about. For the for­mer, includ­ing a num­ber of doom­say­ers, mis­sile-defense boost­ers, and promi­nent politi­cos, the risk is that a rogue state could emit a blast ...

    By Robert Beck­husen, War Is Bor­ing
    Jan­u­ary 3, 2014, 5:44 PM

    Elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse attacks are one of those things that keep some mil­i­tary offi­cials wide awake at night — and put oth­ers sound­ly asleep. It all depends on who you’re talk­ing about.

    ...

    For skep­tics — and many sci­en­tists — it’s all an overblown the­o­ry con­tain­ing loads of tech­ni­cal and prac­ti­cal prob­lems. More real­is­ti­cal­ly, it’d be lights out when we’re even­tu­al­ly hit by a rare and exceed­ing­ly pow­er­ful solar storm.

    But con­cerns about weaponized EMP per­sist. The Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency, a Pen­ta­gon body focused on coun­ter­ing threats from nuclear weapons, has put out the call for new stud­ies into the phe­nom­e­non, accord­ing to a notice from the agency post­ed in Decem­ber. Specif­i­cal­ly, DTRA wants to research “high-alti­tude weapons elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse effects mod­el­ing” for satel­lites.

    The ulti­mate goal is to come up with a uni­form mil­i­tary stan­dard for EMP effects on satel­lites, which could lat­er be used to hard­en them against an attack. The term “effects mod­el­ing” in the notice refers to lab­o­ra­to­ry sim­u­la­tions. DTRA has also stressed it’s not try­ing to pre­dict the like­li­hood of an e‑bomb attack, just the expect­ed results of one.

    We have some expe­ri­ence with this — albeit with sev­er­al gaps.

    For one, we do know that satel­lites in low-earth orbit would be in grave dan­ger of get­ting zapped by EMP. Satel­lites at these orbits include ones used for high-res­o­lu­tion imagery, mon­i­tor­ing the weath­erb and han­dling telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. They also include a large num­ber of mil­i­tary sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness satel­lites and the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion.

    ...

    While most low-earth-orbit satel­lites would avoid being imme­di­ate­ly knocked out by an EMP, the pres­ence of radi­a­tion expo­sure over the long term is a “seri­ous long-term haz­ard” that “could seri­ous­ly ham­per any war effort, par­tic­u­lar­ly in remote regions,” the agency not­ed in a 2010 report.

    Lit­tle is known about effects of EMP at high­er alti­tudes, above 370 or so, or below 60 miles. For a bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense sys­tem that suc­cess­ful­ly strikes and det­o­nates a nuclear ICBM at high alti­tudes, “strate­gies may risk being designed on the basis of inap­pro­pri­ate lev­els of nuclear effects, at least for det­o­na­tions in the upper half of the mid-course bat­tle space,” the report added.

    The good news is that the agency doesn’t think mid- and high-earth orbit satel­lites are at great risk for any dam­age beyond a slight­ly short­er lifes­pan. “Satel­lites in MEO or GEO are not at risk to imme­di­ate loss from radi­a­tion dam­age result­ing from a cred­i­ble EMP attack any­where on Earth,” the agency con­clud­ed.

    At high orbits, spy satel­lites from the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office, mil­i­tary com­mu­ni­ca­tions satel­lites, and bal­lis­tic mis­sile detec­tors — plus the Glob­al Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem — are already heav­i­ly shield­ed from radi­a­tion. Radi­a­tion inject­ed by a weapon at high orbits would also decay with­in days instead of years like in low orbits, less­en­ing the effect fur­ther.

    There are sev­er­al things you could do to make satel­lites more sur­viv­able, though. There’s hard­en­ing and shield­ing, which can add weight and cost — a prob­lem for pri­vate com­pa­nies that own and oper­ate LEO satel­lites joint­ly used by the mil­i­tary. The often-mis­un­der­stood, $250 mil­lion High Fre­quen­cy Active Auro­ral Research Pro­gram (HAARP) is even used by the Air Force to research how to scrub the mag­ne­tos­phere of elec­trons emit­ted by nuclear weapons that could screw up satel­lite tran­sis­tors.

    ...

    ————

    “Mil­i­tary Looks to Shield Its Satel­lites from Elec­tro­mag­net­ic Attacks” By Robert Beck­husen; For­eign Pol­i­cy; 01//3/2014

    “While most low-earth-orbit satel­lites would avoid being imme­di­ate­ly knocked out by an EMP, the pres­ence of radi­a­tion expo­sure over the long term is a “seri­ous long-term haz­ard” that “could seri­ous­ly ham­per any war effort, par­tic­u­lar­ly in remote regions,” the agency not­ed in a 2010 report.”

