...Way back in 1970, US congressman James Scheur commented that: 'As a result of spinoffs from medical, military aerospace and industrial research, we are now in the process of developing devices and products capable of controlling violent mobs without injury. We can tranquilize, impede, immobilize, harass, shock, upset, stupefy, nauseate, chill, temporarily blind, deafen or just plain scare the wits out of anyone the police have a proper need to control and restrain.' The 1972 Security Planning Corporation report on nonlethal weapons to the National Science Foundation listed 34 different types using electrical, optical, acoustic, thermal, kinetic impact, chemical irritant and barrier devices to produce control effects. ...any of us might become future targets, since in reality these weapons will form part of the future's technology of political control.
Wright, Stephen, Weapons of Control, New Scientist, Jan. 29, 1994, p. 55.
Can Human Beings be Manipulated by ELF Waves?
The technical principal of receivers for electromagnetic waves is fully analogous with biological information and communications systems. If several thousand of the hundreds of billions of nerve cells in our brains resonate with man-made centimeter waves, the carrier frequency has to be suppressed when the signal is passed on to the synapses.
To overcome cell membranes, living organisms use electrochemical processes involving sodium and potassium ions. This suppresses the carrier frequency in the high-frequency range, just as the demodulation circuit does in man-made receivers. What remains is the signal impressed on the carrier frequency, e.g., in the low-frequency ELF range. This is also the frequency range at which our own nervous system normally works.
Using these frequencies, the nerve fibers convey pain sensations, the feelings of hunger, tiredness, nausea, and signals on the sense of balance to points in the brain which invoke these stages in an awake consciousness.
If interference signals are superimposed on the natural signals generated by the body, e.g., by using artificially created centimeter waves as a carrier, the brain could be presented with simulated states that we consciously perceive, but which are not reality.
A state of disturbed sense of balance, which seems to us to be real, is enough to stop people from being able to run or make them feel dizzy even when they are lying down.
In a 'psychotronic war' using microwaves modulated using ELF waves, it would no longer be necessary to kill whole armies by inducing cardiac or respiratory irregular signals. The enemy can simply be incapacitated by disturbing their states of balance or confusing the ability to think logically. ...The manipulation of human beings, by means of ELF waves is relatively easy to perform.
Volkrodt, Dr. W., Can Human Beings be Manipulated by ELF Waves?, Raum & Zeit, June-July 1989. (A West German publication.)
Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum is on the Board of Directors of Fusions-Energie- Forum in the Federal Republic of Germany, and an editor of it's magazine, Fusion.
Often referred to by the misleading name, "radio-frequency weapons, the most sophisticated new type of anti-personnel weapons now being perfected by the USSR for use by its Spetsnaz and regular forces, uses pulses of electromagnetic energy to disorient, paralyze, and kill human targets. Such electromagnetic pulse (EP) weapons can take a variety of forms, including the following:
Electromagnetic pulse anti-personnel weapons have many scientific and technical features in common with the laser weapons under development in the American and Soviet anti-missile defense programs. Both use electromagnetic radiation, propagating at 300,000 kilometers per second, to achieve their destructive effect. Both require compact power sources, generators of electromagnetic radiation (e.g., lasers, magnetrons, gyrotrons, etc.) beam radiator and focusing apparatus (e.g., optics for lasers, wave guides and phased-array antennas for microwave weapons), and computerized control systems. In both cases also, the maximum effect of these weapons is obtained by "tuning" or "tailoring" the output to the characteristics of the target.
The chief peculiarity of EP anti-personnel weapons lie in their exploitation of highly non-linear effects of electromagnetic radiation upon living organisms. Typically, these weapons employ complicated pulse shapes and pulse trains, involving several frequencies and modulations which can range over a wide spectrum from extremely low frequencies (ELF) into the hundred gigahertz range. Thus, although state-of-the-art technology permits construction of mobile systems of extremely high power output (up to 10 megawatts average power, peak pulsed powers of many gigawatts), it is not the high power per se which determines the lethality of the system, but rather its ability to "couple" the output effectively into the target and to exploit non-linear biological action. While high output power may be used to obtain range and breadth of effects and penetration into enclosures and defenses, the minimum lethal "dose" on target will typically be orders of magnitude less than that which would be required to kill by mere heating, in the manner of a microwave oven.
The closest analogy to a sophisticated EP anti-personnel weapon is provided by powerful chemical weapons, such as nerve gasses having rapid, fatal effects at extremely low concentration. In the latter case, the effect is mediated by molecules which enter nerve synapses and other critical areas and disrupt normal functions without massive destruction of tissue. The poison acts on the higher levels of organization of living processes. Furthermore, it should be understood that molecules themselves are nothing but electromagnetic configurations. That is, the molecules (e.g., of the nerve gas) act via electromagnetic fields, by exchange of electromagnetic energy with other molecules. Hence, it should hardly be surprising to discover that the same effects can be induced by electromagnetic radiation alone - without the presence of the molecules! In principle it suffices to identify the precise geometrical characteristics of the electromagnetic action associated with the given substance, and then just "mimic" the molecular action by a carefully "tailored" signal. Once this principle is understood, biophysical research can define the most appropriate pulse forms for weapon applications, independently of any specific chemical "model." That this is by no means a mere theoretical possibility is proven by a wide variety of experiments on the biological effects of "tailored" electromagnetic radiation, carried out by the West and East over the last 40 years. For obvious reasons, experiments involving lethal effects are mostly classified. To illustrate some of the relevant research areas, we present a couple of examples of well-documented non-lethal effects.
