Nothing to Fear: The Unvested Interests of Rosalie Bertell

Part 6: Military juggernaut ushers in brave new weapons

[Part 5]

Two decades before Rosalie Bertell published her 1985 book, No Immediate Danger—Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, another seminal book, Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, sparked an awareness about how pesticides were affecting the natural world. Both books were a call to action to stop using the outgrowths of military applications to poison and pollute human and biological systems.

But part of Bertell’s legacy—the part that hardly received any public recognition at all—involved her last book, Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War. In the years before she died, Bertell raised alarm bells about the military’s use of the planet and its systems as a weapon of war.

“We allowed nuclear bombs to be set off in the sky, before we even knew what the sky was and what it did to protect Earth’s biosphere,” she wrote.

As previously discussed in Part 5 of this series, when the US and USSR—as well as France, China and the UK to a lesser degree—were engaged in atmospheric nuclear testing, it was not only contaminating the global environment—the Arctic in particular—it was also depleting the earth’s protective ozone layer. According to Bertell, this had the potential to not only disrupt natural patterns but if it was bad enough, could “wipe out the food web and make life impossible.”

Layers of Earth’s atmosphere (NASA). The ozone layer, which protects the Earth from damaging ultra violet radiation, is contained within the stratosphere; the ionosphere is another protective layer located within the thermosphere—it shields the Earth from damaging solar and cosmic particles. Not included in the image is the magnetosphere, another discernible layer just beyond the exosphere, which contains the Van Allen belts.

In her book, Bertell reported that in 1975 it was discovered that nuking the atmosphere had a cumulative effect. She referenced a study by the US National Academy of Sciences titled, “Long-term effects of multiple nuclear weapon detonations,” which reported that the 300 megatons of nuclear explosions detonated between 1945 and 1963—the equivalent explosive energy of 8,300 of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined—had depleted the ozone layer by about 4%.¹ ²

“Between 1978 and 1990, the ozone layer in the northern hemisphere decreased by a further 4–8% and in the southern hemisphere by 6–10%,” Bertell wrote.³

“These experiments clearly show the danger of undertaking experiments before we have the necessary knowledge to understand the consequences.”

The ozone layer—in case we need reminding—is a layer of trace gas located in the stratosphere, about 40 km from the Earth, that absorbs a lot of the sun’s biologically harmful ultraviolet radiation and acts like a protective shield. When ozone breaks down, there is less absorption of UV rays, which can be very dangerous for life in the Earth’s biosphere.

Bertell pointed not only to nuclear testing as one of the causes of ozone depletion, but also to the effects of rocket gases from space shuttle flights. A space shuttle’s ‘orbit maneuvering system’ (OMS) releases large amounts of hydrochloric acid in its exhaust. Chlorine is known to deplete ozone. She also pointed to experiments conducted in the 1980s with US space shuttles (and likely those of other countries) to ‘induce ionospheric holes,’ by “dumping” exhaust into the ionosphere.⁴

According to the scientific “consensus,” thinning ozone and the ozone holes are the result of ozone-depleting substances (ODS), particularly chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—chemicals that contain chlorine, fluorine, and carbon. But the sources of some of these ozone depleting substances that Bertell pointed to have garnered little if any attention.

To be clear, Bertell did not question whether the ozone was being depleted or whether CFCs were involved—indeed, she warned about the serious dangers to life on Earth should this protective layer be further lost. However, she did question the causes, and why certain known offenders—like the military and the aerospace industry—who were not only contributing “ozone depleting substances” to the atmosphere but were experimenting with creating holes in the ionosphere, weren’t also being called out, and more importantly, phased out, along with the refrigerants, solvents and aerosol sprays.

In a paper that appeared in Canadian Woman Studies, Bertell wrote that reports of the “environmental impact” of military experiments “are non-existent in the public sector.” When it comes to ozone depletion, she wrote, “it was blamed on under arm deodorant and cologne, atomizers and asthma medicine dispensers.”⁵

More recently, there has been some recognition that atmospheric rocket emissions from the military and the booming space industry do contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer, but their role continues to be ignored in official circles.

