Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

This blog will pay for itself.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

This fight is for everything.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

He really is that stupid.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Rofer on International Relations / Where Is The Weapon?

Where Is The Weapon?

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State Department and intelligence personnel have reported neurological symptoms since 2016 that have been attributed to a “directed microwave” weapon. The first reports were from State Department personnel in Havana, Cuba, and the symptoms have been named the Havana Syndrome.

No cause of this syndrome has been identified, but it has been attributed to the effects of a directed microwave weapon. But nobody has shown 1) that microwaves cause such symptoms or 2) that such a weapon exists, or what it might look like.

At one point in my career, I did some research that bears some similarities to the discussions that have been going on. So I wrote about that.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

Reader Interactions

86Comments

  4. 4.

    Gravenstone

    This assertion has always seemed on the exotic side, but the power requirements in opposition to the portability/concealability desires/needs should be a rather large nail in the coffin this claim is likely to find itself in.

  5. 5.

    Ten Bears

    One of the Pendergast novels featured a portable focused microwave weapon.

    Yeah yeah yeah, third door on the left …

    Though as merely a Mad Scientist, I too have pondered upon these same things.

  6. 6.

    Cameron

    Sorry, I’m old-school.  Y’all wanna fry my brain, can’t use microwaves.  Gotta do it with a charcoal grill, the way Jesus intended.

  7. 7.

    Gravenstone

    @Cheryl Rofer: Think blunt force trauma.

    I remember playing with magnetrons in college physics lab. Even stripped down they were not exactly small, or quiet, or readily powered.

  8. 8.

    Ken

    @Gravenstone: Plenty of solar power in space, and no one ever looks up. Jewish space lasers was the false-flag operation; it’s Russian space masers. Wake up sheeple, the truth is out there, et cetera, et cetera….

  14. 14.

    oldster

    Good article, Dr. Rofer, and valuable scepticism.

    None of it exculpates Putin or rules out *some* kind of microwave skulduggery (or skull-nukery).

    But to make a murder case, you need motive, opportunity and means. Right now, we do not have anything like a plausible account of the means, and it is important to say that clearly. Thanks.

  15. 15.

    Curtis

    I’ve been wondering about the validity of this, thanks for posting, Cheryl.

    A bit off topic, but any thoughts about the Colonial pipeline issue?

  16. 16.

    Another Scott

    Obligatory, Kate Bush – Experiment IV (4:43)

    The NAS report makes a comment, hiding the lede, that they weren’t able to interview or see the medical records of the people affected in Cuba. :-/

    Another news report once mentioned that these reports seemed to be correlated with mosquito control spraying (for Zika, etc.). But without actual evidence, it’s hard to tie any of this stuff down…

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  17. 17.

    prufrock

    Forget the microwave weapon. A portable power source that could power it would be infinitely more useful, including use in other, better weapons.

  18. 18.

    Benw

    @Cheryl Rofer: yeah, that thing you use to bonk government officials in the head. Strangely, I can’t get any of my old government friends to come over for a visit anymore.

  19. 19.

    Seanly

    The Stuff You Should Know podcast did an episode on this recently (April 6). Josh & Chuck aren’t scientists, but their take was that this was not something nefarious and a lot of the follow on cases have been mass hysteria.
    A lot of the debunking has to do with: 1) these type of weapons aren’t known to exist and 2) if they were to exist the size would be extremely large so they would be exceedingly difficult to hide.

  20. 20.

    Anoniminous

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    People dropping to the ground and screaming in pain is fairly obvious.

     

    @Seanly:

     

    Either the mega-watt transmission lines or coal fired power plant next door gives the game away

  21. 21.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Curtis: The Colonial Pipeline problem is ransomware, apparently from a criminal gang in Russia. Ransomware has been a problem for some time, but many companies have tried to deal with it on their own, even paying off the ransom, because they don’t want bad publicity.

    I hope this incident changes that. Law enforcement needs to deal with this, and paying ransoms no questions asked leads to more.

