Well it says it's a true story at the top of the page and "true" is even underlined, so it's got to be true! Plus it's posted on the Internet, thus solidifying it's worthiness! Seriously though, that's from 2003 and if you back out to the home page of the site it's clearly a new age site loaded with every fringe thought and opinion out there. I'd hardly classify this as reliable.

Yes there are projects to transmit radiowaves into the ionosphere. It probably isn't billions of watts by any means, as that would be very expensive in electricity.a

And there isn't very much weapons potential either, at least directly. A heating of the atmosphere may change some properties of long-wave radio communications.

Another possibility is heating the atmosphere is indirectly for missile defense. Possibly by increasing the density and height of the ionosphere (a little bit) you could better distinguish real warheads (heavy) from decoy warheads (light) as the decoys would be more affected relatively by atmospheric drag.

That's about the only directly military application I could think of, and if that's it, I'm for it.

Why did you include a picture of the Norway spiral?
The image and the article are completely unrelated.

The original purpose of the ionospheric heating experiments wasn't (at least directly) a weapon. It was to investigate the possibility of altering the ionosphere and using what amateur radio operators call "skip" to facilitate long-range communications and radar.

As an aside, 'billions of watts' isn't a misprint..but before you get too alarmed by the numbers, look up "effective radiated power". You'll find that a surprising number of commercial radio and television stations already pump out billions of watts...and a typical thunderstorm pumps out even more.

Originally posted by allenidaho
Why did you include a picture of the Norway spiral?
The image and the article are completely unrelated.

Is it allenidaho?

Is it REALLY?

Yes. It really is unrelated.

The Norway Spiral was the result of a failed missile launch in the North Atlantic.

Originally posted by allenidaho
Yes. It really is unrelated.

The Norway Spiral was the result of a failed missile launch in the North Atlantic.

Thats what Dan Aykroyd said they said!

Aykroyd: I woke up in the middle of the night and I said to my wife, they're calling me, they're calling me. I want to go outside, they want me to come outside and see. Something outside wants me to come out and see. Oh, just go back to bed. I went back to bed but the next day in the media - in newspapers and radio - all over upstate New York and Ontario and Quebec and Vermont, people spoke about this urge they had to go out of their houses at 3:00 in the morning and look up into the sky.

Aykroyd: Yeah, you could research, that was in the mid-80s. In fact it was a pink spiral that appeared in the sky. People went out, telepathically urged like I was, I didn't go, shmuck. They went out, in the sky they saw this pink spiral in the sky, huge, miles, like two miles long. And the Air Force said it was a Chinese rocket.