📖 Book Summary Health Lawyer Parenting

The Zapping of America: Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Cover-Up

Paul Brodeur · 1977

New Yorker reporter's 1977 exposé: how the Pentagon, industry and regulators defended a heat-only microwave safety limit while evidence of cataracts, 'microwave hearing', blood and genetic effects piled up.

Type Book
Language English
📋

Overview

What this book is about

Brodeur's argument is that the United States set its microwave safety limit of 10 milliwatts per square centimetre (mW/cm²) on theory alone. The only harm it assumed microwaves could do was heating tissue. The military, the electronics and microwave-oven industries, and the federal agencies meant to regulate them then defended that number for twenty years. Against it stood a steady flow of evidence of "non-thermal" effects at far lower levels: cataracts, nervous-system and behavioural changes, blood and chromosome changes, birth defects and possibly cancer. The number was proposed in 1953 by engineer Herman Schwan. His reasoning was that a resting body sheds about 5 mW/cm² of metabolic heat and could take roughly that much again. The Army, Navy, Air Force, Bell Labs and General Electric adopted it in 1957–58. Meanwhile the Soviet Union set a full-working-day limit of 10 microwatts (µW/cm², one-thousandth as much) in 1958, and Czechoslovakia and Poland set similar limits. Those limits rested on large clinical studies of exposed workers. American officials dismissed these studies as propaganda or bad science. Brodeur's explanation is that microwaves sat at the heart of every Cold War radar, missile and communications system. Admitting low-level harm would have meant buffer zones, redesigns, lawsuits and compensation claims.

The book is investigative journalism, not a scientific monograph. It follows a documented trail: congressional hearings, symposium proceedings, declassified Pentagon files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), internal memos, court and compensation cases, and interviews. The first third is history: the growth of microwave technology, the origin of the thermal standard, the Air Force-run Tri-Service research program (1957–61), and the Soviet research the US ignored. The middle chapters are case studies of what Brodeur calls the cover-up:

- The "Moscow Signal" that the Soviets beamed at the US Embassy from 1962 onward, and Project Pandora, the secret Pentagon study of it using monkeys. - Milton Zaret's fight to have "microwave cataract" recognised as a disease. - Birth defects among families of helicopter pilots at Fort Rucker. - Cancer clusters among workers on electromagnetic-pulse tests, Project Tempest and TACAN navigation equipment. - Blindness and deafness in radar repairmen. - Industrial exposures that no agency could even measure.

The last third follows the money and the weapons. A 1975 Pentagon research plan openly aimed to keep a "united position" against tighter limits. The book also covers electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) and directed-energy weapons, the Navy's ELF submarine antenna (Seafarer), mind-control applications, and background radiation from TV, FM and radar in American cities.

Brodeur writes as a prosecutor. He builds a case, names names and uses heavy irony. Much of his evidence is case reports, clusters, animal studies and documents showing what officials knew. It is not proof that low-level exposure harms people, and he says so in places: several chapters (the directed-energy "gap", the Iran IBEX killings, Soviet motives) are openly labelled "conjectural and speculative". He also reports evidence against his own case, for example the over-reporting explanation at Fort Rucker, the negative second Johns Hopkins Down's-syndrome study, and the success of Finland's diet programme against Zaret's radar-and-heart-attack idea. His firmest conclusions are about process. The Department of Defense controlled and paid for most of the research into its own equipment. Standard-setting bodies were packed with military and industry people. And "no proven hazard" usually meant "no one was allowed to look".