The maximum ozone hole extent over the southern hemisphere, from 1979 to 2024. According to the EEA, the largest historical extent of the ozone hole – 28.4 million square kilometres – occurred in September 2020—equivalent to almost seven times the territory of the EU. (Source: European Environment Agency)

By the 1970s—around the time Bertell was working as a senior cancer researcher at Roswell Park Cancer Centre—there was growing concern internationally over the military’s use of tactics and technologies that were shown to both manipulate and damage the environment.

During the Vietnam War, for instance, a top-secret cloud seeding program (Operation Popeye), and the spraying of the herbicide Agent Orange (Operation Ranch Hand) with the goal of defoliating forests and crops used by Viet Cong forces, were tangible evidence of how the US military was using weather and the environment as a weapon.⁶

Partly in response to concerns over military tactics like these, in 1976 an international agreement was adopted through a United Nations General Assembly resolution. The Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any other Hostile use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) stated that any environmental modification, when “produced by military or any other hostile use” for “changing—through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes—the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space,” should be “prohibited.”

The ENMOD Convention also provided some examples that were “illustrative of phenomena” that could be caused by the use of environmental modification techniques.

They included: “earthquakes, tsunamis; an upset in the ecological balance of a region; changes in weather patterns (clouds, precipitation, cyclones of various types and tornadic storms); changes in climate patterns; changes in ocean currents; changes in the state of the ozone layer; and changes in the state of the ionosphere.”

But the prohibition only applied to wartime, allowing “peaceful” environmental modification techniques as long as they were undertaken “with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.”

In other words, the prohibition did not apply to research and experimentation involving environmental modification.

During the Vietnam War, US Air Forces sprayed the herbicide Agent Orange (Operation Ranch Hand) with the goal of defoliating forests and crops used by Viet Cong forces. [Source: Air Force Historical Support Division]

Using the atmosphere as a lab

Since the 1960s, the US military has sponsored and been engaged in research involving manipulating the environment and the atmosphere. In her book, Bertell mainly focused on the ways in which the atmosphere was tampered with. She explained that these experiments could be categorized as either chemical- or wave-related.

In either case, the aim was to cause a reaction, distort, or interrupt normal conditions in the upper atmosphere. These perturbations were then monitored and recorded.

Bertell cites several examples in the early 1990s where the US military launched satellites containing canisters of toxic chemicals such as barium and lithium and dumped them just above the ozone layer, or sometimes higher, into the stratosphere while rockets were simultaneously launched to monitor the effects.

According to NASA, experiments are conducted to “understand how the natural upper atmospheric winds and/or ion drifts behave.”

For instance, in January 1991 the US air force and NASA “staged a $250 million fireworks display” over North America, that could be seen as far away as Europe and South America. And in 1979, a “lithium red sky” was the result of a high-altitude rocket-borne chemical release with the aim—according to the University of Alaska—to “understand how energy is transferred from one level to another in the atmosphere and the near-earth regions of space above.” The brief report also noted that that “energy transfer may have some influence upon climate.”

Bertell wrote that Canada has been cooperating with the US on weather modification experiments since the 1950s. Manitoba-made Black Brant rockets were launched from Churchill—Canada’s upper atmosphere research facility—starting in 1956 until the mid 1980s. The rockets were used to propel chemical release modules (CRMs) into the upper atmosphere in order to obtain atmospheric readings.

Bertell noted that any changes made to the ionosphere—the ionized or electrically charged part of the upper atmosphere—could influence atmospheric dynamics and lead to weather and climate variations.

“Chemical experimentation with the Earth’s atmosphere was undoubtedly linked to the military’s desire to tap into this immense source of energy and to control the weather,” she wrote. “Reports on the environmental impact of these experiments are non-existent since they predate the legislation that would have required it.”⁷

In an interview Bertell gave in 2008, she recounted how in 1967-68 she was hired to review an environmental impact statement for the US Department of Energy. She explained how the project she reviewed, while ultimately rejected by the US Congress, eventually became the “Strategic Defence Initiative,” in 1983 and was nick-named “Star Wars” under President Reagan.

The missile defence system that was proposed was going to protect the US from ballistic nuclear missiles, and, as it was pitched at the time, render nuclear weapons obsolete.

“People laughed at it all over the world,” said Bertell.