  22. 22.

    evodevo

    It has always had the earmarks of a mass hysteria event to me…seen that happen in elementary schools, and at the small PO office where I worked…people get the idea they are being attacked/poisoned/etc. and their imagination does the rest. In the case of the PO, I went in one AM to work and the clerk was gibbering about some smell and imagining there was a gas leak….I informed her the furnace was a heat pump powered by electricity, so that wasn’t an option. Then I figured out she was smelling the diesel fumes from the mail truck that had just left. She calmed down and that was the end of it….
    In the case of the elementary school, some of the more emotional students complained of an “odor”, then started throwing up, others started imagining headaches, and even some of the teachers got in on it….they evacuated the school and found….nothing. Rational thinking usually goes out the window when this kind of thing happens…

  25. 25.

    Roger Moore

    @Anoniminous: ​
     
    The inverse square law is most relevant if you have something that radiates in all directions. If you can create a focused beam, it doesn’t spread out much, so distance is less important. It still does spread- beam angle is proportional to wavelength divided by aperture- but potentially by little enough that you could zap someone from a good distance. This is why people are interested in things like lasers for weapons; the beam spread can be controlled enough to make them interesting for use in a long-range weapon. You could do the same thing with a microwave beam, but it would need a quite large aperture to create a decently focused beam.

  26. 26.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Anoniminous:​ Have any of those morons heard of the Inverse Square Law?

    Um, have you ever heard of a maser, whose development predated the laser by 7 years? Coherent EM radiation doesn’t disperse per the inverse square law.

    Not saying that’s what’s going on here – but it might behoove anyone who isn’t a “moron” to at least recognize the possibility.

  27. 27.

    J R in WV

    Foreign Policy paywall… I must be reading Farley’s pieces on LGM too much, huh?

     

    Non cheep, also too! Great that you’re published there, tho. Kudos for you and Cole and B-J all .

  28. 28.

    cmorenc

    Well, the Russians have clearly found a method that works to beam stupidity to GOP officeholders like Ron Johnson.  Even if the target subjects were a bit dense to begin with, the Russian’s stupidity beam amplifies and reinforces their stupidity.

  29. 29.

    Roger Moore

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    Ransomware has been a problem for some time, but many companies have tried to deal with it on their own, even paying off the ransom, because they don’t want bad publicity.

    I think the key with a lot of ransomware attacks is the price of the ransom.  Even if they aren’t worried about the bad publicity, the victims are supposed to be tempted by the ransom being cheaper and faster than trying to fix the problem themselves.  It can be hard for the authorities to convince a business owner to refuse to pay if it’s actually more expensive for them to fix the problem themselves.

  30. 30.

    Urban Suburbanite

    I’ve seen some articles indicating that LRADs aren’t of much use as weapons. They’re loud as hell, and police here love to use that dumbass thing to make sure half the city can hear their excuses for beating the shit out of marchers or homeless people.

  31. 31.

    w_seattle

    Indeed, it’s important to remain skeptical. Until more is publicly known, it shouldn’t become conventional wisdom that these attacks are due to a microwave weapon. That said, I think there are some threads of plausibility around a pulsed device. Microwaves can be focused to length scales on the order of the skull size. And power requirements may not be so extreme for high amplitude pulses at very low duty factors. I work in therapeutic ultrasound, and this approach can indeed produce some amazing transcutaneous bioeffects (though obviously sound waves are different animals). Related amplifier technology for short pulses has been evolving in parallel. I haven’t studied the literature, but I imagine there is relatively little known on microwave bioeffects across such a large parameter space of base frequency, amplitude, and pulsing rate.

  32. 32.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Benw: You’d be woozy too, if someone bonked you in the head with a microwave.​

    When I was burglarized 30 years ago the thieves absconded with my new PC, the VCR, and the CD player. Also every microwave dinner in my freezer. (When I mentioned this the responding officer said, Sounds like they’re local. :^D) But not the microwave. If they’d tried to steal that big honkin’ half-ton Samsung nuke I would’ve heard them when I opened the front door – writhing on the kitchen floor, screaming in agony from multiple hernias…

  34. 34.

    germy

    The window of opportunity for resolving this series of incidents has passed. The US response was simply too slow and uncoordinated. “Despite some early attempts to provide consistent support for potentially affected employees”, the 2018 DoS report concluded, the DoS response was hampered by the “lengthy vacancies at the Under Secretary level” with “no senior official [being] identified as having ownership of the issue”. The report found the “delay of almost six weeks between first knowledge of injury and the first briefing of Embassy staff to be unfortunate and the exclusion of family members from this knowledge to be unjustified, given the incidents were taking place at residences”. It appears that slowness of the Trump administration in filling senior DoS positions directly contributed to the unacceptably slow response of the DoS.

