Heya, Flowperson! Thank you for posting that second link, which was very interesting. I looked at it and criticized it some!
I was reading your second link and got up to around page 18 and then skimmed up to page 28. A comment made on page 8 was that such a 'Super heating' device was impractical for other nations because they didn't have the computing power to use it. That probably is not true anymore and likely wasn't even back then. For aiming and targeting I suspect that even a Sega Genesis game machine working in tandem with a big telescope could probably have handled that kind of computer processing. It probably could also have handled the ionospheric-microwave and turbulence computations -- although I couldn't calculate the 'Big O' for it right this second. Maybe a Physicist would comment?
I do not know whether treating a section of the ionosphere with heat or any other treatment would make it more reflective than it already is, but its the boundaries between temperature layers that bounce radio waves. It works similar to the way sonar bounces off the cold layers deep in the ocean and visible light photons bounce off of the silvered layer behind glass. (The Russians probably had it first.)
The working theory in Dan's story is that you could heat any section of air evenly enough to create a false ionosphere layer -- or else make a sort of concave lens to focus multiple phased microwave arrays somewhere on earth's face. Fluid dynamics, Thermodynamics, and Meteorology are all disciplines that are understood well enough in textbooks to handle this and have been for 20 years or so. Its not like this tech is all that amazing, because it is something that anybody with some background in Science can understand. I do not know whether Dan's death ray trick would work, however. Securing a patent does not require you to prove that your idea works.
Also....
Brigham Young University (shows up around page 18) has had stuff on the internet about 'Proto-Canaanite' language for years, and it is unfortunately a little bit too much for me to accept. Its a very attractive idea, and I wish I were educated enough to evaluate it. Unfortunately, I can't just accept it. Its as if Microsoft announced they had found ancient patents proving that they owned the fundamental CPU processing cycle. Whether this was true or not, it would be too strongly in Microsoft's favor for me to consider it as an objective statement. I would consider it to be 'Spin'.