U.S. Air Force: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

Narendra P. Singh, known to friends and colleagues simply as NP, died last December at the age of 69. When his family wrote to me with the news, Singh’s wife asked me not to publish a tribute or an obituary at that time. I honored her request, but now, after a decent interval, I break my silence, in part to make good on a promise and to settle some unfinished business.

Singh was a proud and honest man; he was also gentle and unassuming. “He cannot tell a lie, even a white lie,” Henry Lai, his long-time collaborator at the University of Washington in Seattle, told me years ago. Perhaps most of all, Singh was a meticulous experimentalist who believed in the power of science.

Over the last few years, microwave researchers at the Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio have published a series of papers showing that 94 GHz millimeter waves have minimal effects on the eyes and the skin, and that current models are adequate for predicting pain and thermal thresholds. It has been no secret that this work was to support the military's development of a microwave weapon for crowd control — active denial technology. After all, how else would people be exposed to 94 GHz radiation?