  35. 35.

    Hoodie

    @w_seattle:  I tend to be skeptical and hysteria would seem to be a likely cause. However, your mention of ultrasound does raise the possibility that this could be a by-effect of an imaging technology using something like a SASER, which develops coherent audio emissions at very high frequencies that might be useful for imaging but also could cause physiological effects.

  36. 36.

    Anoniminous

    Directed Energy Weapons

    “After decades of research and development directed-energy weapons are still at the experimental stage and it remains to be seen if or when they will be deployed as practical, high-performance military weapons”

  37. 37.

    Roger Moore

    @Uncle Cosmo: ​
     

    Coherent EM radiation doesn’t disperse per the inverse square law.

    Technically, it does disperse; it just does so in a narrow cone. The angle of the cone is proportional to the wavelength divided by the aperture. For visible light, you can get a very tight beam even with a relatively small aperture, so people treat it as if the light isn’t spreading at all, but it still is.

  39. 39.

    Nora Lenderbee

    Reminds me of the lawsuit filed by a highway patrolman who claimed that his testicular cancer was caused by the radar gun he held in his lap to catch speeders.

  41. 41.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Roger Moore: Technically, it does disperse; it just does so in a narrow cone.

    IOW, not per the inverse square law (where intensity twice as far away from the source is 1/4, three times as far away is 1/8, etc.) but significantly more slowly with distance. Which, technically, was my point.

  42. 42.

    Martin

    @Anoniminous: 

    Microwaves can be directed. In fact, that’s what makes them useful – they are like inefficient lasers, able to put a decent fraction of their power downrange.

    See: radar, wireless backhaul communication.

  43. 43.

    Bill Arnold

    Nice FP piece. Re
    The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion (Julia Ioffe, October 19, 2020)
    Julia Ioffe’s GQ piece late last year (a bit credulous IMO) has this interesting more recent tidbit, that suggests (if the reported incident actually happened as described), some sort of directed, indiscriminate effect on mammalian nervous systems.

    Then, shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face.

    But there are other things that can affect nervous systems from a distance. Heck, seizures can be started in epileptics with modulated visible light, and there are known direct effects using infrared being explored for conditions like PTSD and rehabilitation[1], and the skull and spinal cord are mostly opaque to visible light, but near infrared penetrates (“up to 4 cms”). (If I read one of the papers correctly.)
    Etc.

    [1] This caught my eye, researchgate link. (Not for the squeamish; animal research.) There is also a body of clinical work with humans for other purposes.
    Infrared neural stimulation at different wavelengths and pulse shapes (18 December 2020)

  45. 45.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Benw: My mom was a microwave tech back in the 80s. She said all the engineers ended up with brain cancer because they would stick their heads in the dish while it’s on. so it isn’t something that is immediately intolerable.

    Also, there are instruments that will detect this. It shouldn’t be this mystery this long over were is the microwave source.

  46. 46.

    Anonymous At Work

    It’s a good article pointing out what it can’t be.  The only thing I get hung up on is the symptoms seem well-reported and enough people who know better seem to be taking it seriously enough to think there is something going on.  I’d think it was a bored Congress and psychosomatic illness, otherwise.

  47. 47.

    Jinchi

    nobody has shown 1) that microwaves cause such symptoms or 2) that such a weapon exists

    Sure, sure.

    But what I really need to know is whether a tin-foil hat will deflect the microwaves or concentrate them.

    Asking for a friend.

  48. 48.

    Pete Mack

    Low level microwaves are harmless: in the early days of microwave experiment,  cats would curl up in front of the klystron like it was a fireplace.  Though probably not in Cuba, since it’s already plenty warm. Further, ordinary aluminum screen windows are enough to reflect or absorb 80% of millimeter wave radiation,  let alone concrete walls. Everything about this smells like a combo of Munchausen and the madness of crowds.

  49. 49.

    catclub

    @germy: incompetence and empty shell st State Department during Trump admin.  Knock me over with a feather.

