Maxwell's Stiver Hammer 301
sailors often gave themselves "treatments" before shore leave. The first
scientific evidence of reproductive effects didn't come until 1959, when
John H. Heller and his co-workers at the New England Institute for
Medical Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut, found major chromosome
abnormalities in garlic shoots irradiated with low levels of microwaves.
They soon found the same changes in mammalian cells, as well as the
fruit fly mutations mentioned above. Their work in this direction ended
about 1970 due to lack of funds.
In 1964 a group of researchers studying Down's syndrome at the
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, after linking the malady to excess X
rays given to pregnant women, found an unexpected further correlation
with fathers working near radar. It was a full decade before any money
was allocated to follow up this finding, and, while the link between
parental radar exposure and Down's syndrome wasn't substantiated,
higher-than-normal numbers of chromosome defects were found in the
blood cells of radarmen.
By this time an Alabama professor of public health had found an
apparent surge in birth defects among children of radar-exposed Army
helicopter pilots. In 1971 Dr. Peter Peacock noted that there had been
seventeen children born with clubfoot within a sixteen-month period at
the Fort Rucker, Alabama, base hospital. Statistically, there should have
been no more than four.
Working through two federal agencies and two private research foun-
dations, Peacock and others tried for five years to follow up this disturb-
ing news, only to be thwarted by some clever tactical moves by the
Army. Refusing to release work records, medical files, and radar inspec-
tion records on grounds of "privacy" and "national security," officials of
the Army Medical Research and Development Command managed to
prevent all but two reassessments of Peacock's original data for several
years. They stalled separate research proposals sponsored by the Environ-
mental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration's Bu-
reau of Radiological Health without ever letting on to one agency that
they were dealing with the other. As the coup de grace, the Army
agreed to supply the FDA group with a survey of radar transmitters in
the Fort Rucker area. The officers fobbed off on the unwitting civilians a
deceitfully sketchy map showing only one major radar installation at the
base, whereas an official Army report made at the time of the observed
birth defects showed nineteen such emitters. Throughout the Vietnam
War thousands of helicopter trainees had each spent months flying
through the resultant microwave haze. Much of their training consisted
of homing right down the beams to within a few dozen yards of the