More than a decade ago I first heard rumors that the Russians were secretly wreaking havoc with American crops and climate by sending microwaves into the atmosphere. Now the United States, too, has been hard at work exploring the effects of microwaves on atmospheric physics. Last year Jeanne Manning and Nick Begich published a book called Angels Don't Play This HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology (Anchorage: Earthpulse Press, 1995). Rather than hash over the doomsday scenarios proposed in that and other books, I would rather report on the scenario envisioned by Frederic B. Jeuneman, speculative columnist for R&D Magazine. This column appeared in the August 1996 issue, page 21.

HAARP stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project. Researchers hope that by beaming billions of watts of microwave power into the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, they can influence radio propagation and weather. The disaster predicated by Manning and Begich supposes that HAARP could short-circuit the van Allen belts, huge clouds of trapped charged particles surrounding much of the earth. The predicted discharge would be 4 million Amperes and would happen at the poles where the van Allen belts are closest to earth.

Jeuneman sees another possible effect, such a bolt of lightning would briefly cancel the earth's weak magnetic field and would cause the earth's ionosphere to fluoresce like a fluorescent light bulb. The discharge would result in a Giauque-Debye adiabatic demagnetization which means that with the sudden demagnetization, there would also come an extreme cooling. The atmosphere itself would drop over the entire polar region, creating a vacuum into which would rush air from the temperate regions. This would cause huge cyclone-force winds which would level almost everything in their paths. They would push oceanic waters along with them which would soon come back south as a huge wave. The onrushing air at the pole would spiral upwards into space, causing tremendous electrical phenomena.

Jeuneman does not envision the persistent sort of weather and radio disruption claimed by Manning and Begich.

Does HAARP have the ability to wreak such havoc? We don't know.