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The Body Electric
the face of callous official denials of responsibility, an interesting discov-
ery was made by Thomas Montgomery, a former civilian technician
working for the Army Signal Corps, who is now blind, deaf, and crip-
pled because of a massive accidental exposure to a radar beam in 1949.
In one of the files opened by his suit, Montgomery found a document
proving that in the late 1940s the Institute of Radio Engineers had
formulated more conservative safeguards that included methods for pre-
venting accidents like the one that had incapacitated him. (He'd been
repairing a transmitter when a co-worker, not knowing he was standing
in front of the wave guide, turned it on. Since the microwaves were
imperceptible, Montgomery didn't know he was being irradiated until it
was too late.) Leaders of the military-industrial electronics community
chose not to promulgate these proposed regulations.
There were other hints that all was not well. In 1952 Dr. Frederic G.
Hirsch of the Sandia Corporation, a maker of missile guidance systems,
reported the first known case of cataracts in a microwave technician. The
following year Bell Laboratories, alarmed by reports of sterility and bald-
ness among its own workers as well as military radar personnel, sug-
gested a safety level of 100 microwatts, a hundred times less than
Schwan's. Even Schwan has consistently maintained that his dosage limit
probably isn't safe for more than an hour.
In 1954 a study of 226 microwave-exposed employees at Lockheed's
Burbank factory was reported by company doctor Charles Barron. He
said there were no adverse effects, despite "paradoxical and difficult to
interpret" changes in white blood cell counts, which he later ascribed to
laboratory error, as well as a high incidence of eye pathology, which he
determined was "unrelated" to radar.
However, the safety standard had already become a Procrustean bed
against which all research proposals and findings were measured. Grants
weren't given to look for low-level hazards, and scientists who did find
such effects were cut down to size. Funds for their work were quickly
shut off and vicious personal attacks undermined their reputations.
Later, when undeniable biological changes began to be noted from
power densities between 1,000 and 10,000 microwatts,, the idea of "dif-
ferential heating"—hot spots in especially absorptive or poorly cooled
tissues—was advanced, as though this convenient explanation obviated
all danger. Soviet research could easily be discounted because of its "cru-
dity," but when nonthermal dangers were documented in America, mil-
itary and industrial spokespeople simply refused to acknowledge them,
lying to Congress and the public. Many scientists, who naturally wanted
to continue working, went along with the charade.