💡

Key Ideas

The core frameworks and findings

1
The 10 mW/cm² standard was a heating number, not a health finding
Schwan based it on body heat loss, not on biological data, and it made no allowance for frequency. The 1957–61 Tri-Service Program was set up to validate it. Most of its animal studies used over 100 mW/cm² and looked for low-level effects hardly at all. In the 1968 Senate hearings Schwan himself called the level "crudely set". He said it needed frequency dependence and was "practically meaningless" near complex fields such as leaking ovens. He also warned that a woman standing at an oven leak could be blinded.
2
Eastern bloc science versus American thermal orthodoxy
Soviet institutes studied thousands of exposed workers, as against a single American study: Charles Barron's 1954–55 study of 226 Lockheed radar men and 88 controls. The Soviets described "microwave sickness": headache, fatigue, irritability, memory loss, sleep disturbance, slow heart rate, blood-pressure and white-cell changes, and thyroid effects. It started with nervous-system symptoms, moved on to heart and circulation symptoms, and often stabilised once exposure stopped (Maria Sadcikova, 1973). Karel Marha of Prague reported symptoms at 0.1 mW/cm² and explained the Czech approach: "Our standard is not only to prevent damage but to avoid discomfort in people." Barron's own data showed white-cell shifts, which he later blamed on "laboratory error". His S-band workers complained of "buzzing vibrations, pulsations, and tickling sensations about the head and ears".
3
Microwave hearing (the Frey effect)
In 1961 biophysicist Allan Frey met a GE radar technician in Syracuse who said he could hear radar. Frey heard it himself ("zip-zip-zip"). He then showed that people hear pulsed microwaves at 300–3,000 MHz, the band that passes into the head, as buzzing, ticking, hissing or knocking. Frey was laughed at when he published (1961–62). Earlier radar engineers had been told they were hearing their teeth rattle. An airman who heard radar in 1943 was sent for psychiatric examination. By 1969 Frey said publicly: "I have seen too much… I very carefully avoid exposure myself." The military's own Military Handbook 238 (1973) later listed "auditory response" among recognised non-thermal effects. A 1976 Defense Intelligence Agency report said that "sounds and possibly even words" could be induced inside the head. In 1973 Joseph Sharp at Walter Reed recognised spoken words sent to him on a pulsed signal of about 2 GHz.
4
The microwave cataract
Frederic Hirsch described the first case in 1951: a Sandia technician who looked into a horn antenna at about 100 mW/cm². Ophthalmologist Milton Zaret later argued that microwaves cause a distinctive cataract on the back capsule of the lens, while heat (infrared) cataracts form at the front. Other points in his case: The Air Force, Army and Navy each ended his contracts after he reported his findings. Colonel Budd Appleton of Walter Reed said "there was no such thing as a microwave cataract". The Bureau of Radiological Health nevertheless documented a man who got cataracts from 2,440 MHz diathermy with only about 33 mW/cm² to one eye and 2 mW/cm² to the other. It presented the case the day after it set the oven-leakage standard and never published it. The Veterans Administration and the Department of Labor went on to compensate radar technicians and air traffic controllers for work-related cataracts.
5
The Moscow Signal and Project Pandora
From 1962 the Soviets beamed multi-frequency, fluctuating microwaves into the US Embassy. Embassy staff were not told until 1976. According to Zaret, a 1965 Institute for Defense Analyses briefing put the peak at 4 mW/cm², while the State Department later claimed 13–18 µW/cm². Pandora files declassified in 1977 show the Walter Reed equipment was built to produce about 4 mW/cm². Monkeys exposed at 1–4.6 mW/cm² for 10 hours a day showed "degradation of work performance", and one monkey's blood showed chromosome aberrations in 40% of its cells. A study on human subjects was planned. Then an Army officer challenged the monkey data without producing a written report, and in January 1970 the committee declared the findings "negative".
6
Embassy health fallout
7
Blood, genetic and cancer signals
8
Birth defects and reproduction
9
Worker clusters that were never investigated
10
Head, ear and eye injuries in radar men
Radar repairman Thomas Montgomery was hit by a mobile radar from under two feet away in 1949. Within hours he was dizzy and losing hearing in the right ear. Within two weeks that ear was permanently deaf, and his balance was damaged. He later lost hearing in the other ear and became blind from retinal haemorrhages. After a long fight he was compensated for a "job-related injury". Nike radar repairman Ronald Karras went deaf, was losing his sight, and bled from the eyes, ears and gums. Both men worked where several radar beams overlapped, which Montgomery identified as the most dangerous situation.
11
Regulation that could not regulate
12
Conflicts of interest, named
13
The money trail
A 1975 Tri-Service research plan aimed "to maintain a united position concerning EMR exposure standards that encroach on… DOD operations". It admitted there were essentially no data on the new phased-array radars (PAVE PAWS, Cobra Dane, FPS-85). A classified study it cited found that a 1 mW/cm² standard would force the services to control another 498,000 acres. The plan noted that veterans' cataract claims had already cost over $100,000 each. It called for studies to settle such claims "until studies are accomplished that disprove this EMR effect". The US also rejected a proposed NATO 1 mW/cm² limit (STANAG 2345).
14
Everyday urban exposure
Brodeur lists the sources: TV and FM transmitters, radar, relay towers, CB radios, police and emergency radios, walkie-talkies, video display terminals (VDTs) and ovens. Urban radio-frequency background is estimated at 100–200 million times the sun's natural level. Street-level EPA measurements (Janes and Tell) were modest, at most 2.5 µW/cm². But the upper floors of tall buildings near broadcast antennas measured 10–97 µW/cm², and levels close to walkie-talkie antennas exceeded 10 mW/cm². Raytheon's own unpublished analysis found that TV broadcasting exposes the population over 40,000 times more than a million microwave ovens would. In the epilogue Brodeur calculates that one radar near his own Cape Cod land averages about 100 µW/cm² a mile away. That is about 100 times the Soviet general-population limit, and roughly 100 times the level for which the State Department screened the Moscow embassy windows.
📑

