Wired.com has a great article about the US goverment's HAARP project (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program), which gives the ability to communicate to submerged submarines.
That last app caught the military's attention. Communicating with subs thousands of miles away, under thousands of feet of ocean, requires ultralow frequencies, and that requires whomping-big antennas. To do it, the Navy had built an array in the upper Midwest that transmits its signal through bedrock, but its construction required razing 84 miles' worth of hundred-foot-wide path through wilderness, including a national forest. It drove local environmentalists crazy. But who would protest an ephemeral antenna in the sky?
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Yet Haarp's future is unclear. Defense budgets are shrinking, and the facility costs $10 million a year to operate. Haarp's patron at Darpa, Tony Tether, has left his job. The project's godfather, Ted Stevens, was defeated in the 2008 Senate election by the mayor of Anchorage: Mark Begich, Nick's little brother. "I'll have his ear," Nick promises.
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So the radio scientists may have to look for funding again, which probably means a whole new set of rationales. You can imagine how the conspiracy crowd will react. And the scientists, in their eagerness, can end up feeding the paranoia. Papadopoulos, for example, says he wants to do another round of subterranean surveillance experiments. "Personally, I believe it can reach 1,000 kilometers. It can't reach Iran, if that's your question," he laughs. "But if I put Haarp on a ship, or on an oil platform, who knows?" Not that he has concrete plans for such tests in Alaska, let alone in the Persian Gulf—though he does mention a facility in Puerto Rico as a possibility.
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