314
The Body Electric
ping frequencies, and therefore a stringent standard with a definite time-
table for phasing it in is the only way to protect the public health.
Moreover, such action must come from Washington. New Jersey and
Connecticut have recently adopted the ANSI standard, while in 1983
Massachusetts enacted a much stricter one of 200 microwatts, which
large areas of New York City already exceed considerably. Some commu-
nities, recognizing that even a 100-microwatt level is too high, are
beginning to set their own, lower, ones. Without realistic federal regula-
tion we will end up with a totally unworkable patchwork. Suppose, for
example, that the Air Force, from a base outside a town, operates a radar
dome that produces illegal EMR levels inside it. Without federal direc-
tion, that will become one more confused legal issue to be hammered
out for years in already overburdened courts.
All of the industrialized West is locked into a false position on elec-
tropollution's risks. It's these countries that have made the maximum
use of electromagnetism for power, communications, and entertainment.
The Soviet Union and China, partly due to underdevelopment and war-
time destruction, and partly by choice, have severely limited its use and
the exposure of their civilians.
Soviet scientists have consistently assumed that any radiation that
doesn't occur in nature will have some effect on life. We've consistently
made the opposite assumption. Throughout our recent history American
regulators have followed a "dead body policy." They have extended no
protection until there was proof of harm sufficient to overcome all decep-
tion. There's no longer any question that, as far as electromagnetic en-
ergy is concerned, we've been wrong and the Soviets have been right.
In the 1950s, Russian doctors conducted extensive clinical exams of
thousands of workers who had been exposed to microwaves during the
development of radar. Having disclosed serious health problems, these
studies weren't swept under the rug. Instead, the USSR set limits of 10
microwatts for workers and military personnel, and 1 microwatt for oth-
ers. Both levels are strictly enforced. When this first became known in
the West in the early 1960s, instead of checking their assumptions
many American scientists and administrators chose to believe this was
Russian propaganda aimed at embarrassing us.
By 1971, when they presented their work at a momentous conference
in Warsaw, Zinaida V. Gordon and Maria N. Sadchikova of the USSR
Institute of Labor Hygiene and Occupational Diseases had identified a
comprehensive series of symptoms, which they called microwave sick-
ness. Its first signs are low blood pressure and slow pulse. The later and
most common
manifestations are chronic excitation of the sympathetic