The question of which technology played the greatest role in securing victory for the Allies in World War II has a plainly obvious answer: the atomic bomb. But the opportunity to develop and eventually use the A-Bomb may never had occurred if not for another technology which in fact, was actually used in the Fat Man and Little Boy devices to determine the altitude for detonation: radar. Radar was also critical to the British efforts to resist a German invasion and thusly provide a critical base for the eventual invasions of Europe on D-Day in 1944.
Radar, the term meaning RAdio Distance And Ranging is a title given in 1940 to a phenomena of radio waves discovered fifty years earlier by Heinrich Hertz. For decades, radio researchers observed that high frequency radio waves bounced off solid objects and actually reflected part of their signal back to the transmitting location. It was the British during the precarious years between their declaration of war against Germany in September 1939 and the entry by America in December 1941, who made the greatest advances in radar science. These advances allowed them to counter the relentless attacks by German submarines on the vital supply line of ships transiting the Atlantic sea lanes. Radar also proved indispensible in the Royal Air Force’s victory during the Battle of Britain air war of 1940. Without radar, the under staffed and poorly equipped British air force may have faltered leading to the defeat of Great Britain. The result would have allowed Hitler to concentrate his forces totally on the invasion of Russia and ultimately achieve a Eurasian Nazi empire stretching from Ireland to the Bering Sea.
Emphasis on radar research and development actually intensified in the years following the war as governments saw the need to see further and better to guard against attacks from missiles carrying nuclear weapons. But radar safety training for troops was not always emphasized. While exact numbers are hard to determine, more than a few servicemen standing guard at radar installations in the frigid northern latitudes sought the strange warming effect realized by standing in front of fixed high-powered radar antennas. What few knew or appreciated was that they were in effect being cooked from the inside out in exactly the same way a microwave oven functions. Most of the victims simply dropped dead from organ failure within a few hours of exposure.
In the 1950’s, some sailors engaged in a dangerous short-term self-sterilization process prior to shore leave. It was generally believed that radar treatments killed off most sperm cells. Taking a “radar treatment” was seen as a safeguard to assure that if their shore bound spouse conceived while they were on active duty the pregnancy could not be attributed to them (the sailor father) and had to be the result of infidelity.
Radar signals are of such high power and frequency they cannot travel through wire cables and instead are channeled from transmitter to antenna in special hallow tubes knows as “wave guides”. For a typical shipboard radar treatment the radar operator disconnected the waveguide at a convenient point and the sailor simply stood in front of the open tube as radar waves were beamed directly at his groin. Anecdotal research in the years that followed are said to have shown that many men who developed testicular and prostrate cancers were Navy veterans who admitted to taking “radar treatments”
By 1960 the issue of radar safety had grown into an international concern as the super powers fired increasingly more powerful rays at each other, often with innocent persons in the line of fire. An international conference was convened and experts agreed on a universal safe exposure limit of one micro-watt (one-millionth of a watt) per square centimeter of body surface area. But when the standards were published in the United States, something was lost in translation.
In the nomenclature of scientific terminology a measurement of ‘micro’ is defined by the character mu ‘µ’. The unit of measure for ‘milli’ (one-thousandths of a unit) is represented by a lower case ‘m’. In America where few typewriters offered the ‘µ’ character, technical writers often used an upper case “M” for milli and a lower case “m” for micro. In some cases they used the lower case ‘m’ for Milli and a lower case ‘u’ for micros. When the standards were published to the scientific community as 1 mw/cm they were taken at face value and the safe limit of radar microwave exposure was assumed to be 1 milliwatt; a level 1,000 times greater than the actual standard of 1 microwatt. As a consequence, for decades the allowable leakage of high frequency radio waves from a typical American microwave oven was one thousand times more than the allowable amount of exposure for an active duty Russian military person.
The many dangers of radar, microwaves and other forms of manmade non-ionizing radiation were explored in great depth in 1978’s controversial book The Zapping of America by Paul Brodeur.
