When my thesis was completed, I began working for a small Department of Defense research company, Dikewood Corporation.  Our principal area of study was electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effects.  It was intellectually challenging work in a relaxed working environment.  I had my own office with a great view in a high-rise building in West Los Angeles (Westwood), not far from the UCLA campus.  Many of my colleagues, including my boss, Kelvin Lee, and my project leader, Lennart Marin, had been students of Prof. Papas at Caltech.  We used to walk to UCLA every day for lunch, using the UCLA library facilities after lunch when we had the need.

The Westwood office of Dikewood was a branch of the main office in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Dikewood was established in Albuquerque (by Drs. Dike and Wood, of course) to perform contract research in support of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory (AFWL) at Kirtland Air Force Base.  One of the main concerns at AFWL was the possible detrimental effects of EMPs generated by nuclear explosions on the electronics of aerospace systems (that's defense-speak for aircraft and missiles).  AFWL was the largest sponsor of the work we did at Dikewood.

In addition to many theoretical studies and computer simulations funded by AFWL, the Air Force constructed a series of full-scale EMP simulators at Kirtland Air Force Base.  The basic idea behind a full-scale simulator is to park a military aircraft in the target zone, launch a simulated EMP from a specially designed antenna, and then measure the responses of the electronic devices inside the aircraft.  The largest simulator at AFWL, called Trestle, was constructed in the late 1970's entirely of wood and non-metallic composites.  (Fortunately for the U.S. taxpayers, the wood for Trestle was purchased before environmental regulations and large-scale Japanese purchases of raw logs drove prices up.)  Trestle was designed to be able to test the largest military aircraft, the C-5A Galaxy transport.  The aircraft to be tested in Trestle is parked on a wooden platform over a deep gorge.  Because the aircraft is suspended well over the ground by a structure that is almost invisible to the EMP, it is the most accurate way to simulate an EMP the aircraft would encounter while airborne, without actually flying the aircraft near an EMP antenna.  That could be hazardous to the crew, not to mention being costly and inconvenient.

Dikewood received several contracts from AFWL to provide scientific and technical consultation for EMP tests. It was my job to supervise the technicians taking data inside the aircraft while the EMP antenna was pulsing, verifying the quality of the data and suggesting additional measurement points if I noticed something unusual in the data. The job required me to make frequent trips to Albuquerque from our branch office. I remember two incidents in particular that the readers of this biography might find interesting.

Incident number one occurred during my first test program. We were testing the E-3A AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System). The E-3A carries a large circular radar dome on a reinforced Boeing 707 airframe. You may recall seeing pictures of this aircraft during news coverage of Desert Storm. The electronic systems in the E-3A for identifying and tracking friendly and enemy targets are highly classified. It was our job to test the aircraft to insure the effectiveness of the EMP protections built into the systems.

On the final day of testing, we had an impromptu party onboard to celebrate the success of the project. It was nothing spectacular, just soda, cake, and ice cream. Many of my colleagues from Dikewood were present, including someone of Chinese (Taiwan) origin whom I will call WC to save embarrassment. In order for us to board the aircraft, the Air Force required us to have security clearances and wear security badges at all times. WC was in the process of getting his clearance, but he didn't have it yet. When the sergeant in charge of the safety and security of the aircraft found out, he stormed in with a loaded pistol and ordered us all out at gunpoint. If you have never had a loaded weapon pointed at you by an angry man, you can believe me when I tell you that the situation commands your immediate attention.

Incident number two occurred about a year later. We were testing a B-52 bomber this time. Because the E-3A is a modification of a passenger aircraft design, its cabin has many of the amenities you might expect: lavatories, comfortable seats, bunks, even a small galley. Like an airliner, it was designed to be connected to an external air conditioning cart to keep the crew comfortable while parked on the ramp in hot weather. Consequently, we worked inside the E-3A in complete comfort, unbothered by the desert heat. In contrast, the B-52 is not much more advanced in crew comfort than the B-29 bomber of World War II on which it was based. Our ground crew tried valiantly to jury-rig some air conditioning lines to the aircraft, but they were not very effective. When we had the aircraft sealed against EMP during the tests, the air conditioning lines had to be disconnected anyway.

If you remember the film Dr. Strangelove, you will recall the late Slim Pickens as Major Kong, crawling around in the bomb bay of his B-52, trying to release the nuclear bomb before they passed over the target. That's where I was one memorable afternoon, taking test measurements while the B-52 baked in the summer sun. To make matters worse, the aircraft, painted in dark green and brown camouflage colors, efficiently absorbed most of the light energy striking it. We hung a thermometer inside the compartment and measured 130ºF air temperature. I survived by drinking about ten cans of soda that afternoon. I didn't need to take a bathroom break because the soda immediately turned to sweat. When we quit for the day and walked out into 90º air, it felt positively refreshing!