    As that 2010 US gov­ern­ment report reminds us, the threat of an EMP attack on the US’s satel­lites crip­pling US mil­i­tary capa­bil­i­ties is not a new threat. Nor is it the only threat. Recall how solar storms have already knocked out Star­link satel­lites. Which is also a reminder that, should an EMP attack end up dis­abling the Star­link clus­ter, it will be an attack that poten­tial­ly could have been at least par­tial­ly mit­i­gat­ed against if the clus­ter was prop­er­ly pro­tect­ed against the solar storms we know are just a mat­ter of time:

    ...
    For skep­tics — and many sci­en­tists — it’s all an overblown the­o­ry con­tain­ing loads of tech­ni­cal and prac­ti­cal prob­lems. More real­is­ti­cal­ly, it’d be lights out when we’re even­tu­al­ly hit by a rare and exceed­ing­ly pow­er­ful solar storm.
    ...

    Also note how the of mil­i­tary satel­lites that tend to be in low orbit include high-res­o­lu­tion satel­lites and sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness. In oth­er words, if we do ever see a major dis­rup­tion of LEO satel­lites, the alarm this will induce in gov­ern­ment will be exac­er­bat­ed by the fact that their orbital ‘eyes and ears’ are going to be out of com­mis­sion:

    ...
    But con­cerns about weaponized EMP per­sist. The Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency, a Pen­ta­gon body focused on coun­ter­ing threats from nuclear weapons, has put out the call for new stud­ies into the phe­nom­e­non, accord­ing to a notice from the agency post­ed in Decem­ber. Specif­i­cal­ly, DTRA wants to research “high-alti­tude weapons elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse effects mod­el­ing” for satel­lites.

    The ulti­mate goal is to come up with a uni­form mil­i­tary stan­dard for EMP effects on satel­lites, which could lat­er be used to hard­en them against an attack. The term “effects mod­el­ing” in the notice refers to lab­o­ra­to­ry sim­u­la­tions. DTRA has also stressed it’s not try­ing to pre­dict the like­li­hood of an e‑bomb attack, just the expect­ed results of one.

    We have some expe­ri­ence with this — albeit with sev­er­al gaps.

    For one, we do know that satel­lites in low-earth orbit would be in grave dan­ger of get­ting zapped by EMP. Satel­lites at these orbits include ones used for high-res­o­lu­tion imagery, mon­i­tor­ing the weath­erb and han­dling telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. They also include a large num­ber of mil­i­tary sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness satel­lites and the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion.
    ...

    And then we get to this fas­ci­nat­ing detail in this 2014 piece: high­er-orbit satel­lites might still be at risk of short­ened lifes­pans due to the ele­vat­ed lev­els of radi­a­tion in orbit. But it’s the low­er orbits where the radi­a­tion will be far more intense. And yet, there’s a poten­tial solu­tion for scrub­bing that radi­a­tion out of low­er orbits: the HAARP array, which can poten­tial­ly be used to ‘scrub the mag­ne­tos­phere’:

    ...
    Lit­tle is known about effects of EMP at high­er alti­tudes, above 370 or so, or below 60 miles. For a bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense sys­tem that suc­cess­ful­ly strikes and det­o­nates a nuclear ICBM at high alti­tudes, “strate­gies may risk being designed on the basis of inap­pro­pri­ate lev­els of nuclear effects, at least for det­o­na­tions in the upper half of the mid-course bat­tle space,” the report added.

    ...

    At high orbits, spy satel­lites from the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office, mil­i­tary com­mu­ni­ca­tions satel­lites, and bal­lis­tic mis­sile detec­tors — plus the Glob­al Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem — are already heav­i­ly shield­ed from radi­a­tion. Radi­a­tion inject­ed by a weapon at high orbits would also decay with­in days instead of years like in low orbits, less­en­ing the effect fur­ther.

    There are sev­er­al things you could do to make satel­lites more sur­viv­able, though. There’s hard­en­ing and shield­ing, which can add weight and cost — a prob­lem for pri­vate com­pa­nies that own and oper­ate LEO satel­lites joint­ly used by the mil­i­tary. The often-mis­un­der­stood, $250 mil­lion High Fre­quen­cy Active Auro­ral Research Pro­gram (HAARP) is even used by the Air Force to research how to scrub the mag­ne­tos­phere of elec­trons emit­ted by nuclear weapons that could screw up satel­lite tran­sis­tors.
    ...