Brodeur’s work which was published before the cell phone communications revolution focused not only on the possible dangers of radar and microwave radiation but also that which radiates from low frequency high voltage electric power transmissions lines. His work was robustly attacked by the electric power industry as ‘scaremongering’. The issue of radar and microwaves is important to understand in that they operate very near the same frequencies as cell phones.
The recent announcement by the World Health Organization that cell phones may pose a health risk was driven not by a single conclusive scientific study but an increasing volume of work which seems to be pointing to a possible risk-link with cell phones. The great problem for scientists and lay persons in understanding the issue of the possible effects of electromagnetic radiation lay in the relationships between the power, the frequency and the length of exposure to a particular type of electromagnetic radiation.
The above illustration from the EPA helps to understand the science and the debate. (A better image and more information can be found on the EPA site)
The Electromagnetic Spectrum is defined by the frequency at which repeating pulses of energy occur. These pulses are sometimes referred to as cycles-per-second (cps) or simply after the Father of Radio Science as “Hertz” after Heinrich Hertz. They begin at the familiar 50-60 Hertz rate used to send alternating current through the world’s electrical transmission systems. When an electrical signal approaches a frequency of 100,000 Hertz it begins to want to leave its wire conductor and propagate into space as radio waves.
AM broadcasting occurs in a narrow band of frequencies around one million or one Megahertz. Moving up the broadcast spectrum from AM you’ll find shortwave bands and some older police and fire radio bands before arriving at FM radio which begins at around 88 Megahertz. From there it’s a rapid rise through the broadcast television bands and then finally the ultra high frequencies approaching 1 Gigahertz (1 billion oscillations per second).
Most cell phones operate at a frequency around 900 Megahertz. Just above them is the beginning range for microwave ovens and radar which cover the 1-30 Gigahertz part of the spectrum. Moving ever higher in frequency, electromagnetic energy manifests itself as forms of visible and invisible light. Finally, at its highest regions you enter the ‘death zone’ of ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation simply means the energy is so powerful it can literally strip away parts of the atom and has been proven to break apart human DNA.
Even at these highest levels, scientific debate still rages over the possible health risks of exposure to ionizing radiation. The issue is a confusing jumble of terms including Roentgen, RAD, REM, and Millisevert. The issue is further complicated by considerations of the amount of time of the exposure, percent of the body exposed and even the age of the person exposed.
Up to a point, the human body has the ability to repair itself from very large doses of radiation provided there are no subsequent exposures (as evidence by the many survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). But such survivors are known to face significantly increased risks of certain cancers as the years progress.
Today, scientists generally agree that an exposure of between 3,000-5,000 Milliseverts over a 1 hour period is usually lethal with the value of 4,500 msv assumed as universally lethal provided it is a “full body exposure” and last for about 1 hour.
Ionizing radiation kills by literally ripping apart cellular DNA. The immediate impact is generally seen in those body systems which are known for rapid cellular replacement: skin, digestive tract, hair and bone marrow. Victims of radiation sickness usually lose their hair and the ability to keep food in their stomachs within hours of exposure. Their skin becomes blackened and boiled and their bone marrow stops producing red blood cells leading to death in 3-5 days.
The problem, which ultimately manifests itself later down the electromagnetic spectrum as you move from ionizing into non-ionizing radiation, is: “does the body eventually suffer cellular/DNA damage due to the cumulative exposure to lower frequency but much longer term non-ionizing radiation?”
A good example of the confusing benefits/risks of ionizing/non-ionizing radiation can be found in that band of frequencies generally referred to s ultra-violet. The highest UV frequencies are regarded as ionizing with the same dangerous aspects of gamma and beta radiation. But a large segment of the UV spectrum is also deemed as non-ionizing.
UV light is known to kill pathogens and is often used in sterilization. It also can break up excess bilirubin in infants with neonatal jaundice. Of course, it is also part of normal sunlight and artificially generated in tanning beds for cosmetic purposes but there is no debate, excess exposure here can lead to cellular damage leading to deadly skin cancers like melanoma.