  50. 50.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Pete Mack:

    Further, ordinary aluminum screen windows are enough to reflect or absorb 80% of millimeter wave radiation,

    This is a big point that I decided not to go into in the article, except for one tiny mention: what is between the source and the receiver. Even the humidity in air will attenuate microwaves, but it depends on wavelength, which is another property we don’t know of the putative weapon.

  51. 51.

    catclub

    @Jinchi: But what I really need to know is whether a tin-foil hat will deflect the microwaves or concentrate them.

     

    yes, probably.  I love answering ‘or’ questions.

  52. 52.

    Benw

    @Uncle Cosmo: the one time I’ve had a B&E, we tracked the guy into the upstairs family room because the first thing he did was go to the fridge and take out a jar of salsa and drip it all over the house. Turns out he was a harmless crazy dude who left when I yelled at him!

  55. 55.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Ninerdave: I have some thoughts, but they’re no better than others’ speculation. I’d rather press those who claim they have some official reason to believe the causes they posit.

  57. 57.

    O. Felix Culpa

    Great article! I didn’t see a comments section for it in FP: have you received any noteworthy (non-Balloon Juice) responses?

  59. 59.

    Robert Sneddon

    Any embassy or consulate building owner has to assume they are being spied on and will have all sorts of countermeasures up to and including TEMPEST[1] standard sheathing of the building structure. Electromagnetic radiation powerful enough to get through walls and shielded windows from tens or hundreds of metres away and affect the people inside would make any detectors light up like Christmas trees.

    [1] A guy I used to work with had been part of a TEMPEST class shielding project for one of the big three-letter-businesses here in the UK. It was fun, he said — there was no published standard for TEMPEST, the engineering team had to make a best attempt, submit their equipment and then wait for a yes or no from the testing authorities. If it failed they were not told why it had failed or what they needed to do to make it pass, just try again. Security by obscurity.

  61. 61.

    Frank Wilhoit

    @Cheryl Rofer: In my view, the operational aspects outweigh the legal.  What is the pipeline counterpart of NERC-CIP?  They should have a complete inventory of cold-spare computing infrastructure that could be fired up in a situation like this and imaged from offsite backups.

  63. 63.

    brantl

    Microwave heating is caused by two microwave sources being focused on the same place at the same time, the interference between the two waves creates heat.

  64. 64.

    Frank Wilhoit

    @Cheryl Rofer: Obviously it would not happen unless mandated, hence my question: who would mandate it?  For the (non-nuclear) electric utility industry, it is NERC-CIP, which is taken very seriously, partly because there are large automatic fines.

  67. 67.

    Benw

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    Also, there are instruments that will detect this.

    Right!? I remember buying my house and they had the kitchen appliances included and the home inspector guy waved some kind of detector in front of the microwave to see if it “leaked”

  68. 68.

    Another Scott

    @Benw:

    2.4 GHz microwave radiation leakage detector – $27.

    (Just an example, not a recommendation.)

    Yeah, if it were actual radiation it should be detectable. Pulsed is more difficult, of course.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  69. 69.

    J R in WV

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    …She said all the engineers ended up with brain cancer because they would stick their heads in the dish while it’s on….

    Imagine that.

    When I was a deck ape in the Navy, and we did replenishment at sea drills, the destroyer next to us was so much lower than our boat deck where we worked, that their radar dish was pointed right at us as it rotated.

    Did they turn off the power? Turn down the power? Almost certainly not!

    So for at least several hours, while we got lines positioned and moved pallets of material across, we also got swept with radar waves every few seconds. How to convince the VA that my chronic health issues are the Navy’s fault? No way, Jose!

  72. 72.

    Variaga

    @Uncle Cosmo: The “narrow cone” also follows the inverse square law, and even directional microwave/laser beam intensity falls off at a rate of 1/(distance^2).

    This comes from the total power of the wavefront being spread over a larger area as the distance increases.  It doesn’t matter if it’s an omnidirectional antenna and spreading over the full 360° (technically, the full 4 pi steradians) or a very tight beam with only 0.1° of dispersion,  the wavefront area still quadruples (so the intensity decreases by 1/4)  when the distance doubles.

  73. 73.

    SteverinoCT

    @J R in WV:

    So for at least several hours, while we got lines positioned and moved pallets of material across, we also got swept with radar waves every few seconds.

