HAARP Dirty Deed Done: Closing, Climate Changed, Weather Modulated

As the U.S. Air Force gave official notice to Congress Wednesday that it’s dismantling the $300 million High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona this summer, it admitted that the facility has been used to “direct energy into the ionosphere and control it,” heating the ionosphere, and thus, impacting weather patterns – possibly intensifying climate change.

The shutdown of HAARP, a project created by the late Sen. Ted Stevens when wielding great control over the U.S. defense budget, will start after a final research experiment takes place in mid-June, the Air Force said in a letter to Congress Tuesday.

Built at a cost of over $290 million, the site has 180 antennas on 30 acres, ”used to direct energy into the ionosphere, which is 55 miles to 370 miles above the Earth, and monitor changes in the flow of charged particles,” Anchorage Daily News reports.

Stevens, the godfather of HAARP, helped start it two decades ago with annual earmarks slipped into the defense budget.

Dirty Deed Done?

University of Alaska has expressed interest in taking over the research site, off Tok Cutoff in an area where black spruce was cleared a quarter-century ago for the Air Force backscatter radar project never completed. The school, however, has not volunteered to pay $5 million a year to run HAARP.

Responding to Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s questions during a Senate hearing Wednesday, David Walker, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for science, technology and engineering, said this is “not an area that we have any need for in the future” and it would not be a good use of Air Force research funds to keep HAARP going.

“We’re moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere, which the HAARP was really designed to do, to inject energy into the ionosphere to be able to actually control it, he said.

“But that work has been completed.”

So the dirty deed is done.

Qui Bono?

In February, the Navy released the U.S. Navy Arctic Roadmap for 2014 to 2030, outlining naval preparations for the region. It lays out various necessities for Naval capabilities in the Arctic, from new satellite communications equipment to cold-weather training exercises.

The Navy’s road map followed the Department of Defense’s “Arctic Strategy” report of November 2013 and the White House’s May 2013 “National Security Strategy for the Arctic Region.”

The documents make up a nascent Arctic strategy – one that’s been in the works for some time, apparently. It’s also one that glorifies militarized extracting and exploiting and capitalizes on global warming.

“As global warming melts Arctic ice, the region is being opened to increased commercial activity like shipping, mining and drilling,” reports Newsweek. “And along with human activity comes foreign policy and military strategy.

“Strategists in the Navy and throughout the government are scrambling to put policies in place, develop technology and create a plan of action for this burgeoning region of commercial activity.”

Financial benefits of global warming to the corporate government of the United States are as vast as the oil is under the rapidly melting ice caps, where the U.S. Navy has raced to secure the Arctic for extracting the fossil fuels.