Since the 1950s much scientific attention has been paid, in the East and West, to effects on the brain of 1) psychotropic drugs (LSD, depressants, stimulants, etc.) and 2) electrical stimulation of specific areas of the brain by implanted electrodes. Among other things, experiments showed that minute currents induced by electrical stimulation could evoke profound changes in brain functions, similar to those obtained by psychotropic drugs, the latter often at extremely low concentrations. This work reveals some "deep secrets" of the physiological organization of the brain, secrets having potentially far-reaching military applications. Since the early 1970s a number of published experiments have shown that similar, profound neurological effects can be induced without the "substantial" intervention of drugs or electrodes, by electromagnetic fields applied from the outside the experimental subject. Typical of these are those of Dr. Jose Delgado and Dr. Ross Adey. Delgado applied a slowly modulated weak magnetic field (several Gauss, pulsed at less than 100 Hz) to the heads of monkeys via external coils. Depending upon the precise modulation frequency used, specific effects were induced. Thus, one frequency caused the animals to fall asleep, and another triggered aggression, each time with very specific neurophysiological effects on specific areas of the brain. Adey and others have obtained similar neurophysiological effects with a modulated, low-power, radio-frequency field, with modulation frequencies in the range of the internal "brain waves" (EEG) Absorbed power levels were very low - on the order of a thousandth of a watt per square centimeter.
Related experiments have shown that internal EEG waves can be entrained and modified, demonstrating the possibility of direction information transfer to the brain via modulated radio-frequency (RF) fields. Thus, below the threshold of lethal effects, a certain potential for subtle psychological manipulation by means of "tailored" electromagnetic signals cannot be excluded.
Lethal effects have been obtained at power levels not very much higher than in behavior modification experiments. Again, it is not so much the net power as the exact form of the applied series of pulses, which makes the difference. One laboratory device, used in brain research, kills experimental animals with a single microwave pulse of 1/6 second duration.
While the neurological effects of modulated RF and microwave radiation have long been a high-priority area for Soviet research, this field has tended to be played down or even suppressed in the West. For example, Delgado's magnetic field experiments have gone nearly unnoticed in the Western scientific literature, but are a featured subject in a recent Russian book, published under the auspices of Znanyia, a cadre organization headed by top Soviet military scientist N.D. Basov.
While we have concentrated here on the brain as a key target of EP weapons, this is by no means the only target. The central nervous system more generally, and vital organs, especially the heart, are all possible targets.
Moreover, a very insidious deployment of EP would be to degrade the overall health of persons in a certain area by long-term, low-level irradiation. There is evidence that the latter has already been tried by the Soviets in a number of cases.
This Special Report presents some details on high-power RF and microwave generators, an area of highest priority in Soviet research and development. There are two essential types of devices which can be used in EP weapons; oscillators using beams of electrons or plasmas, and solid-state devices.
Solid state radar, whose development is driven by the needs of military aircraft and missiles, is one of the fastest advancing areas of electronic technology today. Although solid state devices do not (yet!) reach the very high powers attained by electron beam devices, miniaturization makes it possible to build today complete, highly sophisticated phased-array radars of suitcase-size, with several kilowatts of average output. The principle advantage of this technology is that it permits extremely sophisticated "tailoring" of pulse shape in space and time, in a compact system, with direct coupling to high-speed computers. This is exactly what is needed in order to optimally exploit non-linear biological effects. What is lost in brute power is thus gained in efficiency.
Recent breakthroughs in what is called "high-temperature superconductivity" open up the perspective that both types of EP generation technology - electron beam as well as solid state - are going to undergo revolutionary improvements in the years immediately ahead. The impact of this revolution cannot even be estimated at this time, but it will certainly mean radical reduction in the size of devices having a given electromagnetic "firepower."
As our discussion of biological effects already indicated, electromagnetic anti-personnel weapons depend essentially on "tuning" the output signal to the target. This goes not only for the frequency and amplitude of the signal, but for its entire space-time "shape." Figure 6, for example, is drawn from thermographs of models of the human body irradiated by RF radiation of the same frequency, but with field geometries. These and other experiments demonstrate that the areas of maximum absorption of electromagnetic energy inside the body depend on the geometry of the incident wave. By choosing the right geometry, the energy can be focused into any desired area, such as the brain.
A sophisticated EP weapon must thus be able to project a specific geometry of electromagnetic field onto a distant object, over a given terrain and in given surroundings. Without going into technical details of waveguides and various antenna types, we shall briefly present one of the relevant techniques: the principle of the phased array.
A phased-array antenna consists of an assemblage of many individually controlled emitting (or receiving) elements, placed in a fixed geometrical arrangement. The output field of the array is the sum of the waves emitted by the individual elements. By electronically controlling the relative phases of these individual signals, the output field can be given any desired "shape" and direction, limited only by the wavelength used, the number of elements and the size of the array. The huge Soviet ABM radar at Krasnoyarsk, for example, contains an 83-meter diameter phased array of thousands of elements. The output can consist of a single, very narrow beam, or hundreds of independently directed beams, all depending on the "phasing" of the elements. This radar can track large numbers of missiles simultaneously, without any mechanical motion of the antenna.
Tennenbaum, Jonathan, Some ABCs of Electromagnetic Anti- Personnel Weapons, Executive Intelligence Review Special Report, 317 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E., 2nd Floor, Washington, DC 20003, (202) 544-7010, Feb. 1988, p. 9.