Bertell explained how the project she reviewed eventually went into the Department of Defence budget instead of the Department of Energy:

What I watched happen after that was that the whole massive project was broken up into pieces, so they became all separate things… So the space shuttle is part of it, so is the space lab, so is the over-the-horizon radar, so are the missile tests, all of these things were part of a whole program which they divided up into small payable projects, that they could say were university projects… [it] all fits together under this one master plan that came out in the late sixties.⁸

Another part of the “master plan,” was HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), an installation in Alaska that Bertell described as being “related to 50 years of intensive and increasingly destructive programs to understand and control the upper atmosphere.”

The array of antennae and transmission towers is capable of bombarding the atmosphere with powerful radio beams, that can stimulate or heat parts of the ionosphere, creating modifications like holes, incisions, and artificial ‘lenses’ which can then be used to magnify, change, or reflect the path of electromagnetic waves.

According to a US Air Force study, such modifications can alter weather patterns and disrupt enemy communications and radar.⁹ An archived HAARP Web site explains that the ionized medium within the ionosphere “can distort, reflect and absorb radio signals, and thus can affect numerous civilian and military communications, navigation, surveillance and remote sensing systems in many varied ways.”

There was also a claim that the energy could be aimed at a moving target and be used as an anti-missile system.¹⁰

HAARP-type installations exist in other places as well, including Puerto Rico, Norway, Peru, Russia, and Ukraine.¹¹

These atmospheric experiments started as early as 1966 in the US, but they have always been shrouded in secrecy and garnered little if any media attention.

HAARP was established in 1993, and Bertell noted that in 1994, Project Censored featured it as one of the top ten most underreported news stories of that year. Then in 1996, the CBC aired an episode of Undercurrents with Wendy Mesley, who interviews a number of people including John Heckscher, the HAARP program manager at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. The 14-minute episode does a really good job of encapsulating the unanswered questions and concerns and is definitely worth a watch.

“It is not known how the atmosphere will react to these [holes or incisions],” wrote Bertell, and furthermore, with little if any public scrutiny, the technology could eventually be used as part of a weapons systems with extraordinary capabilities, including manipulating the electrojet to “blow out a major power grid,” or “be used to ‘deposit energy’ (a military euphemism for causing an explosion) at some point on the Earth.”

According to Bertell, the Environmental Impact Statement filed by the US Air Force for HAARP said that its massive transmitter was capable of raising “the internal body temperature of nearby people, ignite road flares in the trunks of cars, and scramble aircraft communications, navigation and flight control systems.”

But despite the legitimate concerns this raised, in 1995, “reporters were fed stories from unknown sources about irrational fears being circulated to alarm the public,” wrote Bertell.

In other words, disinformation was used offensively to neutralize or discredit legitimate questions. To illustrate, Bertell provided the following opening paragraph from a Washington Post article that appeared at the time:

The rumours are buzzing across the Internet that a Pentagon physics experiment on a wind-whipped tract of US Air Force land in Alaska has a secret purpose – digging up bodies of UFO aliens. Another rumour has it that men in black suits…are jumping out of a black sedan to beat up Alaskan opponents of the project.¹²

Later, the reporter does include some of the actual concerns, including that the installation can scramble airplane electronics and disrupt communications, and was, according to a “small group of American physicists, ‘an irresponsible act of global vandalism.’”¹³

A few years later, in 1999, The European Parliament referred to HAARP as a “weapons system which disrupts the climate,” and of “global concern,” capable of having “far-reaching impact on the environment.” It called for an international independent body to examine its “legal, ecological and ethical implications,” and noted the “repeated refusal” of the US to send anyone to give evidence to the public hearing.

According to Bertell, HAARP is linked to and interacts with other research and military facilities including the network of SuperDARN radars (Super Dual Auroral Radar Network) around the world—there are currently more than 35 radars, capable of monitoring what happens to the ionosphere after it’s been acted upon by HAARP and other similar installations.

Currently, SuperDARN Canada operates five radars: in Saskatoon, SK, Prince George, BC, Rankin Inlet, NU, Inuvik, NWT, and Clyde River, NU.

Hardly anyone in Canada even knows they exist, let alone what they do.

In 2014—two years after Bertell passed away— it was reported that the US Air Force turned the HAARP facility over to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, saying it was “moving in another direction in ionospheric research.” There was no indication given of what this new direction involved.