    On the sub we had the BPS-15 radar in the sail which was rather close to those on the bridge (surfaced). We were assured that it was harmless as long as it was rotating. I used to joke the lethal range was two feet, because the antenna would hit you. Of course I assume it  wasn’t very powerful anyway compared to a skimmer’s surface-search radar.

  74. 74.

    Ruckus

    @cmorenc:

    Ron Johnson has nothing to worry about microwaves, first, there is nothing to cook inside that noggin, second, Ron would have to smarten up a few levels to be at just plan stupid. He’s at dumb as a box of fucking rocks, on a good day.

  75. 75.

    Caphilldcnr

    Thank you for this!  I agree. Extraordinary claims require some level of proof and we do not have that here.

     

    Well jeez. I’m Caphilldcne not dr. Ugh.

  76. 76.

    brantl

    @Cheryl Rofer: The heat is caused by the impact of molecules being moved by two different wave patterns. Microwave heating was discovered by a Navy researcher, who was working with multiple microwave sources. They melted a chocolate bar in his shirt pocket. It didn’t cook his chest. Look it up, google it. No /s. All of the molecules, moving in synchronization, won’t produce heat. Microwave towers don’t cook birds, regardless of how close they are to the towers.

    In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket. -Wikipedia.

  77. 77.

    billcinsd

    @Jinchi: If you use a metallic mesh with holes smaller than about a centimeter (about the distance across your little fingernail) you will “reflect” the waves

  78. 78.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @brantl: I worked on molecular interactions with energy for a decade. I thought about molecular absorption of various types of energy every day. I took courses in spectroscopy.

    There are many myths about microwaves. I debunked a few in the article I linked. They’re fun but often inaccurate, as are the ones you’re recounting.

  80. 80.

    dopey-o

     

    @Cheryl Rofer: s: The Colonial Pipeline problem is ransomware, apparently from a criminal gang in Russia. Ransomware has been a problem for some time, but many companies have tried to deal with it on their own, even paying off the ransom, because they don’t want bad publicity.

    The problem is that people don’t back up their freakin’ data! Backups save dollars on the pennies. Offsite storage is cheap, and the big providers have very strong security.

    Incremental backups at 10 minute intervals would have made the ransomware moot.

    The SolarWinds hack is another case of stupid / lazy IT policies. Aside from letting an intern set security on the FTP server used to distribute updates…..

    If the gummint had used 3 different vendors, instead relying on SolarWinds alone, 67% of the damage could have been avoided. Anyone who has heard the term ‘monoculture ‘ knows this.

    Don’t get me started.

  81. 81.

    Gavin

    There’s something else that mysteriously causes headaches and nausea.

    Dehydration.

  84. 84.

    karen marie

    @Bill Arnold:  The thing that got me in that article is the claim that multiple nefarious countries have bought the technology. If those purchases are “known,” how is the technology itself unknown? She had me up to that point.

  85. 85.

    Crusty Dem

    I’m an auditory neuroscientist and engineer (research not clinical so take with a grain or two of salt) and microwaves never made a lick of sense to me. Especially inside buildings – low efficiency, poor targeting, I don’t see it. Ultrasound (not the 2-18 MHz in medical applications, more like ~20-200 kHz) would likely be more effective and targeted, but penetration of a building wouldn’t be possible. However a device capable of damage could work with relatively small size and power, and fits the descriptions of discomfort extremely well (see asa.scitation.org/soI/10.1121/1.5063819). The descriptions of auditory issues appear reasonable, though the absence of proper measurements of auditory function are bizarre. Everything else described (brain damage, concussion) seems extremely unlikely to me and very poorly described (as the Neuroskeptic article addresses)

    It’s also worth mentioning that a number of chemicals could also cause most of the symptoms reported…

  86. 86.

    Bill Arnold

    @karen marie:

    If those purchases are “known,” how is the technology itself unknown? She had me up to that point.

    Very dead thread, but yes. Poked at it briefly and it seemed that she conflated some other sort of microwave weapon, perhaps some sort of aggressive ECM device, with a hypothetical device to attack humans. The reporting that I saw is very dubious (e.g. weird propaganda(?) sites), fuzzy and multiple-hand, though. (Just did a surface poke, not a dig, to be clear.)

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