Maxwell's Stiver Hammer 325
netic war. However, there are persistent complaints that the American
effort is being hampered in a strange way. Shortly after the rigged Na-
tional Academy of Sciences report on Project Seafarer, for example, the
Navy sent a delegation to a meeting at the National Security Agency to
complain about an alleged "zap gap" between the United States and the
USSR, and to ask other delegates to push for more research money for
turning nonthermal EMR effects into weapons. According to one of my
Navy contacts, the NSA sent several "experts" who had never done any
research on EMR and who firmly advised the Navy to abandon its pro-
gram. Later he voiced the same suspicions I'd already heard from others:
Given the allegedly vigorous Soviet electroweapons research program and
the underfunding of ours, he concluded that there is a mole highly
placed in the American military science establishment, perhaps in the
NSA itself, who is preventing us from acquiring any clear competence in
this field.
Unfortunately, my source, having served as a hatchet man for defund-
ing research on the environmental dangers of electropollution, isn't ex-
actly reliable. Complaints of a mole could easily be a blind for a large
and intense U.S. EMR weapons program. That there's more going on
than meets the eye is clear from my last communication with Dietrich
Beischer. In 1977 the Erie Magnetics Company of Buffalo, New York,
sponsored a small private conference, and Beischer and I both planned to
attend. Just before the meeting, I got a call from him. With no pream-
ble or explanation, he blurted out: "I'm at a pay phone. I can't talk
long. They are watching me. I can't come to the meeting or ever com-
municate with you again. I'm sorry. You've been a good friend. Good-
bye." Soon afterward I called his office at Pensacola and was told, "I'm
sorry, there is no one here by that name," just as in the movies. A guy
who had done important research there for decades just disappeared.
The crucial point to me is that both sides may be embarking on
hostilities whose consequences for the whole biosphere no one can yet
foresee. Even if the Soviets have begun an electromagnetic war and we're
totally unprepared to fight back, I doubt that a simple buildup and
retaliation are the best course for our own survival.
The extent of the danger can be dramatized best by considering one
last potential weapon. Around 1900, Nikola Tesla theorized that ELF
and VLF radiation could enter the magnetosphere, the magnetic field in
space around the earth, and change its structure.
He has recently been
proven right.
The magnetosphere and its Van Allen belts of trapped particles pro-
duce many kinds of EMR. Since they were initially studied through