Maxwell's Silver Hammer 317
The Russians themselves have never admitted the irradiation, and the
Schwan guideline has put the American government in an embarrassing
bind. In 1976 the State Department gave its Moscow employees a 20-
percent hardship allowance for serving in an "unhealthful post" and in-
stalled aluminum window screens to protect the staff from radiation a
hundred times weaker than that near many radar bases. That same year
the government gave Johns Hopkins School of Medicine a quarter of a
million dollars to see if there was a link between the signal and "an
apparently high rate of cancer" in the embassy (which wasn't confirmed).
Nevertheless, although President Johnson asked Premier Kosygin at the
1967 Glassboro talks to stop the bombardment, Washington has never
had any formal basis to demand that it be stopped due to danger to the
staff. That was apparently considered an acceptable risk in the protection
of the lenient U.S. standard.
Invisible Warfare
The Soviets have led the way in learning about the risks of electropollu-
tion, and, as we have seen, they've apparently been the first to harness
those dangers for malicious intent. However, the spectrum of potential
weapons extends far beyond the limits of the Moscow signal, and Amer-
icans have been actively exploring some
of
them
for
many
years
.
Most
or
all of the following EMR effects can be scaled up or down for use against
individuals or whole crowds and armies:
The crudest of these armaments would be a sort of electromagnetic
flamethrower with a greater range
than chemical types. Dogs were
cooked to death in experiments
at the Naval Medical Research
Institute as long ago as 1955, and high-power transmitters using
short UHF wavelengths can severely burn exposed skin in seconds.
Electromagnetic
pulse
(EMP)
is
a
term
designating
the
im-
mensely
powerful,
near-instantaneous
surge
of
electromagnetic
en-
ergy produced by a nuclear explosion. It was first discovered in the
late 1960s. The EMP from one detonation a few thousand miles
above the earth would destroy all
electrical systems throughout an
entire continent. In the early 1970s new types of EMR generators
emitting power levels on or twenty
times higher than ever before
were developed in in an effort to simulate EMP and help devise com-
munications systems shielded from it. In 1973 these transmitters
were described in an invitation-only seminar at the Naval Weap-