Israel has certainly chosen an interesting time to announce ongoing "research into how earthquakes are formed" by inducing earthquakes, while the Pentagon announced February 7 that it was planning further "earthquake simulations", beginning in Alaska sometime this spring.

We've seen since 9/11 that the US government has no qualms obliterating whole countries through "creative destruction", leaving millions dead and wounded in the wake of its imperialistic goals and thirst for oil. If it had the means to cause earthquakes at specific locations, would it be shy about using it? Many are suggesting HAARP as the likely culprit, but the high amounts of concentrated energy required to cause an earthquake at a specific location may require a more precise method of delivery. Perhaps a good place to start looking is space-based weapons. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative "Star Wars" program didn't die with the Soviet Union. In fact, the "Evil Empire" was the justification for the real Evil Empire to construct technologies that would enable it to control the whole planet:

"Environmental warfare is defined as the intentional modification or manipulation of the natural ecology, such as climate and weather, earth systems such as the ionosphere, magnetosphere, tectonic plate system, and/or the triggering of seismic events (earthquakes) to cause intentional physical, economic, psycho-social, and physical destruction to an intended target geophysical or population location, as part of strategic or tactical war." (Eco News)

As far back as 1955 John von Neumann said that "Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters... will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present... this will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war would have done." In 1977, the nations of the world were obviously aware of the dangerous implications of the Pentagon's development of "environmental modification techniques" because an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly banning "military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques", which it defined as "any technique 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."

The Pentagon is (or was, until its report was taken offline) on record as having claimed the ability to modify terran and space weather as part of its strategic arsenal:

"[Weather modification] offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary... Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally... It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather... and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies." (US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report)

In April 1997, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen, answering a journalist's question about an apparently unrelated topic at a conference on terrorism, slipped in some curious remarks about the type of weapons available to those bent on terrorising humanity. The following exchange is taken verbatim from a transcript posted on the Department of Defense website, which used to found here:

Q: Let me ask you specifically about last week's scare here in Washington, and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to deal with that (inaudible), at B'nai Brith.

A: Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a false threat under the circumstances. But as we've learned in the intelligence community, we had something called -- and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. 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. So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations.

• Mysterious eye disease strikes astronauts on long space journeys
• Astronauts' hearts take on spherical shape in space
• What are the psychological effects of being in space?