All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Cheryl Rofer.
She was a chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 35 years and writes all about scientific and political topics.
This one is in foreignpolicy.com.
Claims of microwave attacks are scientifically implausible.
There's little evidence for an unknown weapon being behind so-called Havana syndrome, she writes, and this is from last May, if you're looking for it out there.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, Cheryl?
I'm fine.
Glad to be here.
Very happy to have you on the show.
So, okay, my bias is that I think that you're right, and that the State Department is run by a bunch of kooks who are exaggerating some symptoms into some kind of mass hysteria type thing.
On the face of it, it seems pretty obvious.
But you write an entirely different angle here, which is what you know about microwaves, which is a lot, and how they might be used in some kind of weapon, or how they might not be.
So, I guess, first of all, can we talk a little bit about just the background of the story here?
You say that the first reports that we really are dealing with here started coming in 2016.
But then, am I also right that they kind of went back and said, actually, we think they were doing this to us back in the 1990s, too?
Is that right?
Well, I think some people are saying that, but I don't believe I've seen that said by the State Department.
I see.
So that was just a claim of maybe some of the victims.
They thought that, but it wasn't an official position of the agency itself.
Is that right?
Yeah, I think that comes mostly from a particular group, and their lawyer claims that there are reports all the way back to, I don't know, the 1970s.
But he hasn't really put forth any evidence for that.
All right.
Now, you said that we know for sure that between 1953 and 76, that the Soviets were bathing the American embassy in Moscow with microwaves, either to power listening devices or to jam American signals.
But that they determined that even after decades of that, you know, I guess high powered, I don't know how exactly you measure how high powered it was, but after this is pretty significant microwave radiation, that there were no health effects.
Right.
There was a study to that effect.
I think there is a little bit of question about it.
But by and large, I think you've characterized it properly.
OK.
And now, so there's it's funny because this story keeps coming up and it keeps being repeated by credulous reporters at the same time that it seems like it's already debunked.
So, for example, The New York Times ran the thing that said, oh, it turns out it was Cuban crickets that these people, you know, they had recorded a sound and said, see, there it is again and where.
And then these people who knew something about the natural world said, no, those are crickets rubbing their back legs together, man.
And then.
So we already knew that.
But then it keeps coming up again anyway, as though it hasn't been debunked.
I think the most recent was this group, Jason, inside the Pentagon issued a report essentially agreeing with you that there's nothing to this.
And then Julia Ioffe was at the Atlantic or the New Republic or something, put out a new piece about it just a few weeks later, like, oh, yeah, no, it's still true and and no reference to the debunkings, really.
Yeah, I think what happens is that people who feel that they have been affected by this and some of them have real symptoms.
I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to try to analyze those symptoms or tell you in detail what they might be.
But people who have real symptoms look for real causes.
And this idea of microwaves, directed microwave weapon has taken root.
And so that's what they look to.
Although there's really no evidence for it.
All right now, so talk to me a little bit about cooking burritos in the microwave here and what that has to do with what may or may not be a Russian brain ray attacking our civil servants.
Well, what I tried to do in the article was to calculate what a weapon might look like, which I haven't seen anybody else do.
I'm a scientist, and if you tell me that I can make a weapon that does some effect, my first question will be, OK, what does that weapon look like?
And if you tell me somebody's carrying it around and zapping people with it, I want to know, can you carry it around?
Does that make sense?
So I took the power level of a microwave, which we all have in our houses and which we see working all the time, although what it does does seem a little bit like magic.
And what I did was I calculated what you would need as a power supply for that.
We plug them into the house circuit so we don't see that.
But if you're carrying it around, you're going to need some kind of power supply to go with it because it would be very awkward to have a really long extension cord back to some building.
So what I came up with was a gasoline powered power source for electricity that weighed about, I think, 60 pounds, which somebody could theoretically carry around.
But it's not real convenient.
Or if you're going to use batteries, it would be the equivalent of 200 batteries for your laptop computer.
It would probably be one large battery, but it would still weigh quite a bit.
And then it's important here that we're talking about range, right, that if you were going to microwave me to one effect or another, you'd have to be nearby and not a few miles away to get any effect out of it at all.
Even if you were just trying to cook my nose.
Well, yeah, and that's something that is much harder to calculate than my simple order of magnitude power supply, because you'd need to know what wavelength is being used.
And there's a question of whether that wavelength can penetrate the concrete buildings or wood buildings, glass windows, and even the air does tend to attenuate a laser beam or microwave beam.
So you can't be too far away, right?
Yeah.
So, which, you know, I don't know if there's a Russian embassy right next door to the American embassy in Cuba, I guess.
I didn't know that, but I don't think I don't think they probably put them right next door to each other down there.