    Pret­ty neat if it works. Neat, although unless HAARP can also some­how knock all the shrap­nel and oth­er debris that would get cre­at­ed by a Kessler syn­drome event, it’s not real­ly going to address the full prob­lem. But still, pret­ty neat. And as the fol­low­ing 2009 piece in Wired describes, the orig­i­nal vision for HAARP includ­ed a lot more than just scrub­bing the skies of post-nuclear radi­a­tion. The orig­i­nal sales pitch to the US gov­ern­ment includ­ed the promise that HAARP would be able to pump the atmos­phere with enough radi­a­tion that it could actu­al­ly knock out incom­ing Sovi­et ICBMs. It does­n’t sound like those capa­bil­i­ties were ever demon­strat­ed. But scrub­bing the skies of radi­a­tion fol­low­ing a nuclear orbital event does appear to be a use case they saw as plau­si­ble:

    Wired

    Strange New Air Force Facil­i­ty Ener­gizes Ionos­phere, Fans Con­spir­a­cy Flames

    The shock­ing thing about Haarp isn’t that it’s a boon­dog­gle (it’s actu­al­ly pret­ty worth­while) or that it was spawned by a mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al-petro­chem­i­cal-polit­i­cal com­plex (a hal­lowed gov­ern­ment tra­di­tion). It’s that, all too often, this is the way big sci­ence gets done in the US.

    Noah Shacht­man
    Busi­ness
    Jul 20, 2009 12:00 PM

    Todd Ped­er­sen had to hustle—the sky was sched­uled to start glow­ing soon, and he did­n’t want to miss it. It was just before sun­set, a cold Feb­ru­ary evening in deep-woods Alas­ka, and the broad-shoul­dered US Air Force physi­cist was scram­bling across the snow in his orange down par­ka and fur-lined bomber hat. Grab­bing cables and elec­tron­ics, he rushed to assem­ble a jury-rigged tele­scope atop a crude wood­en plat­form.

    ...

    As dark­ness closed in, Ped­er­sen tried to get the sec­ond imager working—with no luck—and the first one began snap­ping pic­tures. A few min­utes before sev­en, throb­bing arcs of green and red light began to form on his mon­i­tor, even­tu­al­ly coa­lesc­ing into an egg shape. Oth­er shards of light shim­mered, gath­ered into a jagged ring, and spun around the oval cen­ter. “This is real­ly good stuff,” Ped­er­sen cooed. This was­n’t just anoth­er auro­ra bore­alis trig­gered by solar winds; this one Ped­er­sen made him­self. He did it with the High Fre­quen­cy Active Auro­ral Research Pro­gram (Haarp): a $250 mil­lion facil­i­ty with a 30-acre array of anten­nas capa­ble of spew­ing 3.6 megawatts of ener­gy into the mys­te­ri­ous plas­ma of the ionos­phere.

    Bring­ing Haarp to fruition was, well, com­pli­cat­ed. A group of sci­en­tists had to cozy up to a US sen­a­tor, cut deals with an oil com­pa­ny, and con­vince the Pen­ta­gon that the project might rev­o­lu­tion­ize war. Oh, and along the way they sparked enough con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries to make the place sound like an arc­tic Area 51.

    ...

    In 1901, Gugliel­mo Mar­coni received a sim­ple radio sig­nal sent from across the Atlantic Ocean—dot-dot-dot, again and again, the let­ter S repeat­ed in Morse code. Lead­ing sci­en­tists of the day had said such a trans­mis­sion was impos­si­ble: Earth­’s sur­face is curved, and radio waves trav­el in straight lines. The dots should have shot out into space. Instead, they trav­eled from Corn­wall, Eng­land, to a 500-foot anten­na Mar­coni hung from a kite in New­found­land. A pre­vi­ous­ly unknown, elec­tro­mag­net­i­cal­ly charged lay­er of the atmos­phere was reflect­ing the sig­nal back down to earth.

    At any giv­en moment, the sun is bom­bard­ing our plan­et with 170 bil­lion megawatts of ultra­vi­o­let, x‑ray, and oth­er radi­a­tion. Those waves col­lide with atoms of air—nitrogen, oxy­gen, and so on—stripping away elec­trons like spring rain erod­ing a snow­bank. The result: pos­i­tive­ly charged ions drift­ing free. At high alti­tudes, those ions are far enough apart that it can take hours for them to bind with a free elec­tron. Called the ionos­phere, these undu­lat­ing bands of charged par­ti­cles stretch from 50 to 500 miles above the earth—too high for weath­er bal­loons and, in large part, too low for satel­lites. Researchers who study it jok­ing­ly call it the ignoros­phere.

    ...

    But by the 1980s, US atmos­pher­ic radio sci­ence had dead-end­ed. “We had become a very small field, and we want­ed to try to revive it,” says Kon­stant Papadopou­los, a plas­ma and space physi­cist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land. “We need­ed a mod­ern facil­i­ty.”

    Papadopou­los, now a white-haired, deeply tanned 70-year-old who goes by the name Den­nis, had worked on and off with the gov­ern­ment since he left his native Athens in the 1960s. He knew his way around the fed­er­al sci­ence-fund­ing machine. Many of his fel­low ionos­pherists had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence sway­ing the folks with fat wal­lets. So this loose band of radio sci­en­tists began a cam­paign of per­sua­sion in sup­port of a new research cen­ter. “We’ll sell it,” Papadopou­los remem­bers think­ing. “We’ll sell it in good faith, but we’ll sell it.”

