(CNN) Pentagon bought device through undercover operation some investigators suspect is linked to Havana Syndrome. Quoting,
Officials have long struggled to understand how a device powerful enough to cause the kind of damage some victims have reported could be made portable; that remains a core question, according to one of the sources briefed on the device. The device could fit in a backpack, this person said.
I have written about this extensively; see (CNN)’Sonic attacks’ suffered by US diplomats likely caused by microwave energy, government study says. This post adds a napkin calculation based upon a formerly common cellphone protocol. standard. GSM was world-dominant from the late 90’s to circa 2007. If you are in the U.S., and your carrier was AT&T or T-mobile, you had a GSM phone.
Unlike other standards, GSM emission was “bursty”, which means that the microwave emissions came in narrow-band pulses. More than any other protocol, it had a tendency to interfere with nearby electronic equipment. It was the bane of hospitals, where a user in the hallway could interfere with an MRI. In recording and broadcast studios, the GSM burst would break into shielded cables, audibly contaminating broadcasts and recordings.
All this havoc was wreaked by a handheld microwave gadget, with a maximum power of perhaps 3 watts, perhaps an inch from the user’s skull. Apart from the laments of “electrosensitive” individuals, no credible reports of brain injury from these phones exist. In how many ways could this phone-gadget vary from the purported Havana attack machine? Three:
- Frequency, which determines Specific absorption rate (SAR). The amount of absorption is significant to injury. Bands in wide use are near optimal for brain absorption
- Power, which, along with frequency, determines SAR.
- Modulation. Everyone, including me, has considered how pulsed microwave could be much more damaging than CW (continuous wave.)
In what follows, we assume that, for a given power level, the GSM phone burst has an effect on the brain similar to a purpose-built weapon. Any microwave pulse shakes brain tissue at least a little. And it has been established that cellphone emissions activate heat shock proteins in the brain. We offer no other justification. This is a napkin calculation, to make you think.
Assume that the Havana brain-buster has an effective range of 60 feet. What power would be required to deliver a dose to the brain equivalent to a GSM phone held 1.2 inches from the head? The answer has two parts. The first is the inverse square law:
(power of brain-buster)2 ÷ (power of cellphone) 2 =
(distance of brain-buster)2 ÷ (distance of phone) 2 =
(60 feet)2 ÷ (0.1 feet) 2 =3.6*105 = 360,000
Since the cellphone emits 3 watts, the brain-buster must emit 360,000*3 watts, about a million watts. This is not entirely accurate. While the radiation pattern of a cellphone is broad, the brain-buster would have an antenna that radiates in a cone towards the victim, so it does not need to be quite so powerful. For a 10◦ cone, multiply by 0.075, to get 27000 watts.
But what have we actually shown? Since a GSM phone does no damage at all, we now know that the brain-buster must emit more than 27000 watts. If you’re on a conference call with five cellphones, are you destroying your brain? Multiply by 10; the brain-buster must emit at least 270,000 watts for an extended period of time. And if it is located exterior to the building, multiply by 4: one million watts in a device the size of a backpack.
This suggests that the device purchased by the Pentagon is unsuited as an explanation for the Havana events. It is more likely a torture device, used for interrogation, and to degrade the mentality of a detainee before release.
GSM is still present as a backup protocol on modern phones. You could concentrate the energy towards your own head with aluminum foil. Let us know what you find out.