Well, consulate or whatever.
We don't have an embassy in Cuba, right?
You know what I mean?
Right.
We do not.
But now.
OK, so.
I mean, I understand you're not a doctor, but they claim that there's some brain scans that show that people have brain damage, that this isn't just a hangover or loud, obnoxious crickets, that it must be some kind of Russian brain ray or else how come their brains are all messed up?
OK, yeah, no, I'm not a doctor, but there are some logical issues in some of those claims, and one of them is that if people haven't had a brain scan before the incident that they're claiming damaged them, you don't know whether the damage, whether the later damage came from the incident or whether it was there to begin with or whether it came from something else.
So even though I'm not a doctor, I understand the use of controls and experiment and or another way to look at that would be to look at a population study and see how common that particular type of brain damage is across the population.
And now, you know, I read this somewhere else, too, where someone was saying that they were someone was pointing out the politics of this, that, OK, fine, for the sake of argument, let's say that the Russians just have the total run of the place down in Cuba or something.
But we're supposed to believe that the Chinese don't mind the Russians shooting brain rays at American diplomats in China.
It seems like the Chinese would tell the Russians, actually, you guys go cause those problems with America somewhere else, not here.
Or, for example, the same thing in India, where I think it was the director of the CIA came back from India recently, said he had a headache, too.
It must be the Russian brain ray.
It seems like that'd be kind of a big deal for the Russians to be shooting brain rays at Americans in these third countries that have, you know, important diplomatic interests at stake here that but it just kind of goes without saying that, like, well, whatever, it's fine.
The Russians shoot brain rays, brain rays wherever they want.
And don't be naive or something.
Well, yeah, I find that a somewhat implausible part of the story, just as you've outlined.
But we do know that the Russians were willing to poison people in the UK.
So they've done some of that, but to take a highly secret weapon and be running around the world with it, shooting it at low level diplomats by and large, just doesn't make a lot of sense strategically or tactically.
Yeah, well, I'm not so convinced on the the poisonings thing, but that's a separate issue.
But even that, you know, in the UK is one thing, but alienating their friends, the Chinese or something could is a whole other question, which, you know, governments make bad decisions sometimes.
But it does seem, you know, pretty questionable that they would do such a thing in all of these different foreign nations around the world like this.
And well, in China, particularly a friend who is a China expert said no way would China allow that to happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It doesn't make sense that they would at all.
And now.
So can you tell me about the Jason report, because this was a big deal, right?
The Jason Leopold, who's, you know, Mr.
Freedom of Information Act over there at BuzzFeed, got his hands on this Jason report that you referred to in your piece from last May here that they were working on it.
And they just completely dismissed this and went back to the crickets explanation, correct?
Right.
I'm sorry, I should ask you, who's Jason?
What's the big deal with that?
Who's Jason?
Jason is actually a group of people.
They're high level scientists from a variety of institutions that basically the government has contracted to some organizations that do this kind of bringing people together and having meetings and making reports.
And they're from the National Laboratories.
I know one person who has been on the Jason committee from Los Alamos and from universities.
I can't remember what Jason stands for.
I think it is an acronym, but the name has been in use for so long that it's just what they're called, pretty commonly known.
So that's who they are.
Now, their report, I did not have the report last May.
Jason Leopold had not yet gotten it out.
But since then, I have seen the report.
It is highly redacted, and I can't quite see a reason for that.
And I think Jason is going back and trying to shake some more out of the government on that report.
But what is not redacted in the report, and it's almost the it's certainly the only coherent story that is not redacted in the report, there are little bits and pieces of other things, is the story of the crickets.
And what the Jasons did was they got recordings.
And this was done probably in 2017, shortly after these reports came from Havana.
And what the Jasons did was they got recordings from people who reported these incidents.
And they analyzed the recordings with sonograms.
And Jason started being a lot of physicists, and they still have a fair number of physicists on the group.
And it was pretty obvious they were just analyzing those sound waves as far as they could.
And they compared them to the sounds of the crickets in the area.
And I think even some other bugs, some katydids, and they said these sounds are the same.
They are crickets.
Now, what you have to consider is that they were analyzing the recordings they had.
So they can't analyze things that people say happened only in their heads or that they didn't record.
So this may not be a full sample.
And it's video only for more authenticity.
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Now, so Julian Borger, who did great work 20 years ago in The Guardian, he's since become a Russiagate truther and, you know, put his name on all kinds of ridiculous articles over there.
But this one he claims this is from June.
He says microwave weapons that could cause Havana syndrome do exist.
Experts say, and they say the American, an American company even made one called Medusa that they made for the Marine Corps and that it would work just like this.