Contents

Chapter by chapter — click to expand

§ 1. From Radio to Radar ▾
  • History from Maxwell, Hertz, Marconi and Tesla to the naming of "microwaves" (1933) and wartime radar (the magnetron, S- to K-band).
  • Post-war growth: FCC-authorised transmitters rose from 50,000 to over 7 million; nearly 250,000 relay towers; satellites; about 15 million CB radios; NSA eavesdropping; EMP and directed-energy programmes.
  • Medical diathermy (about 15,000 machines, about 2 million patients a year), ovens and industrial heating. Brodeur also notes the predicted "pocket telephones".
  • The 1971 federal advisory-council (ERMAC) warning that exposure "may already be biologically significant" and that the population at risk "may well be the entire population".
§ 2. Early Warning ▾
  • Galvani, d'Arsonval and diathermy. The X-ray precedent: doctors' hand cancers, radium dial painters, pelvic X-rays in pregnancy. The split between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
  • Schereschewsky's 1920s frequency-specific effects; the AMA's 1935 ruling that the "burden of proof" lay on non-thermal claims.
  • The Navy's 1942–43 study of radar workers (headaches, eye pain, flushing) dismissed as subjective.
  • Hirsch's 1951 cataract case. Bell Labs (0.1 mW/cm²) and GE (1 mW/cm²) proposed their own limits.
  • The 1955 Mayo Clinic symposium adopted Schwan's 10 mW/cm², supported by Barron's Lockheed study, including its head-and-ear "buzzing" complaints.
§ 3. The Cover-Up Begins ▾
  • The Tri-Service Program (1957–61) set out to validate a number already chosen. Contrary findings were ignored: testicular damage at 5 mW/cm² and Carpenter's cumulative, pulse-related cataracts.
  • The "19 girls in a row" radar-plant story told as a joke.
  • The Soviet 10 µW/cm² standard (1958), its work rules and goggle rule, and the Levitas–Gordon book.
  • The Moscow Signal discovered in 1962; Project Pandora and the ARPA monkey laboratory at Walter Reed.
§ 4. The Human Factor ▾
  • Johnson raised the embassy signal with Kosygin (Glassboro, 1967).
  • 1968 Senate hearings: Susskind urged that Soviet findings be replicated; his mouse leukaemia data; Schwan's doubts; the oven-leak surveys.
  • The Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act of 1968 and its gaps.
  • The 1969 Richmond symposium: Marha's symptom list, the ban on pregnant workers, and "avoid discomfort in people".
  • Allan Frey's discovery of microwave hearing and brain and heart effects, and his "I have seen too much."
§ 5. The Cataract Connection ▾
  • Zaret's blind survey of about 1,600 workers, cases referred from industry, the posterior-capsule "signature", and the Thule men who felt nothing.
  • CIA questions about brainwashing; the 4 mW/cm² Moscow Signal; being ordered to stop replicating a Czech study.
  • Contracts ended by the Air Force (1964), Army (1968) and Navy (1971). The ad hoc panel that upheld the Navy's decision had members from EPA, the military ocular committee, AHAM, Raytheon and Pandora.
  • The Arthur Kay VA win (1972). Radar in the belly of P-2 Neptune aircraft measured at 300–600 mW/cm².
  • The 1970 oven standard. The unpublished diathermy cataract case (33 and 2 mW/cm²).
  • Jack Anderson and Les Whitten's columns (1971–72).
§ 6. Some Illumination ▾
  • 1973 Senate hearings: Consumers Union against ovens. Zaret called the danger "clear, present, and ever-increasing". Osepchuk and Michaelson testified for AHAM, Michaelson reversing his 1967 view.
  • The Navy's human ELF experiments at Pensacola: triglycerides rose in 9 of 10 volunteers and arithmetic ability fell. Andrew Marino on 765-kV power lines.
  • The 1973 Warsaw symposium: Sadcikova's microwave sickness; US birth-defect doses (123 mW/cm²) compared with Soviet ones (6.5 mW/cm²).
  • Zaret's elastic-membrane theory of heart disease and his North Karelia radar hunch, which Brodeur says was not strengthened by later events.
  • 1974 data: Ross Adey's work on reaction time and brain chemistry; Frey's rats avoiding 0.2 mW/cm² and his blood-brain-barrier leakage findings.
  • Heller's mutagenesis work; the Johns Hopkins Down's-syndrome findings; scientists urged to write "illuminate" instead of "irradiate".