    One of the first ideas came mid-decade from Bernard East­lund, a physi­cist work­ing for oil-and-gas con­glom­er­ate Atlantic Rich­field. Arco had the rights to tril­lions of cubic feet of nat­ur­al gas under Alaska’s North Slope. The prob­lem had always been how to get that gas to the port at Valdez. East­lund had a bet­ter idea: Use the gas onsite to fuel a giant ionos­pher­ic heater. Such a facil­i­ty, he wrote in a series of patents, could fry Sovi­et mis­siles in mid­flight or maybe even nudge cyclones and oth­er extreme weath­er toward ene­mies. That’s right: weaponized hur­ri­canes.

    Arco’s exec­u­tives pre­sent­ed the idea to Simon Ramo, one of the god­fa­thers of the US inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile pro­gram. Ramo passed it on to the under sec­re­tary of defense, who in turn gave it to the Pen­tagon’s advanced research arm, Darpa, and the DOD’s secre­tive sci­ence advi­so­ry board, code-named Jason. Tony Teth­er, direc­tor of Darpa’s strate­gic tech­nol­o­gy office, gave Arco a con­tract to con­duct a fea­si­bil­i­ty study. Arco brought on board none oth­er than Den­nis Papadopou­los as a con­sul­tant.

    Papadopou­los was­n’t very impressed. East­lund’s tricks would­n’t work even if the site were in the right place along Earth­’s mag­net­ic field—which it was­n’t. But the ad hoc coali­tion of radio sci­en­tists did like the idea of set­ting up a new heater in Alas­ka. In those upper lat­i­tudes, the ionos­phere inter­sects with Earth­’s mag­net­ic field and becomes sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing.

    Luck­i­ly, the senior sen­a­tor from Alas­ka, Ted Stevens, enjoyed a rep­u­ta­tion for insert­ing projects into the fed­er­al bud­get to ben­e­fit his home state, most noto­ri­ous­ly a $223 mil­lion bridge from the town of Ketchikan to, well, not much of any­place. In 1988, the researchers sat down with Stevens and assured him that an ionos­pher­ic heater would be a bona fide sci­en­tif­ic mar­vel and a guar­an­teed job cre­ator, and it could be built for a mere $30 mil­lion. “He pro­vid­ed some con­gres­sion­al mon­ey, some pork mon­ey,” Papadopou­los says. “It was much less than the bridge to nowhere.” Just like that, the Pen­ta­gon had $10 mil­lion for ionos­pher­ic heater research.

    Now the sci­en­tists had some start­up cash, but they also need­ed hardware—and for that, they had to enlist the mil­i­tary. In a series of meet­ings in the win­ter of 1989–90, the field­’s lead­ing lights, includ­ing Papadopou­los, pitched the Navy and the Air Force. Haarp, they assert­ed, could lead to “sig­nif­i­cant oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ties.” They’d build a giant phased anten­na array that would aim a fine­ly tuned beam of high- fre­quen­cy radio waves into the sky. The beam would excite elec­trons in the ionos­phere, alter­ing that spot’s con­duc­tiv­i­ty and induc­ing it to emit its own extreme­ly low fre­quen­cy waves, which could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pen­e­trate the earth­’s sur­face to reveal hid­den bunkers or be used to con­tact deeply sub­merged sub­marines.

    That last app caught the mil­i­tary’s atten­tion. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing with subs thou­sands of miles away, under thou­sands of feet of ocean, requires ultralow fre­quen­cies, and that requires whomp­ing-big anten­nas. To do it, the Navy had built an array in the upper Mid­west that trans­mits its sig­nal through bedrock, but its con­struc­tion required raz­ing 84 miles’ worth of hun­dred-foot-wide path through wilder­ness, includ­ing a nation­al for­est. It drove local envi­ron­men­tal­ists crazy. But who would protest an ephemer­al anten­na in the sky?

    ...

    In 1992, the Navy hand­ed out a $21.6 mil­lion con­tract. The deal did­n’t go to an estab­lished engi­neer­ing out­fit or defense firm. It went, instead, to Arco, for which Papadopou­los was a con­sul­tant.

    For more than a year, plan­ning pro­ceed­ed large­ly out of pub­lic view. Then, in 1993, an Anchor­age teach­ers’ union rep named Nick Begich—son of one of Alaska’s most impor­tant polit­i­cal families—found a notice about Haarp in the Aus­tralian con­spir­a­cy mag­a­zine Nexus.

