Page 144 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

missile toward Kwajalein Atoll from a ballistic submarine, smearing the sky with a blue-green
plume:

The Navy’s fleet of 14 ballistic submarines can each carry 24 Trident missiles, each tipped with 14 independently
targetable thermonuclear warheads. . .The test on Saturday featured the launch of a missile outfitted with a dummy
warhead toward the Kwajalein Atoll, a missile test site that’s part of the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific. . .The
U.S. military’s nuclear weapons strategy rests on a triad of delivery systems—bombers, submarines and land-based
missiles. . .The submarine missile test came late Saturday after Defense Secretary Ashton Carter addressed a defense
forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley about the U.S. “adapting our operational posture and
contingency plans” to deter Russia’s “aggression.” 14

Nice touch, that tip of the hat to Ronald Reagan whose administration initiated the “Star
Wars” program now culminating in the latest addition to the ground-based system upon which
the Space Fence depends going up on the Kwajalein Atoll at the old Ronald Reagan Ballistic
Missile Test Site.
The Space Fence rises from “Star Wars”

The Naval Space Surveillance System field stations comprise a bi-static radar that points straight up into space and
produces a “fence” of electromagnetic energy. The system can detect basketball-sized objects in orbit around the
Earth out to an effective range of 15,000 nautical miles. Over 5 million satellite detections or observations are
collected by the surveillance sensor each month. Data collected by the Fence is transmitted to a computer center at
Dahlgren [VA], where it is used to constantly update a database of spacecraft orbital elements. This information is
reported to the fleet and Fleet Marine Forces to alert them when particular satellites of interest are overhead. The
Navy’s space surveillance system is one of about 20 sensors that together comprise the nation’s worldwide Space
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Surveillance Network directed by U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska.

The Space Fence actually began with the Navy Space Surveillance System (NAVSPASUR)
in 1957, just after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite. Designed to track both transmitting
satellites and those that were quiet, NAVSPASUR’s ground base consisted of a nine-radar array
“fence” (217MHz each) from Georgia to Southern California at the 33rd parallel north: two
transmitters at Gila River, Arizona (pre-recalibration frequency 219.97MHz) and Jordan Lake,
Alabama (pre-recalibration frequency 216.99MHz); a more powerful addition at Lake Kickapoo,
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Texas (768kW radiated power, pre-recalibration frequency 216.983MHz); and six receiving
stations, four of which are still operating in San Diego, California, Elephant Butte, New Mexico,
Red River, Arkansas, and Hawkinsville, Georgia.
The 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), known familiarly as “Star Wars,” was presented
as a multi-layered outer space defense system based on “non-chemical kinetic and directed
energy weapons”—kinetic kill and speed of light weapons, neutral particle beams, ground-based
lasers, electrons using fighting mirrors and hyper-velocity guns—against invading ballistic
missiles divided into flight-orbit stages of booster, late booster, mid-orbit, and last-stage.
The plan in the 1980s was that a space-based constellation of forty platforms would deploy
1,500 kinetic interceptors. But what happened was that the initial stage alone—Brilliant Pebbles,
a satellite constellation of 4,600 kinetic interceptors (KE ASAT) in low Earth orbit, each
weighing 100 pounds (45 kg), and their associated tracking systems—would cost $125 billion,
and that wasn’t counting the next stage deployment of even larger platforms, including laser and
particle beam weapons like the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL). It became
evident that “Star Wars” was premature and that a more sophisticated ground-based system
would have to be developed to support space-based platforms.
Along came Bernard Eastlund and his 1987 HAARP patent, leading to a decade of HAARP