BOOM Goes the...RF?

by Paul McGoldrick

For the last ten years or so I have been coming across the name of Barrie Trower in connection with EM radiation scares. Without having met the gentleman personally I can only recount what the press have said about him – from his own statements, presumably – in descriptions of his former employment. It is said that he is a “British scientist and former naval weapons expert” and that he “specialized in microwave stealth warfare during the Cold War.”

It is very easy to claim a past such as this. If the man has indeed worked behind the wall of silence that governments impose on so many, then any claim from him is going to be ignored by those powers: unless he goes beyond the remit of official secrets and, in his case, the dreaded Official Secrets Acts to which he would have been a signatory.

Trower’s name had kind of left my consciousness again until last week when it was announced that he was giving a free lecture in Toronto on the dreads of using Wi-Fi in the public school system in Canada. Included among the horrors of exposure to small doses of 2.4 GHz are particular cares for females and their ovaries. Trower contends that children are “undeveloped adults” rather than “small adults” (something that I would not disagree with) and that DNA can be affected by Wi-Fi leading, especially, to birth defects in the next generations. He states, frequently, that there are no studies proving there is no harm to prolonged exposure. That is a kind of Mickey Mouse scientific approach, but is fully in line with Trower’s associated claims that it is especially dangerous to use cell phones inside vehicles because the waves bounce backwards and forwards within the metal cabin.

I am not a proponent of exposure to RF: I have seen, as I have written before, the effects of RF on the human body. But I certainly do not accept that the exposure created by a “hot spot” in a school is going to cause any kind of lasting damage.

If you read more of Trower’s menacing statements (and Google will throw up many for you) another of his beliefs seems to be that it is not RF, per se, that does the damage but the modulation technique that is being used. I have scratched my head on that one and have come to the conclusion that while crest factors do indeed change the average power level (APL) of exposure, it does not change the equation of harm in any kind of meaningful manner.

Barrie Trower has said that he has taken to the lecture circuit free of charge (just expenses, please) because he recognized that the exposure to Wi-Fi was at the same frequencies and powers of those used during the Cold War. Coming out of retirement was, it appears, a common courtesy to the world.

To my knowledge there have been few weaponized uses of microwaves. Virtually the only one to become public has been in the last couple of years with Raytheon’s vehicle-mounted Pain Ray which, with its parabolic dish, has reportedly consumed in excess of $60 million in development monies and has been rejected by the military in Afghanistan because, presumably, it amounts to torture. That has not stopped the development of a cute table-top model that has been given free-of-charge to a prison in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department. The machine is being called an assault intervention device (AID) that is said to cause an intolerable heating sensation from its focused beam.

Exposure to the machine is said to be less than three seconds per trigger pull – but the deputy in control can keep pulling the trigger – and is effective at distances up to 100 feet. Raytheon also makes no secret of the fact that they are developing hand-held versions of the device, no doubt as an active alternative to tasers.

I am not qualified to speak of the long-term damage that this Pain Ray may, or may not, cause, but it would be difficult to persuade me that internal RF heating can possibly be good for the human body.

Nevertheless, such a weapon, or anything like it, could have been and was not available during Barrie Trower’s claimed time in Cold War weaponry.

Also claimed by this gratis lecturer is that he teaches Physics at “Britain’s Dartmoor College.” This is, presumably, referring to South Dartmoor Community College located at Ashburton on the Southeast corner of the moor. I have driven through it thousands of times on the A38 during the many years that I lived in both Devon and Cornwall. To North Americans the name suggests a place of higher learning; it is, in fact, a secondary school for ages 11 – 18. There is no Physics department at the school and in the Science staff list there is no listing for Barrie Trower.

If he is a part-time teacher, or substitute, at the school, I sincerely hope that the content he expounds is carefully monitored…

There appears to be no reference to Wi-Fi facilities on the school’s web site so one doesn’t know if the anti-radiation views of Trower have been listened to by the administration there.

In the Canadian press coverage of the lecture in Toronto there were also quotations of health concerns from Associate Professor Magda Havas of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Dr Havas is no stranger to our Editorial pages and we last met her in relation to her views on dirty electricity and chakras.

Technological insanity is probably a good plea for both Trower and Havas.