>The Russians definitely were working on this fifty years ago, and it produced symptoms consistent with many independent reports from US agents and people that suffered collateral damage

The twitter thread mentions this. It involved a bombardment of microwave rays that was detected. How would a similar attack evade detection now?

>The twitter thread’s main objection seems to be that the US is not publishing plans describing the secret Russian weapon.

Even without publishing the plans, if you think a microwave weapon caused this event you should be able to explain how it would function.

>Now that he’s on the way out, it’s not surprising they’re beginning to take action.

Taking action is a report that took months to complete with no strong conclusion?

> The twitter thread mentions this. It involved a bombardment of microwave rays that was detected. How would a similar attack evade detection now?

Sounds like something they could have worked on in the past half-century. Detection of a narrowly focused burst of radiation would be fairly challenging if you're outside of whatever volumetric detection zone is generated by the attack device.

How would you differentiate it from other RF interference?

> if you think a microwave weapon caused this event you should be able to explain how it would function.

I don't see what exists to be gained by explaining the function of a weapon that jeopardizes and frightens your diplomats. If the claims are true, then there is nobody to convince here; the US is going to act internally on its own information, and the alleged foreign actors involved are going to spread their own disinformation accordingly.

Radio receivers (and the LNA component of such) are incredibly sensitive... that's what allows all the radio systems we use daily to work at all. If a signal is strong enough to have a physiological effect on the human body it is many many orders of magnitude stronger than can be measured with off-the-shelf instruments (i.e. an antenna and spectrum analyser).

Even if you make an effort to concentrate the effect in a specific spot (e.g. phased array antennas), you can only achieve a moderate reduction (e.g. 1-2 orders of magnitude) outside the central lobe. It will be easily detectable outside the effective area.

>I don't see what exists to be gained by explaining the function of a weapon that jeopardizes and frightens your diplomats.

Why would that be more frightening than releasing a report saying they were probably attacked by an unknown microwave weapon?

I think a radiation beam powerful enough to hurt people as described but able to avoid detection seems unlikely. Anything similar to interference is unlikely to cause damage.

> It is sickening that the US government was unable to protect its own agents for the last four years because of interference from the White House.

Citation needed.

If this is such an old known weapon why are walls not insulated or some detectors placed in this buildings?

> If this is such an old known weapon why are walls not insulated or some detectors placed in this buildings?

IIRC, most diplomats live in private residential areas, not in an embassy compound.

Aren't the important guys living inside the embassy? if not you would still protect their homes if this weapon would exist and US knows about it. If it exists for 50 years and somehow US is incapable to protect against it or prove it was used then what does this mean?

Maybe ambassadors do, but it's not like they can run the show on their own. US embassies are pretty large operations with many different functions. IIRC, the people who think they were targeted by that weren't ambassadors, and at least some were involved in intelligence missions.

Still I expect US intelligence would know all the side effects of this weapon and not have to struggle identifying it, I expect they tested it 50 years ago already (same how they tested radiation effects, brain washing with drugs and all the other disturbing experiments they did)

> Still I expect US intelligence would know all the side effects of this weapon and not have to struggle identifying it, I expect they tested it 50 years ago already

You seem to be assuming US intelligence is as scarily competent as it is in the movies.

For instance even if they did test something similar 50 years ago, in the real world, all the people with that expertise would have retired long ago. To put it in perspective (with an imperfect analogy): 50 years ago, software engineers were writing code in COBOL and IBM 360 assembler, how quickly would a senior Java developer be able to parachute in and figure out and fix a subtle bug in an application written with those technologies?

Yes, it makes sense if such old stuff was experimented with in secret but then not used for decades.

But since we are entertaining conspiracies, what if US also is using this weapon, then they won't want to admit it and give clues on how to prove it was used.

My opinion(very uninformed) is that it is more probable that if a device is involved then it is some kind of spying/scanning tool and not a weapon.