So this must be what it is only made by them probably, right?
Yeah, I saw that report.
And let's see, I'm also thinking I've seen some of the contract, I think, material associated with that.
I can't give you a definitive read on it at the moment because I'm not remembering everything.
But what I would say is that no such reliable weapon has been used, has been developed and fielded.
It's, in fact, I saw an RFP back around the time I was writing that article.
I'm sorry, RFP request for proposal from the military asking for proposals on how to build one of those.
So if they've got it already, they would be asking for different things, maybe improvements on it.
But the thing is, the reason I wrote that article is that back in the 70s, I was working in the laser division at Los Alamos and these microwave beams are not too different from lasers.
And so the military wanted their death rays and people were looking on how to make death rays.
And people have been working on this for 50 years and it really hasn't happened.
You mentioned masers in there.
That's some kind of hybrid between a microwave and a laser beam.
No, it's the microwave equivalent of a laser.
OK, so now that's an important point, right?
You guys have been working on this.
Well, you guys at the National Laboratories, your colleagues anyway, they've been trying to come up with these things for a very long time.
It's not just about a lack of power, it's that a microwave is not a good way to cook somebody's brain, I guess, or, you know, I don't know what it is.
What's the failure?
Why not feel these things, say, back in 1972?
What had they not perfected about it yet?
That's another question, is how do microwaves cause the damage that is claimed to be caused?
And nobody has really shown a mechanism how microwaves would do that or how they do that without cooking the skin on people's head as they went in to scramble their brains.
Right.
That's an important point.
You talk about that in your piece about cooking food in the microwave, that it's funny you say that there's this misconception somehow people just get it stuck in their head that — I don't know where this came from — that microwaves cook things from the inside out.
And then you go, well, no, they don't.
I just think about all the times you try to microwave a TV dinner, whatever it is, and the center is still cold.
The outside gets cooked first.
There's no real way around that.
So here these people have had their brains destroyed, but the skin on their face or their ears or whatever has not been, you know, cooked at all, it doesn't sound like.
Right, right.
And you'd have to explain that.
Yeah.
And they haven't even tried to, right?
They just avoid that issue so far.
Have you heard anyone try to address that?
Well, there are attempts to explain it by something called the Fry effect, in which very high power microwaves can cause a small clicking that only the person who is affected can hear.
And I have seen an explanation of that as being a heating of small bones in the ear that then produce that clicking sound.
I also just last night, and I haven't read it yet, got a paper that tries to estimate the power that you'd need based on the Fry effect to produce sounds like the cricket sounds.
And it concludes pretty much what I've said, is that you would have to cook a person's head to get that kind of effect if you extrapolate from the Fry effect.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, very kind of inconsistent arguments, it sounds like.
So you also cite in your piece the study, and this is what really gave it a boost, right, was the study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where they said they really think there's something to this.
But you said they don't include any microwave experts in their study?
Right, right.
And go ahead, and if you could explain, what's their argument and why you don't find it compelling there?
Well, what they did was they said, well, could this be pesticides?
I can't remember.
But they went through three or four possible causes, and they ruled out those causes.
I know pesticides was one of them.
Are these people being poisoned by pesticides that have been applied in or around the building?
And they pretty much excluded that.
So they had these four or five, and they said, OK, it's none of those.
So it must be a directed energy microwave beam.
And it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
There could be other explanations, too.
You don't just jump to something that you don't even know exists if you can't make the other points.
And recently, there was an NPR program on which Arnold Railman, who was the head of that study, actually said they really don't know.
He didn't say quite what I've said here, but he said we excluded other things, but we didn't really connect it to microwaves.
Well, that's a hell of an omission from the guy who put out a study saying, yeah, it must be microwaves, but OK.
And so this is the problem, right, is essentially you can't prove a negative here.
They've got a claim.
And I've been told this numerous times.
There was a funny tweet about this the other day about, you're so naive.
That's what I was told.
You're so naive, Scott Horton.
And this other lady was quoting people coming at her saying, you don't think the Russians would make a brain ray?
Right, so all the burden is on any doubter to disprove that the evil Vladimir Putin would develop and feel the weapon like this if he had one.
And then probably the first thing we do is shoot it at our diplomats or something.
I don't know.
They just they already know it.
So now this whole interview even is kind of about debunking a thing that's already an accepted truth, even though there's really nothing to demonstrate it at all other than somebody says that they got a headache.
But I don't know how much wine they had last night.
Probably plenty.
Well, I think, you know, the rule in science is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary support.
And I think that claiming that the Russians are zapping people with a microwave weapon is pretty extraordinary.
And I would like to see some support for that.
And I, I haven't.
Now, would Vladimir Putin do that?