    When Begich was 13, a Cess­na car­ry­ing his father, a Con­gres­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tive, dis­ap­peared. Nei­ther the plane nor its pas­sen­gers were ever recov­ered. Over the years, Begich became obsessed with uncov­er­ing mys­ter­ies. Between gigs as a gemol­o­gist, min­er, school super­vi­sor, and Chick­aloon trib­al admin­is­tra­tor, he reg­u­lar­ly lec­tured on gov­ern­ment mind-con­trol tech­nol­o­gy. So you can imag­ine his reac­tion when he began look­ing into Haarp: the weath­er-con­trol patents, the Pen­ta­gon pro­pos­als for long-range spy­ing, the oil com­pa­ny schemes. Sen­a­tor Stevens had even sug­gest­ed that the ionos­phere could end our depen­den­cy on fos­sil fuels. “At any time over Fair­banks,” Stevens said on the Sen­ate floor, “there is more ener­gy than there is in the entire Unit­ed States.” Begich had hit the con­spir­a­cy jack­pot.

    In 1995, he self-pub­lished a book, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. It sold 100,000 copies. He start­ed giv­ing speech­es on Haarp’s dan­gers every­where, from UFO con­ven­tions to the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment. Mar­vel Comics, Tom Clan­cy, and, of course, The X‑Files made the facil­i­ty an omi­nous fea­ture of their nar­ra­tives. A Russ­ian mil­i­tary jour­nal warned that blast­ing the ionos­phere would trig­ger a cas­cade of elec­trons that could flip Earth­’s mag­net­ic poles. “Sim­ply speak­ing, the plan­et will ‘cap­size,’ ” it warned. The Euro­pean Par­lia­ment held hear­ings about Haarp; so did the Alas­ka state leg­is­la­ture.

    Begich told his audi­ences that Haarp was a high-pow­ered weapon pro­to­type. For­get spy­ing under­ground with low-fre­quen­cy waves—Haarp was so strong it could trig­ger earth­quakes. And by dump­ing all those radio waves into the ionos­phere, Haarp could turn a miles-wide por­tion of the upper atmos­phere into a giant lens. “The result will be an absolute­ly cat­a­stroph­ic release of pure ener­gy,” he wrote. “The sky would lit­er­al­ly appear to burn.”

    The mil­i­tary’s response only amped up the con­spir­acists. When pro­gram man­agers swore that the facil­i­ty would “nev­er be used for mil­i­tary func­tions,” Begich would trot out mil­i­tary reports tout­ing satel­lite-blind­ing research plans or then-sec­re­tary of defense William Cohen’s sug­ges­tion that “elec­tro­mag­net­ic waves” could alter the cli­mate and con­trol earth­quakes and vol­ca­noes remote­ly.

    Begich’s agi­tat­ing did­n’t delay the project too much. (Gov­ern­ment research projects slip dead­lines and bust bud­gets just fine on their own.) But by 1999, when Haarp’s first 48-anten­na array was fin­ished, the pro­jec­t’s cost was on its way to tripling the orig­i­nal fea­si­bil­i­ty study esti­mate, and the mil­i­tary was get­ting antsy. Sure, the ini­tial exper­i­ments had been sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly impres­sive, detect­ing ion­iza­tion in the atmos­phere caused by a gam­ma ray flare from a neu­tron star 23,000 light-years away and find­ing bunkers 300 feet below the earth­’s sur­face. But the Pen­ta­gon want­ed to know when its over­priced con­spir­a­cy-mag­net would pro­duce that bat­tle-ready tech­nol­o­gy they’d been promised.

    The Haarp team was caught in an expec­ta­tions trap. In the­o­ry, the Pen­ta­gon should spend a lot of mon­ey on basic research. That’s how you come up with the Inter­net and stealth jets. But in prac­tice, the gen­er­als and Con­gress want sci­ence that’s use­ful now. Papadopou­los under­stood this instinc­tive­ly: You have to sell it. Look­ing at the sleep cycles of fruit flies? Why, that might some­day lead to inde­fati­ga­ble supertroops! Build­ing nanome­ter-long hinges? You’re devel­op­ing arti­fi­cial mus­cles that could let sol­diers leap build­ings! But it was tough to make that kind of case for Haarp. “It’s like, I talk to my mom and she says, ‘When are you gonna build some­thing?’ ” says Craig Selch­er, Haarp pro­gram man­ag­er for the Navy. “Mom,” he answers, “I’m try­ing to unlock the secrets of the uni­verse!”

    So the ionos­pherists formed a pan­el to find a new pur­pose for Haarp. Teth­er, who fund­ed the orig­i­nal Arco stud­ies and had con­sult­ed on the project, was named chair.