§ 7. An Unhealthful Post ▾
  • The 1976 disclosure in Moscow: Stoessel's illness, window screens, evasions, staff anger and the Foreign Service association's telegram.
  • Pollack's role in Pandora.
  • Radiation found carried into Stoessel's office phone line.
  • The secret mouth-swab chromosome tests of 1967–68.
  • The Johns Hopkins study of embassy staff, and the "unhealthful post" pay allowance.
§ 8. Exaggerated Reactions ▾
  • Kissinger's "contingency press guidance" cable on the New Yorker articles.
  • The lymphocytosis notice and the water-contamination story that was withdrawn.
  • A third child sent home.
  • The embassy doctor's "psychic stress" explanation.
  • A cluster of four appendicitis cases among sixth-floor residents facing the transmitter.
§ 9. Project Pandora Revisited ▾
  • Declassified files: equipment built for 4 mW/cm², monkeys showing reduced work performance, chromosome aberrations, plans for tests on human subjects, the "Big Boy" study on the carrier Saratoga ("cover story… worked well").
  • The late reversal of conclusions; Lawrence Sher's jokes at Richmond; Justesen's paralysed rats; the project closed as "negative" in 1970.
§ 10. The Cancer Connection ▾
  • The rooftop transmitter feeding the ambassador's phone lines; lawsuits by staff.
  • The medical mission sent to Moscow in 1977.
  • Brzezinski's "highest cancer rate in the world"; 16 breast cancers.
  • The American Cancer Society's "poppycock Buck Rogers stuff" set against the National Cancer Institute's caution.
  • Leach and Czerski's lymphocyte transformation ("the word is cancer").
§ 11. The Genetic Time Bomb ▾
  • Pandora minutes: 18 of 25 children with Down's syndrome had radar-exposed fathers; Jacobson's chromosome tests on women returning from Moscow.
  • Fort Rucker in detail: Peacock's clubfoot cluster, the Southern Research Institute studies, the Army's stonewalling via the Privacy Act, and two contradictory radar surveys (1971 against 1976). About 16,000 helicopter pilots trained there flying through radar beams.
§ 12. Irretrievably Messed Up ▾
  • EMP testing at Minuteman sites: the cancers, and Boeing's request for a looser standard.
  • Tyler's "as high a level as possible"; Birenbaum's "irretrievably messed up".
  • The 1970 Lovelace EMP conference treated risks with "tolerant amusement".
  • Project Tempest brain tumours; three sudden coronary deaths among the crew installing an NSA communications system (IWCS) in Thailand.
§ 13. An Aggressive Study ▾
  • The TACAN cancers at Quonset Point; X-rays from klystron tubes.
  • The Navy–NIOSH meeting worried about compensation claims, and planned to avoid "alarming TACAN workers unduly".
  • The Privacy Act used again; Robert Engell's $4.5 million lawsuit.
  • The FAA's ignorance and inaction; Engell's letter to OSHA about 60–80 W antennas on relay towers and the lack of warning signs.
§ 14. Well Aware of the Hazards ▾
  • The FAA's denials and the Transportation Secretary's reply, refuted by technicians who must bypass safety interlocks to do routine checks.
  • Pacemaker risk distances near radars.
  • Zaret's cataracts in airline pilots and in air traffic controllers who misidentified aircraft.
  • A study of Down's syndrome among airline pilots' children in Seattle abandoned after the pilots' union withdrew support.
§ 15. The Tip of the Iceberg ▾
  • McLaughlin's 1954 fatal case and his 1962 purpura series; industry used "security regulations" to withhold exposure data.
  • Sailors warming themselves in radar beams; the RCA Camden factory.
  • Why heavy-exposure cases should prompt precaution at low doses, with asbestos, vinyl chloride and saccharin as the parallels.
§ 16. Some Intense Exposures ▾
  • The weather-radar repairman made infertile; the microwave-oven repairman (NIOSH's Vernon Rose).
  • Western Electric's "Electronics Disease".
  • Montgomery's deafness, balance damage and blindness; Karras and the Nike radars.
  • An Army survey showing more than 10 mW/cm² beyond the fence toward homes at Homewood, Illinois.
§ 17. Some Poor TV Reception ▾
  • A DEW Line engineer's heart-rhythm damage after passing a radar beam.
