A few of the cases of a mysterious ailment that has affected U.S. embassy staff and CIA officers on and off from 2016 onwards in Cuba, China, Russia, and a few other countries probably were due to pulsed electromagnetic radiation as per an analysis by an expert panel set up by the national intelligence agencies.
The findings of the report are similar to those in a statement that was released by the National Academies in 2020. In the report, a panel composed of 19 experts from medical fields and other areas concluded that directed pulsed radiofrequency energy was one of the “most plausible mechanisms” to explain the condition, which is known as ” Havana syndrome.”
Both reports are not conclusive, and the authors don’t discuss who targeted the embassies or the reasons why the embassies were targeted. However, the technology behind suspect weapons is well-understood and goes back to earlier in the Cold War arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. High-power microwave weapons are typically intended to destroy electronic devices. But, as Havana syndrome studies show this,e energy pulses can cause harm to people and also.
In my role as an engineer in the field of electrical engineering and computing who develops and designs sources of high-power electromagnetics, I’ve spent a long time researching the physics behind these sources, and have also worked in an organization called the U.S. Department of Defense. Directed energy weapons convert power from a source – like a wall outlet in a lab, or an engine in the military vehicle – into radiation of electromagnetic energy, and then direct it towards a area of. The targeted high-power microwaves destroy devices, including electronics, and do not kill people around them.
Two excellent examples include Boeing’s Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) which is a microwave source with high power that is mounted on a missile as well as the The Tactical High-power Operational Reaper (THOR) it was developed recently through researchers at the Air Force Research Laboratory to destroy drones in a swarm.
An article on the U.S. Air Force’s high-power anti-drone microwave weapon, THOR.
Cold War origins
These kinds of directed energy microwave devices first came into the spotlight during the late 1960s in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They were facilitated through the invention of pulsed power in the 1960s. Pulsed power produces brief electrical pulses that possess an extremely high electrical capacity, that is, the highest voltage – as high as several megavolts – as well as huge electrical currents, 10 Kiloamps. This is more than the longest-distance power transmission lines with the highest voltage and roughly the amount of current that flows through lightning bolts.
The physicists who were studying plasma were at the time able to realize that if you could create such one megavolt electron beam using ten kiloamps of current, the result would be beam power of 10 billion watts or gigawatts. Converting 10 percent of that beam power into microwaves with standard microwave tube technology dating from the 1940s creates one gigawatt worth of microwave energy. In comparison, the power output of the most common microwave ovens is approximately 1000 watts, which is one million times less.
The advancement of this technology resulted in one aspect of the U.S.-Soviet arms race: the microwave power contest. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union collapse in 1991, I and other American scientists were able to access Russian-powered accelerators that pulsed, such as the SINUS-6 that’s still operating within my laboratory. I enjoyed a productive decade of working together with Russian colleagues, but it quickly came to an end with the rise of Vladimir Putin to the presidency.