    Months lat­er, the group had its ratio­nale, and it was ambi­tious to say the least: post-nuclear space cleanup. By the late ’90s, Cold War fears had been replaced by wor­ries that a rogue state could get a nuke. If Pyongyang set off a bomb in orbit, it would fry cru­cial satel­lites. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, ultralow-fre­quen­cy waves in the ionos­phere would knock the par­ti­cles out of their nat­ur­al spin, send­ing them tum­bling down into the low­er atmos­phere to be harm­less­ly reab­sorbed. The Pen­ta­gon loved the idea. But it would need a lot of testing—which could only be done at Haarp. “You could actu­al­ly see the light­bulb flick on,” says Ed Kennedy, a for­mer Haarp pro­gram man­ag­er. “This was some­thing Haarp could actu­al­ly help solve.”

    Haarp’s Mis­sion

    The heart of the High Fre­quen­cy Active Auro­ral Research Pro­gram is an ionos­pher­ic heater that shoots elec­tro­mag­net­ic ener­gy into Earth­’s atmos­phere. Five gen­er­a­tors pump out 2.9 megawatts each; 180 anten­nas con­vert the elec­tric­i­ty into high-fre­quen­cy radio waves and send them into the ionos­phere, which turns them into low-fre­quen­cy waves. Why? Research. An ener­gized ionos­phere could be used for all sorts of cool stuff.

    ...

    Of course, the facil­i­ty would need 180 anten­nas and a lot more mon­ey. But as the pan­el was wind­ing down in 2001, cash stopped being a prob­lem. Teth­er became head of Darpa, tak­ing charge of near­ly $2 bil­lion a year for research. He put togeth­er a deal for the Air Force, Navy, and his agency to fund Haarp’s construction—with some con­gres­sion­al pork, of course. Again, Arco’s con­struc­tion sub­sidiary (by then renamed and sold to giant defense con­trac­tor BAE Sys­tems) was select­ed to han­dle most of the hard­ware, a $35.4 mil­lion job that would bal­loon to $118.5 mil­lion. And Papadopou­los still had his sep­a­rate mil­i­tary fund­ing for ionos­pher­ic heat­ing research. In a field as small as radio sci­ence, it’s almost impos­si­ble to avoid such over­lap. By 2007, Haarp was run­ning at full strength. But it was still mys­te­ri­ous. Nei­ther the pub­lic nor the press had been allowed inside since the array became ful­ly oper­a­tional.

    ...

    Dur­ing a few weeks in Octo­ber 2008, for exam­ple, the site host­ed 31 inves­ti­ga­tors con­duct­ing 42 dif­fer­ent sets of experiments—imaging ionos­pher­ic irreg­u­lar­i­ties, exam­in­ing the “ion out­flow from high-fre­quen­cy heat­ing,” cre­at­ing arti­fi­cial north­ern lights. Physics stu­dents flock to Haarp in the sum­mer. Ionos­pher­ic papers are back in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture. Even the space-based nuclear clean-up exper­i­ments are teach­ing us lessons about the Van Allen radi­a­tion belts. Online, the tin­foil-hat­ted chat­ter about Haarp drones on—it’s blamed for every­thing from Kat­ri­na to last year’s earth­quake in Sichuan, Chi­na. But after decades of push­ing, radio sci­en­tists final­ly have the exper­i­men­tal facil­i­ty of their dreams.

    Yet Haarp’s future is unclear. Defense bud­gets are shrink­ing, and the facil­i­ty costs $10 mil­lion a year to oper­ate. Haarp’s patron at Darpa, Tony Teth­er, has left his job. The pro­jec­t’s god­fa­ther, Ted Stevens, was defeat­ed in the 2008 Sen­ate elec­tion by the may­or of Anchor­age: Mark Begich, Nick­’s lit­tle broth­er. “I’ll have his ear,” Nick promis­es.

    So the radio sci­en­tists may have to look for fund­ing again, which prob­a­bly means a whole new set of ratio­nales. You can imag­ine how the con­spir­a­cy crowd will react. And the sci­en­tists, in their eager­ness, can end up feed­ing the para­noia. Papadopou­los, for exam­ple, says he wants to do anoth­er round of sub­ter­ranean sur­veil­lance exper­i­ments. “Per­son­al­ly, I believe it can reach 1,000 kilo­me­ters. It can’t reach Iran, if that’s your ques­tion,” he laughs. “But if I put Haarp on a ship, or on an oil plat­form, who knows?” Not that he has con­crete plans for such tests in Alas­ka, let alone in the Per­sian Gulf—though he does men­tion a facil­i­ty in Puer­to Rico as a pos­si­bil­i­ty.

    ...

    ————

    “Strange New Air Force Facil­i­ty Ener­gizes Ionos­phere, Fans Con­spir­a­cy Flames” by Noah Shacht­man; Wired; 07/20/2009

    “Bring­ing Haarp to fruition was, well, com­pli­cat­ed. A group of sci­en­tists had to cozy up to a US sen­a­tor, cut deals with an oil com­pa­ny, and con­vince the Pen­ta­gon that the project might rev­o­lu­tion­ize war. Oh, and along the way they sparked enough con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries to make the place sound like an arc­tic Area 51.”