  • Symptoms at the Weinbrenner shoe plant from a 27.12 MHz sealer; OSHA unable to measure; NIOSH findings (Parr).
  • Gandhi's resonance data (490 W at 10 mW/cm²).
  • Sweden's stricter rules; a special Labor Department claims branch for radiation injuries.
§ 18. The "Golf Ball" ▾
  • The Moorestown, NJ spacetrack radar reactivated in 1972: buzzing in stereos, organs and hearing aids, lost model aircraft, and 1.06 mW/cm² measured in a residential street. It was torn down in 1975–76.
  • Phased-array successors: FPS-85 (32 MW peak), Cobra Dane, PAVE PAWS.
  • The full inventory of "electronic smog", ending with "the zapping of America".
§ 19. The Money Trail ▾
  • The 1975 Tri-Service plan: a "united position" and "take a stand"; 498,000 acres; STANAG 2345 rejected.
  • Military Handbook 238's own list of non-thermal effects, including auditory response. The plan's admissions on the nervous system, behaviour, eyes and litigation.
  • The weapons alphabet (AWACS, AEGIS, COBRA, PAVE PAWS…).
  • The OTH-B radar and Gandhi's data; the PAVE PAWS environmental assessment for Cape Cod (hazard zone, pacemakers, birds).
  • The "revolving door" (Malcolm Currie); universities as defence contractors; a passive Congress.
§ 20. Some Further Unraveling ▾
  • EMP physics (high-altitude bursts covering a continent) and test facilities.
  • The 1973 Dahlgren symposium: high-power pulse generators reaching 3 million V/m.
  • The ANSI working group's EMP limits; the circular chain of advisory committees (Tyler, Caine, Patti).
§ 21. A New Game of Gap ▾
  • Press leaks about Soviet lasers, killer satellites and particle beams (Keegan, Aviation Week, 1977).
  • Brodeur's thesis, which he presents as his own inference: the "particle beam" talk hides US high-power microwave-pulse weapons.
§ 22. Seafarer ▾
  • The Navy's buried ELF antenna for submarines (Sanguine/Seafarer).
  • Suppressed human data; findings in monkeys, pigeons and gulls; referendum defeats in Wisconsin, Texas and Michigan.
  • A National Academy of Sciences committee that included standard defenders; political pressure.
§ 23. Some Loose Ends ▾
  • The murder of three Rockwell IBEX technicians in Tehran and space-warfare context. Brodeur speculates the Soviet embassy beam may be retaliation or a demonstration.
  • Reporter William Beecher's own symptoms in the embassy: sweating, dry mouth, loss of concentration, forgetfulness.
  • A call for independent, non-military studies of the "cancer connection".
§ 24. The Mind-Control Connection ▾
  • The 1976 Defense Intelligence Agency report on "internal sound perception" as a way to disorient people or aid interrogation; heart seizure; opening the blood-brain barrier. All of it originated in Frey's Navy-funded work.
  • An Army study of microwave "barrier warfare" (third-degree burns at 20 W/cm²); CIA behaviour-control programmes.
  • William Bise's uncontrolled trial on human volunteers (memory and concentration effects).
  • The Soviet "woodpecker" signal pulsed at 10 per second; Zaret on alpha rhythm.
§ 25. The Zapping of America ▾
  • The climate of complicity:
  • Appleton's letter for President Ford.
  • The Radar Victims Network (about 150 men with cataracts).
  • The Litton oven settlement conditioned on attacking Zaret.
  • Moris Shore's warning that the tenfold safety margin had eroded.
  • The make-up of the ANSI committee; Guy's and Michaelson's industry work.
  • The flawed NAS veterans study; a one-senator oversight hearing in 1977.
  • Broadcast exposure: Osepchuk's TV-versus-oven comparison; EPA city surveys and high-rise readings.
  • A NIOSH instrument reading 1 mW/cm² on a floor of the New York Times building; cataracts in two young VDT users there.
  • Oven sales overtaking gas ranges; GE oven repairs.
  • The shoe-store fluoroscope analogy.
§ Epilogue ▾
  • The North Truro (Cape Cod) Air Force radars near Brodeur's own land, with his calculated power densities out to one mile. The Air Force itself warned that hang-gliders could be "fried".
  • His call for residents near radars and transmitters across the country to demand that they be operated so as not to irradiate populated land.
⚡