Oh, yeah, I'm sure he would.
But he's got to have the weapon first.
Sure.
And you know what?
Maybe he's been too busy developing new nuclear weapons to overcome our anti-ballistic missile technology.
So.
Well, that's a whole nother story.
In fact, can I ask you about that?
I won't keep you too long, but I saw your most recent piece at Foreign Policy is called plutonium pits are a critical obstacle in U.S. nuclear plans.
And I really liked the subtitle here.
Modernization programs need to be realistic and maybe unnecessary.
Emphasis on the last part there.
But, you know, Obama had to make a deal with the Republican senators to get new start ratified that they would do this massive new overhaul of the national laboratories and all the factories and the entire nuclear weapons arsenal and all of these things.
And they started out saying it was going to be one trillion dollars.
And that pretty quickly changed, I think, two point seven.
So who knows what it'll be by the time they're done?
Anyway, I'm just interested in your take on that.
I actually haven't even had a chance to read this yet.
I just like the subhead.
Well, one of the things that I did at Los Alamos was I worked on the Ares Project, which was to disassemble plutonium pits from nuclear weapons and put them into a form that might be used or disposed of in other ways.
And I was in charge of the canning module in which we would can up the plutonium after it was processed so that it would be safe and could be transported.
So there have been difficulties at Los Alamos in producing producing as many plutonium pits as would be required by the modernization.
So Savannah River, another DOE lab has come in and said, oh, we can help, even though they've never done any of that kind of thing.
And they have a building that was supposed to be used for making reactor fuel from a mixture of uranium and plutonium, which went way over budget and got cut as a result.
And they want to remodel that building so that they can build plutonium pits.
And that's going to take quite a while, too.
So in congressional hearings a while back, the NNSA administrator said, um, we said we could do this by 2030, but it's going to be more like 2035.
And my guess is that it's not going to happen, but we'll see.
And so what do you think about the necessity?
I mean, I guess accepting the argument that we're going to have a nuclear deterrent and need one.
What do you think about this whole project to kind of refurbish the entire industry and arsenal this way?
Oh, boy, that's another long story.
Russia and China are modernizing and China is increasing their nuclear arsenal.
So then the easy argument is, well, if they're doing it, we have to do it.
But there are some things that need to be updated.
But the whole thing that's being proposed, I have my doubts.
So, you know, it really seems to me just from this perspective, anyway, I don't know what it looks like from inside a national laboratory, but it kind of all just looks like a big racket.
You know, they even have the nuclear weapons caucus in the Senate where it's, you know, senators from states that have Minutemen missiles stationed in them or national laboratories stationed in them lobby incessantly for, you know, increased H-bomb sales, just the same as any other industry would if they can get a captive market in the U.S. government and lobby to contract and sell the things.
And it seems like, you know, like the soldiers call it a self-licking ice cream cone.
Where people don't really ask, why do we need all these H-bombs?
And don't we already have lots and lots of H-bombs?
And more than enough to deter any nation state in the world, even if they all ganged up against us together or something.
But it just, it seems like most of those questions kind of go without saying.
And instead, it's just keep the business going, right?
Just like flipping hamburgers, only make an H-bomb.
Well, the weapons production does provide jobs to people.
And the Los Alamos National Laboratory is a mainstay of the economy of northern New Mexico.
So, and likewise Savannah River in South Carolina.
And yeah, jobs are important to senators.
And we've had so much craziness the past several years.
And I don't know, we could almost go back to the 2000s and say we've had so much craziness that it's hard to find time to actually think these things out.
So, Congress seems to be driven by mostly short-term goals.
Yeah.
Like just say, hypothetically, Superman 4 comes and wants to get rid of all the nuclear weapons on earth, you'd have the northern part of New Mexico would be screaming their head off.
No, we have to have a continuing Cold War with the other major powers of the world, or else we'd have to get real jobs.
What are we going to do then?
Right?
Well, that's not entirely true, because Los Alamos does other things besides weapons.
So, the way to deal with that would be just to increase the other things that Los Alamos does.
They've been doing research on understanding the pandemic.
They do research on climate change.
Those would be good things to increase.
And you could keep people in jobs.
Yeah.
Certainly better than making nukes, if you ask me.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today.
This has really been great.
And thank you very much for it.
Okay.
Glad to be here.
And thanks for asking me.
All right, you guys.
That is Cheryl Roefer.
And she used to work at Los Alamos.
And she wrote this great bit.
You'll love it at foreignpolicy.com.
It's called Claims of Microwave Attacks are Scientifically Implausible.
And listen, don't worry if you get stuck behind the paywall.
Just paste that URL into archive.is.
Claims of Microwave Attacks are Scientifically Implausible.