    A rev­o­lu­tion in war­fare. That’s how HAARP was ulti­mate­ly sold to the US gov­ern­ment. The ini­tial sale pitch was grand, with Bernard East­lund, an ARCO physi­cist, sug­gest­ing that HAARP could be used to pump the ionos­phere with radioac­tive par­ti­cles that could knock out incom­ing Sovi­et mis­siles. It’s not clear it was a fea­si­ble idea, but that was the hook:

    ...
    One of the first ideas came mid-decade from Bernard East­lund, a physi­cist work­ing for oil-and-gas con­glom­er­ate Atlantic Rich­field. Arco had the rights to tril­lions of cubic feet of nat­ur­al gas under Alaska’s North Slope. The prob­lem had always been how to get that gas to the port at Valdez. East­lund had a bet­ter idea: Use the gas onsite to fuel a giant ionos­pher­ic heater. Such a facil­i­ty, he wrote in a series of patents, could fry Sovi­et mis­siles in mid­flight or maybe even nudge cyclones and oth­er extreme weath­er toward ene­mies. That’s right: weaponized hur­ri­canes.

    ...

    Papadopou­los was­n’t very impressed. East­lund’s tricks would­n’t work even if the site were in the right place along Earth­’s mag­net­ic field—which it was­n’t. But the ad hoc coali­tion of radio sci­en­tists did like the idea of set­ting up a new heater in Alas­ka. In those upper lat­i­tudes, the ionos­phere inter­sects with Earth­’s mag­net­ic field and becomes sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing.
    ...

    Not sur­pris­ing­ly, it was DARPA that first start­ed invest­ing in the idea with a fea­si­bil­i­ty study. Then came the con­gres­sion­al back­ing, large­ly thanks to Alaskan sen­a­tor Ted Stevens. The promise, at that point, was advanced radar that could detect under­ground facil­i­ties or even con­tact deeply sub­merged sub­marines. HAARP is like a Swiss army knife of mil­i­tary appli­ca­tions:

    ...
    Arco’s exec­u­tives pre­sent­ed the idea to Simon Ramo, one of the god­fa­thers of the US inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile pro­gram. Ramo passed it on to the under sec­re­tary of defense, who in turn gave it to the Pen­tagon’s advanced research arm, Darpa, and the DOD’s secre­tive sci­ence advi­so­ry board, code-named Jason. Tony Teth­er, direc­tor of Darpa’s strate­gic tech­nol­o­gy office, gave Arco a con­tract to con­duct a fea­si­bil­i­ty study. Arco brought on board none oth­er than Den­nis Papadopou­los as a con­sul­tant.

    ...

    Luck­i­ly, the senior sen­a­tor from Alas­ka, Ted Stevens, enjoyed a rep­u­ta­tion for insert­ing projects into the fed­er­al bud­get to ben­e­fit his home state, most noto­ri­ous­ly a $223 mil­lion bridge from the town of Ketchikan to, well, not much of any­place. In 1988, the researchers sat down with Stevens and assured him that an ionos­pher­ic heater would be a bona fide sci­en­tif­ic mar­vel and a guar­an­teed job cre­ator, and it could be built for a mere $30 mil­lion. “He pro­vid­ed some con­gres­sion­al mon­ey, some pork mon­ey,” Papadopou­los says. “It was much less than the bridge to nowhere.” Just like that, the Pen­ta­gon had $10 mil­lion for ionos­pher­ic heater research.

    Now the sci­en­tists had some start­up cash, but they also need­ed hardware—and for that, they had to enlist the mil­i­tary. In a series of meet­ings in the win­ter of 1989–90, the field­’s lead­ing lights, includ­ing Papadopou­los, pitched the Navy and the Air Force. Haarp, they assert­ed, could lead to “sig­nif­i­cant oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ties.” They’d build a giant phased anten­na array that would aim a fine­ly tuned beam of high- fre­quen­cy radio waves into the sky. The beam would excite elec­trons in the ionos­phere, alter­ing that spot’s con­duc­tiv­i­ty and induc­ing it to emit its own extreme­ly low fre­quen­cy waves, which could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pen­e­trate the earth­’s sur­face to reveal hid­den bunkers or be used to con­tact deeply sub­merged sub­marines.
    ...

    Then Nick Begich took an inter­est, lead­ing even­tu­al­ly to the broad­er pub­lic tak­ing an inter­est after Begich self-pub­lished his book sug­gest­ing HAARP was a weapon pro­to­type poten­tial­ly pow­er­ful enough to trig­ger earth­quakes:

    ...
    For more than a year, plan­ning pro­ceed­ed large­ly out of pub­lic view. Then, in 1993, an Anchor­age teach­ers’ union rep named Nick Begich—son of one of Alaska’s most impor­tant polit­i­cal families—found a notice about Haarp in the Aus­tralian con­spir­a­cy mag­a­zine Nexus.