As we move lower in frequency away from the visible and invisible light spectrum we arrive in the radio spectrum where-in lies the cell phone debate. As indicated in the chart, the known effects of the radiation in this segment are thermal (heating i.e. microwave) and high electrical currents.
At this point it is important to understand the exponential component which impacts the strength of a single-point energy source, such as a cell phone antenna. Whether the electromagnetic source is a cell phone or a 1 megaton hydrogen bomb, the amount of energy dissipates to the square root of the distance. If the power of any energy is ‘X’ at a given distance, then if you increase the distance by a factor of two, you actually decrease the amount of energy by a factor of four (X/4). Double it again and you drop to just 16th of the power at your starting location (X/16).
The current cell phone risk debate follows the same hypothesis as that offered by Brodeur in Zapping, namely that while the lower non-ionizing frequencies are not known to cause DNA damage and thusly cancer, when living tissues is exposured to sufficient power over a long enough period of time the effect becomes cumulative. Just as the human body suffers measurable damage over time to longer and higher power exposures of the ionizing energies, the very same “point of lethal danger” can be achieved with much lower frequency over much longer time.
The second line of thought on the possible impact of non-ion ionizing radiation does not assume a DNA altering impact similar to ionizing radiation, but instead seeks to understand if the known effects of heating and/or induction of electrical current could be responsible for carcinogenic pathology. This is where proven science comes into the argument.
It is absolute that the electromagnetic field generated by a cell phone pressed against the skull will induce stray electrical currents inside the brain. While these voltages are very small there is also proven science that suggests human cells subjected to electrical stimulation grow faster. Each year, thousands of people are treated with the FDA approved therapy provided by ‘Bone Growth Stimulators (BSG)”. BGS’s are most often used to pass a small electrical current across a broken bone that is slow to heal (non-union fracture). While not always successful, BGS’s are regarded as an effective treatment.
The logical conclusion leaves little uncertainty. Small electrical charges are essential to cellular metabolism. BGS’s are known to stimulate this metabolism and promote cellular growth. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that a small cluster of cancerous brain cells would not be stimulated to grow faster and more aggressively when exposed to the induced voltages generated by the electromagnetic field of a cell phone.
Just as the electric power industry waged all out war against Brodeur, the cell phone industry is certain to counter the WHO’s pronouncements on cell phone safety.
One interesting note from an ‘inside-the-industry’ perspective on the possible dangers of exposure to all radio waves has been quietly in evidence for over a decade. Starting in the 1990’s, a company or person selling a standard broadcasting (AM-FM-TV) outlet in the US has been forced to indemnify the buyer from: “any and all future claims which may arise from the negative health effects of exposure to RF (Radio Frequency) radiation emitted by the Facility during Sellers ownership of the Facility.” In simple terms while the industry is vigorously denying any connection it is covering its’ bet by pushing the responsibility backward onto owners and corporate entities which no longer exist.
Over the coming years, a definitive link between cancer, birth defects and other illnesses will almost certainly be linked to the exposure to non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation (NIEMR). When this happens the position of the cellular industry will likely change from one of denial to one of shifting responsibility to other ‘emitters’ of NIEMR, and the point may be valid.
Over 3 decades ago Brodeur lamented on the fact that our modern world was awash in sources of NIEMR. Today’s world with cell phones, WiFi, security scanners, and a myriad of other NIEMR emissions makes Brodeur’s 1978 world seem nearly pristine.
Long before medical science understood how the human body worked, there was an understanding that many bodily functions were a careful balance of chemistry and when the body was exposed to some chemicals, that balance was destroyed and the body died.
Today, we know that electricity also plays a vital role in the functions that regulate and maintain life. NIEMR , like chemical poisons, must be researched and assessed for its true impact and where warranted, treated the same as a potentially toxic substance.
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