Maxwell's Silver Hammer 307
from nuclear weapons tests. Throughout the 1950s there was "no cause
for alarm," but twenty years later the Wyoming sheep ranchers' suit for
compensation for fallout-damaged herds unearthed documents proving
the responsible officials had known better at the time. Even the symbol
of American military machismo may have fallen victim to the policy.
John Wayne, as well as Susan Hayward and other cast members, died of
cancer about two decades after making a movie called The Conqueror,
which was filmed in the Nevada desert while an unexpected wind shift
sifted radioactive dust down on them from a nearby test.
Today the EMR deceit still proceeds. On August 2, 1983, Sol Mi-
chaelson was quoted as saying some bioeffects had been observed in ani-
mals and a few claimed in humans from intensities under 10,000
microwatts, but "none of these effects, even if substantiated, could be
considered hazardous or relevant to man"—even though three years be-
fore he'd co-authored a paper that reviewed previous evidence and added
some of his own in support of the generalized stress response from mi-
crowaves.
The evidence had begun to come in over twenty years previously.
John Heller's 1959 finding of chromosome changes in irradiated garlic
sprouts and the 1964 Johns Hopkins correlation of Down's syndrome
with parental exposure to radar were mentioned in the previous section.
In 1961 a study was conducted on a strain of mice bred to be especially
susceptible to leukemia and used to evaluate risk factors for that disease.
Two hundred mice, all males, were dosed with 100,000 microwatts at
radar-pulse frequencies for one year. An unusually high proportion of the
animals—35 percent—developed leukemia during that time, and 40
percent suffered degeneration of the testicles. Admittedly, this was a
very high power density, but the mice were exposed for only four min-
utes a day. The most disturbing part, however, is that the sponsor, the
Air Force, cut off all funds for follow-up work, and to this day no Amer-
ican research has adequately addressed this potential danger.
In 1959 Milton Zaret, an ophthalmologist from Scarsdale, New York,
began a study for the Air Force to see if there was any special risk to the
eyes of radar maintenance men. He at first found none, because he'd
geared the examinations to check the lens of the eye. A few years later,
when several private companies referred to him microwave workers
who'd developed cataracts, Zaret saw he'd made a mistake. Because the
microwaves penetrated deeply into tissue, cataracts from them had de-
veloped behind the lens, in the posterior capsule, or rear part of the
elastic
membrane surrounding the lens. At
this point
the Air Force
again suddenly lost interest, but Zaret has doggedly pursued the matter
in his own practice. Although military and industry people still deny