    ...

    Begich told his audi­ences that Haarp was a high-pow­ered weapon pro­to­type. For­get spy­ing under­ground with low-fre­quen­cy waves—Haarp was so strong it could trig­ger earth­quakes. And by dump­ing all those radio waves into the ionos­phere, Haarp could turn a miles-wide por­tion of the upper atmos­phere into a giant lens. “The result will be an absolute­ly cat­a­stroph­ic release of pure ener­gy,” he wrote. “The sky would lit­er­al­ly appear to burn.”

    The mil­i­tary’s response only amped up the con­spir­acists. When pro­gram man­agers swore that the facil­i­ty would “nev­er be used for mil­i­tary func­tions,” Begich would trot out mil­i­tary reports tout­ing satel­lite-blind­ing research plans or then-sec­re­tary of defense William Cohen’s sug­ges­tion that “elec­tro­mag­net­ic waves” could alter the cli­mate and con­trol earth­quakes and vol­ca­noes remote­ly.
    ...

    Final­ly, we get to the late 90s, when HAARP was well over bud­get and in need of fur­ther jus­ti­fi­ca­tions to keep going. What we’re the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions they fell back on to keep the spon­sors hap­py? Post-nuclear space cleanup. The idea being that HAARP could knock the radi­a­tion out of orbit back down to earth. The Pen­ta­gon loved it:

    ..
    The Haarp team was caught in an expec­ta­tions trap. In the­o­ry, the Pen­ta­gon should spend a lot of mon­ey on basic research. That’s how you come up with the Inter­net and stealth jets. But in prac­tice, the gen­er­als and Con­gress want sci­ence that’s use­ful now. Papadopou­los under­stood this instinc­tive­ly: You have to sell it. Look­ing at the sleep cycles of fruit flies? Why, that might some­day lead to inde­fati­ga­ble supertroops! Build­ing nanome­ter-long hinges? You’re devel­op­ing arti­fi­cial mus­cles that could let sol­diers leap build­ings! But it was tough to make that kind of case for Haarp. “It’s like, I talk to my mom and she says, ‘When are you gonna build some­thing?’ ” says Craig Selch­er, Haarp pro­gram man­ag­er for the Navy. “Mom,” he answers, “I’m try­ing to unlock the secrets of the uni­verse!”

    So the ionos­pherists formed a pan­el to find a new pur­pose for Haarp. Teth­er, who fund­ed the orig­i­nal Arco stud­ies and had con­sult­ed on the project, was named chair.

    Months lat­er, the group had its ratio­nale, and it was ambi­tious to say the least: post-nuclear space cleanup. By the late ’90s, Cold War fears had been replaced by wor­ries that a rogue state could get a nuke. If Pyongyang set off a bomb in orbit, it would fry cru­cial satel­lites. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, ultralow-fre­quen­cy waves in the ionos­phere would knock the par­ti­cles out of their nat­ur­al spin, send­ing them tum­bling down into the low­er atmos­phere to be harm­less­ly reab­sorbed. The Pen­ta­gon loved the idea. But it would need a lot of testing—which could only be done at Haarp. “You could actu­al­ly see the light­bulb flick on,” says Ed Kennedy, a for­mer Haarp pro­gram man­ag­er. “This was some­thing Haarp could actu­al­ly help solve.”
    ...

    It’s worth not­ing that HAARP was trans­ferred from the US Air Force to the the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alas­ka Fair­banks in 2014. It’s now offi­cial­ly just a civil­ian research sta­tion. But, in the­o­ry, it could per­form this kind of sky-scrub­bing ser­vice. Or, who knows, pump the sky full of radi­a­tion and cre­ate a kind of vir­tu­al EMP. HAARP is a ver­sa­tile tool.

    But, again, whether or not HAARP’s promised sky-scrub­bing capa­bil­i­ties are real, there’s more than just radi­a­tion that’s going to need to be scrubbed from the LEO space in the event of an EMP attack. Or just a nasty solar storm. Or ran­dom orbital mishap that trig­gers a chain reac­tion. The more crowd­ed earth­’s orbital space gets, the more we’re going to have to wor­ry about the inevitable day large amounts of debris have to be ‘scrubbed’ before that space is usable again. So let’s hope HAARP has debris-scrub­bing capa­bil­i­ties we haven’t heard about yet. Because while we still don’t know why the chair of the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee risked burn­ing high­ly sen­si­tive sources to make a big pub­lic stink about Russ­ian space nukes, we do know what he was so alarmed about. The increas­ing­ly clut­tered LEO space real­ly is a cause for alarm. Grow­ing alarm. It’s a dis­as­ter wait­ing to hap­pen. With or with­out Russ­ian space nukes.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 23, 2024, 11:42 pm

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