HAARP -- The William Cohen Statement: What the Secretary of Defense Said

HAARP -- The William Cohen Statement: What the Secretary of Defense Said

The Statement

On April 28, 1997, United States Secretary of Defense William Cohen gave a keynote address at a conference titled "Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy," held at the University of Georgia, Athens. During his remarks, Cohen made the following statement:

"Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."

This statement is in the official public record. It was made by the serving Secretary of Defense of the United States, at a public academic conference, on the record.

Context: What Cohen Was Saying

The official framing of the Cohen statement: he was discussing the threat landscape of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, specifically addressing the range of technologies that adversaries might develop or attempt to use. The "others" he referenced were hostile state and non-state actors -- not the United States itself.

In this reading, Cohen was warning that the threat environment included potential electromagnetic geophysical weapons, not confirming that the United States possessed such weapons.

The Conspiracy Reading

The conspiracy reading rests on a straightforward logical inference: the Secretary of Defense of the United States stated, on the public record, that electromagnetic waves can alter the climate and trigger earthquakes. He stated this matter-of-factly, as something "others" are doing or developing -- not as science fiction, not as hypothetical, not as impossible.

For a cabinet official to make such a statement publicly requires him to believe the capability is real. A Secretary of Defense does not speculate about fictional weapon types in public remarks. If he said adversaries can do it, the implied premise is that he had reason to believe the capability exists.

HAARP -- a program jointly funded by the Air Force, Navy, and DARPA that operates electromagnetic equipment aimed at the ionosphere, based on a patent that specifically lists "weather modification" and "earthquake triggering" as applications -- was operational at the time Cohen made this statement.

The Unresolved Question

Neither the official explanation nor the conspiracy reading is entirely satisfying:

The official explanation requires believing that the Secretary of Defense made a specific claim about electromagnetic geophysical weapons solely to describe a hypothetical adversary threat -- not because he had any information suggesting it was achievable. Given that HAARP was operating under military control at the time, this requires significant compartmentalization between the program and the cabinet secretary discussing related capabilities.

The conspiracy reading requires believing that Cohen's statement was an inadvertent or deliberate disclosure of what HAARP could do -- which raises the question of why the Secretary of Defense would make such a disclosure at a public academic conference.

The statement sits in the public record. Its full implications remain contested.