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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

The proposed mechanism of microwave or sonic waves is completely implausible, to the point of absurdity. The only way either could incur brain damage would be through either heat or mechanical stress, both of which would be readily apparent.

If this is a genuine issue then the mechanism is almost assuredly completely different, and personally I don't think it is some scary communist death ray that they would, for some reason, use on US and Canadian diplomats.

Unless the diplomats are all actually covert staff, in which case there would be a motive, but then some kind of chemical is much likelier.

This is IMO so implausible as to put the entire story into question. There is no way this is a microwave or sonic weapon. A microwave or sonic weapon could not cause occipital nerve damage so specific and without leaving any obvious traces of mechanical trauma and/or heat damage. It would also very probably be quite notioeable.

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Physics degree. I find it plausible. Wave mechanics are strange. Several effects can produce surprisingly high energies at a distance: constructive interference (nodes) and cavity resonance. Phased arrays are modern ways to produce these effects. These are all phenomena being used for wireless power transfer with EM, I don't see why you would doubt on first principles that the same thing with sound (the skull being a resonant cavity). I mean, I would tend to prefer a biological/chemical explanation myself, but to say "physical implausible" is wrong, IMHO.

And this wouldn't be the first time the Russians designed something like this. There is that famous passively powered bugging of the American embassy in Moscow story, where they anticipated RFID technology, in the 60's.

Wireless power transfer is done through magnetic induction, which is well understood. The range on wireless power transfer is very small. If this was a targeted attack, the device would have to be within a short range and be targeted at this specific individual.

And ultimately, what for? This agent appears to have retained their memory but can no longer work in the field. Why would this one field agent be so important to debilitate in this way? What benefit would Russia get from it?

I get the motivation behind killing people (dead men tell no tales), but inflicting migraines just seems useless.

The claim isn't EM in general, it's specifically microwaves or sonic waves.

Sonic waves would have to be of relatively low frequency in order to not be reflected or otherwise attenuated, so you would need low frequency waves, which, no matter what kind of interference you try to use, will never have effects moreso localized than the wavelength itself. If you were trying to get resonance with the skull at n<8, you'd be well within the audible range, too.

As for microwaves, the same issue is still there, I can't think of any interference pattern for waves of lambda>1mm that would somehow have effects that would have no detectable thermal characteristics yet be extremely localized to only a few specific parts of the brain.

Same for resonance, you'd need a wavelength comparable to the dimensions of the skull, and for that you couldn't have effects as localized as damaging only the optical nerve.

It's not out of the question that very high-powered microwaves could have some kind of electrical impact on the brain, but those impacts would not be localized to only the optical nerve and instead hit the entirety of the brain, and if you were able to get a machine that could create strong electrical currents throughout the brain the idea that this could happen enough to degrade a nerve without being somehow noticeable, for days to weeks is extremely implausible. Plus, a thin line would have not to be crossed where a lot of waste heat could be dumped in the room.

In all experiments done, effects were either wildly different or extremely rapid, and are thought to come from a completely different mechanism of rapid variations in temperatures causing physical vibrations. But again, this would need energies in the order of multiple watts applied to the human brain for quite a while, and would definitely be noticeable.

Not only that, but this would be incredibly easy to detect, you'd only need an antenna. The energies necessary for any of these effects are exceedingly high.

It just doesn't make sense, in many many ways.

Perhaps it's not that there's some property of physics that we don't understand, but some aspect of brain biology we don't understand. Perhaps exposure to electromagnetic fields of a certain type could cause progressive damage to the brain somehow. Obviously there's a lot of hysteria around "EM Sensitivity" but there seems to be something going on here and our knowledge of how the human brain works is still quite limited.

Perhaps. It would be exceedingly unlikely that no one knows this except for Cuba, Russia, and China, which were only politically connected from 65 years ago, and no one else.

Any plausible mechanism for how this could happen and not be happening in dozens of easily verifiable ways would either cause a lot of heat or be very easily detectable.

People seem to only accept mass hysteria as a thing that happened in the middle ages. Anybody who doesn't believe that contagious fears can cause serious physical symptoms in relatively normal people should look at the endless semi-recent coverage and video of puking, shaking, crying, and fainting fentanyl cops. This was something that was so widespread in the US police (I don't know if it spread worldwide) that the fact that it was just hysteria is so embarrassing to a wide variety of authority figures that it just stopped being covered and was pushed into the memory hole.

The reason the media seized on and perpetuated it (the bizarre rumor that touching something that had been invisibly stained with fentanyl would make you deathly ill) at the time was a combination of the law-and-order right insisting that the drug war was still vitally important, and the liberal left's concern for drug users during the "opiate epidemic" needing more official protection and care lest they be exposed to these Chinese-poisoned drugs. It worked for both sides, so was reported endlessly, and induced people all over the country to somatize.

Now, we have an anti-"Russian" narrative that can be attached to this that makes both the Democratic Party left and warhawks happy. I put Russian in scare quotes, because it's clearly a revival of anticommunism without the communism. Russia, Cuba, China...

Political Morgellons.

re: @sudosysgen: "The proposed mechanism of microwave or sonic waves is completely implausible, to the point of absurdity .."

Very reasonable and well thought piece. It is highly irresponsible for of NPR talking up the next cold-war. But I figure without a foreign bogeyman to scare the American people, the spooks wouldn't be able to justify the budget.

undiscovered physics?

Undiscovered physics that somehow only Leninist states have their hands on? Which, in this case, would have to be discovered before the Sino-Soviet split of 1956, but not by anyone else?

Undiscovered bullshit. A wideband electromagnetic (or acoustical) detector is trivial to construct, especially if the levels are high enough to cause physical damage.

Isn't it obvious? adjusts tinfoil cap The ruskies have figured out a way to attack anyone who has breathed in our freedom air. They pumped their censored/locked air with specific anti-freedom(terror loving) characters which causes immediate discomfort to our free minds. Freedom.

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