However, experimentation in the ionosphere continues at the HAARP facility to this day.¹⁴

Antenna grid at the HAARP installation in Alaska. Wikimedia Commons.

In Bertell’s last book, published in 2000, she dedicated a section in a chapter titled, “Down-to-Earth Problems with Star Wars,” to the issue of climate change. She made a detailed account of the spate of “abnormal” and “violent” weather events of the late 1990s—including severe flooding in Nepal, and heavy snowfall in South Africa. Bertell included a chart showing the increase in greenhouse gases from the pre-industrial era to the 1990s, attributed to burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and modern agriculture. But she also noted that we do not know how human activities, such as the “experimentation on major Earth systems in the upper atmosphere and the bowels of the planet” may have affected the Earth’s “natural stasis.”

To be clear, nowhere in her book does she explicitly connect the decades of highly classified military experimentation in the atmosphere with climate change, though the ENMOD Convention and the European Parliament were clear that changes in climate patterns were among the phenomena that could result from environmental modification and atmospheric perturbations.

However, in the “Enhanced Edition” of her book, which includes the transcript of an interview she gave in 2008, four years before she died, Bertell expressed her apprehension about being too definitive. ¹⁵

About half-way through a long response to the question, “Can you tell us more about HAARP?” Bertell says the following:

“[HAARP] seems like an elaborate instrument to find out how to manage the jet stream, the vapor rivers that bring water up from the tropical rainforest that provides the moisture, and what is called the electrojet, which is a natural current containing more electricity than all of the electricity used on the planet. There are very powerful planetary forces, which they could use for military purposes. Therefore, I have many reservations about climate change, because I cannot distinguish which things the military are causing and which things are due to carbon dioxide and other pollutants causing global warming.”¹⁶

In Part 2 of this series I introduced you to Green Party Member of Parliament, Elizabeth May, a long time environmentalist and lawyer. It was during her years at the Sierra Club of Canada that May met Bertell when they were both working on nuclear and radiation issues.

May reviewed Bertell’s last book, Planet Earth, and wrote at the time: “It is hard to scare or shock me with evidence of technological madness in our world—I am immersed in the evidence—but Rosalie Bertell’s new book made me feel naïve.”¹⁷

In an interview, I asked May what she thought about the comments Bertell made in the 2008 interview regarding climate change.

“I totally think that she, as an open-minded person, was trying to figure out which was which. She didn't say climate change isn't a real thing. She said, ‘I just can't distinguish.’”

“I don't for one minute doubt that the military would be prepared to try to manipulate weather and create geo-engineering for the purpose of military, strategic ends—I don't doubt they’re capable of wanting to do it, I don’t doubt they’re capable of doing it… But we don't need to look there because everything is explained by the increase in greenhouse gases.”

May says, when it comes to fossil fuel emissions, the military hasn’t been accounted for. “We still don't have targets and timelines for reductions of greenhouse gases from the military around the world, and we know the military around the world is the world's biggest polluter.”

Indeed, in her book, Bertell took aim at the human and environmental crises “spawned by war-making,” from the diversion of public funds into militarism, and away from the everyday needs of citizens, to the military’s use of resources, and the development of polluting products that destroy our life support systems.

“There is simply no point in waging wars to ‘protect our assets’ if we have harmed the regenerative power of the Earth itself,” wrote Bertell.

“I find myself unable to pretend that life is normal while threatened with global nuclear or star wars, catastrophic ecological disaster or slow poisoning and genetic destruction. If I cannot bring about change, I will keep watch over the dying Earth.”¹⁸

[Stay tuned for the 7th and final instalment in this series. In it I’ll be exploring some of the themes that keep arising in Bertell’s work, and why I think she is as relevant today as ever. Thanks for reading!]

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1. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 0.015 and 0.021 megatons, respectively.

2. For the 4% ozone depletion statistic, Bertell referenced a 1975 report by the US National Academy of Science, “Long-term effects of multiple nuclear weapon detonations.” I was unable to locate a digital copy online. However, in 2008, an article appeared in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that concluded that a regional nuclear conflict in the world would result in massive global ozone loss. From the article: “We use a chemistry-climate model and new estimates of smoke produced by fires in contemporary cities to calculate the impact on stratospheric ozone of a regional nuclear war between developing nuclear states involving 100 Hiroshima-size bombs exploded in cities in the northern subtropics. We find column ozone loss in excess of 20% globally, 25-45% at mid-altitudes, and 50-70% at northern high latitudes persisting for 5 years, with substantial losses continuing for 5 additional years.” While the article does not address nuclear testing, there is no reason to assume, if the chemistry-climate model used for this hypothetical nuclear conflict is accurate, that the actual detonation of 500 nuclear bombs in the atmosphere and 1,500 underground would not have already had some deleterious impact on the ozone layer.