Practical Takeaways

What to actually do with this

🎯
Distance is the main protectionIn every injury case the person was close to a powerful source, or in a main beam or overlapping beams. Keep transmitting antennas and emitters away from the eyes and head where you can. Brodeur notes that walkie-talkies can exceed the old 10 mW/cm² limit very close to their antennas.
🔧
Microwave ovens:check door seals and interlocks. Don't stand pressed against a running oven, and don't let children watch food cooking through the door. The Bureau of Radiological Health gave that advice itself in 1969, when it told people to stay an arm's length away. Get damaged doors repaired.
📐
Eyes:anyone with long occupational RF exposure, or an unexplained cataract at a young age, may want a slit-lamp examination of the back lens capsule, as Zaret recommended. Early warning signs he describes are glare and a "misty" vision.
🔑
Pregnancy:Eastern European rules barred pregnant women from exposed work, and Brodeur cites birth defects after diathermy in early pregnancy. Avoiding microwave or shortwave diathermy and occupational RF exposure during pregnancy is a reasonable precaution.
⚡
Heard buzzing or clicking near a transmitter?Pulsed microwave hearing is a documented physical effect, not imagination. Move away rather than stay in the field.
🗺️
Judge a safety claim by who set the standard and why"Within the limit" meant very different things in 1977: 10 mW/cm² in the US, 10 µW/cm² for Soviet workers and 1 µW/cm² for the Soviet public. Many of the bodies declaring things safe were funded by the makers and users of the equipment.
⚙️
What the book cannot tell you:it gives no dose–response data for low-power personal devices. Several of its cancer and birth-defect signals are small clusters, and some chapters are the author's openly labelled speculation. Use it for context and for leads to the primary researchers, not as proof about today's devices.
🔗

See Also

Related books in the library

📖[[becker-selden]] (Robert Becker & Gary Selden — The Body Electric. Becker calls this book "impeccably documented". His Chapter 15 and Postscript cover the same figures (Schwan, Michaelson, the thermal-only standard, Project Sanguine/Seafarer) and the same suppression of non-thermal research, from a scientist's inside view.)
📖[[jack-kruse]] (Jack Kruse — a modern, more polemical treatment of EMF as an under-recognised biological stressor.)
📖Brodeur's later book on power-line (ELF) fields, Currents of Death (1989), is filed in this same folder.