3. Bertell did not provide a reference for this statistic in her book—surprising because it is heavily footnoted and referenced elsewhere, so I’m not sure what the source of these numbers is. However, I did locate a 1994 Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, which corroborates her concern and reports that by 1994 there were “substantial decreases [in ozone] in all seasons at mid-altitudes of both hemispheres. For example, in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, downward trends of about 6% per decade over 1979 - 1994 were observed in winter and spring and about 3% per decade were observed in summer and fall. In the Southern Hemisphere, the seasonal difference was somewhat less, but the midlatitude trends averaged a similar 4% to 5% per decade,” the report states.”

4. Bertell wrote that a six-second 68-kg OMS release over Connecticut in August 1985 produced an airglow that covered 400,000 square km. I was not able to locate a reference for this particular OMS release experiment, but was able to locate a study of a similar atmospheric modification experiment that took place over Arecibo, Puerto Rico around the same time, that talks about creating an ionospheric hole as well as an “airglow.”

5. Bertell’s paper can be downloaded here.

6. According to a 1974 piece by the New York Times News Service, titled “Rainmaking Used as a Weapon in SE Asia,” the highly classified program run by the US Air Force and Navy between 1967-1972 used cloud seeding in an attempt to extend the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to disrupt North Vietnamese military supplies by softening road surfaces and causing landslides. The program was sponsored by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the CIA, without the authorization of then Secretary of Defense (Melvin Laird) who had also denied to Congress that such a program even existed.

7. In 1975 an “Agreement” was signed between the US and Canada, “Relating to the Exchange of Information on Weather Modification Activities.”

8. A transcript of this interview appeared as “Additional Text” in a later edition of her last book.

9. Engels, p. 155.

10. European Parliament, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defence Policy Report, 1999.

11. HAARP-type installations listed in 2024 article in Nature.

12. Mintz, John. “Pentagon fights secret scenario speculation over Alaskan antennas.” The Washington Post, April 17, 1995.

13. According to Mintz, a small group of American physicists, some of whom have aired complaints in scientific journals such as Physics and Society feared that HAARP was “phase one of a secret U.S. military program that could be seeking ways to blow other countries' spacecraft out of the sky or disrupt communications over large portions of the planet…The physicist critics fear the government plans a secret second stage of HAARP, in which it would beam much more energy into the ionosphere… that ‘may produce effects that spread rapidly around the Earth for years.’”

14. In her book, Bertell also explored how the military used waves to probe the interior of the Earth, first using underground nuclear explosions (as previously mentioned earlier in this series) but also as part of HAARP in what’s called deep Earth tomography, where low frequency waves are reflected back to Earth by the ionosphere. (see pp. 128-135). In Bertell’s biography, Engels writes: “HAARP… can also create pulsed, extremely low-frequency (ELF) waves. These have been directed deep into the earth itself, potentially disrupting delicately poised tectonic plates… There is a growing chain of extremely powerful, potentially interactive military installations, using varied types of electromagnetic fields or wavelengths, each with a different ability to affect the earth or its atmosphere. Their effects on the earth’s core or the atmosphere are impossible to predict, but many have speculated that the testing of this new technology is related to recent earthquakes and freak weather patterns.” (p. 156)

In 1997, US Secretary of Defence William Cohen warned at a conference sponsored by the University of Georgia, “Others are engaging… in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter climates and set off earthquakes and volcanoes through the use of electromagnetic waves.”

15. Patrick Pasin interviewed Bertell in June of 2008 in Toronto for the documentary film, Bye Bye Blue Sky.

16. The interview is included in the “Enhanced” edition of Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War, p. 257.

17. May’s quote taken from Engels, p. 155.

18. Quote taken from Bertell’s acceptance speech upon receiving an honorary degree from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax in 1985.