During my years of EMP testing with Dikewood, I made use of a newly emerging technology: the Personal Computer, or PC.  I built my first PC from a kit in 1975 while I was a graduate student.  I'll never forget the look on Gena's face when she came home to our apartment after a long day at medical school to find resistors, diodes, integrated circuits, and assorted hardware strewn across our living room floor.  Of course, they couldn't be moved until the computer was complete!

My kit was based on the 8-bit Intel 8080 microprocessor.  The main memory consisted of four 4K memory boards for a total of 16K memory.  The main input device was a row of toggle switches on the front panel.  The main output device was a row of red light-emitting diodes (LED's) indicating binary integers (OFF=0/ON=1).  To that, I added a special 1K memory board that interpreted its 8-bit memory values as characters to be displayed on a standard black and white TV screen in a grid of 64 characters by 16 lines.  I also added a keyboard that transmitted 8-bit character codes to the computer's parallel input port.  I tried saving and loading programs to a simple cassette tape recorder - as many hobbyists were doing at the time - but that proved to be impractical and so I purchased a 5¼" floppy disk drive kit and connected that to the computer.  I wrote my own "boot program" in binary code and programmed it into a read-only memory (ROM) so that the computer would load the floppy disk program upon startup and recognize the TV display and keyboard as the new primary input devices.  The floppy kit came with a small Basic computer language interpreter (not the Microsoft version of Basic - that was a better version but too expensive for me).  Once I had the system built, I had the first computer that I could call my own and upon which I could do any calculation I wished without regard to computer account budgets and other restrictions.  It was great fun to watch the LED's flash on and off as programs ran.

Once the computer was running, I couldn't wait to start working on important computations.  Naturally, my first program was a Star Trek game I modified from a listing published in the Interface magazine of the Southern California Computer Society!  When I ran actual computations on the machine in Basic, I found that the interpreted language was too slow.  To solve that problem, I purchased a floating-point accelerator board for the computer.  Unfortunately, I had to program it in Intel 8080 assembly language, including writing my own mathematical functions like square root.  When that was accomplished, I could finally use the computer for actual work.  For example, I ran thousands of Fourier transforms from data I had collected in the EMP tests.  (A Fourier transform converts a function of time to a function of frequency.)  I eventually added a printer and a plotter, so that I could do almost every task on my home-brew computer other than the original data collection, from data analysis to writing the final report.  The computers used for data collection at AFWL were 16-bit Digital Equipment PDP-11 minicomputers housed in a special building shielded from EMP and solar heat, called the "igloo".

I recall my EMP testing experiences with a large measure of sadness because my project leader, Lennart Marin, died of cancer several years later. Persistent stories about increased cancer risks in people exposed to EMP circulate among those who were involved in EMP tests. As far as I know, there has been no definitive proof of this. As I think about Lennart's death, I cannot help but recall that while I was inside the aircraft taking measurements or in the igloo saving test data on floppy disks for my PC - both environments designed to provide protection against EMP - Lennart was usually sitting in an unshielded field office trailer nearby, examining data and doing paperwork. Whether that put him at significantly increased risk for cancer is an unanswered question.

While I was working on EMP projects with Dikewood, Gena's medical career proceeded. She decided to specialize in emergency medicine, because at the time it seemed to offer the most flexibility for blending a medical career with raising a family. After she completed her internship, she was accepted into the residency program in emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. It was difficult in many ways for us to leave California, but we decided to move to Baltimore for the two years of the program. Our greatest misgiving was the fact that Johns Hopkins Hospital is located in a high-risk neighborhood of Baltimore. Before we left California, I learned about horrible things that had happened to medical students, interns, and residents there. Without filling Gena in on the gruesome details, I resolved to drive her to and from the hospital as often as I could. I also told her to make sure a security guard walked her to the parking garage if she had to leave after hours. If this sounds like paranoia, let me assure you it was justified. During our two years in Baltimore, a policeman was shot and killed in the hospital by a prisoner being treated in the emergency room who grabbed the policeman's pistol, a medical student walking home was shot and killed by a juvenile just for the thrill of it, a man driving by Baltimore City Jail (which was on our route from the hospital to home) had his car commandeered at knife-point by an escaping prisoner, and a man driving through a neighborhood near the hospital was mugged and killed when his car had a flat tire.

While we lived in Baltimore, I maintained a small branch office of Dikewood in a nice residential neighborhood north of Johns Hopkins University, within walking distance of our apartment. I made many trips from Baltimore to Albuquerque for EMP tests, staying in an apartment rented by Dikewood with Lennart Marin and Cooke Lewis, another Dikewood colleague who passed away at an early age. (He had a medical condition apparently unrelated to EMP.) Cooke was a bachelor, but the extended absences were tough on Lennart's and my marriages. The absences were probably tougher on Lennart's wife, because Gena's schedule at Johns Hopkins was so intense (36 hours on duty, 12 off) that she hardly knew if I was at home or not. Hospital rules no longer permit punishing hours like that for interns and residents.

In the spring of 1980, after two years in the Baltimore combat zone, we were ready to move to a smaller, quieter town. We picked Altoona, Pennsylvania. Gena had a great interview there with the director of the Altoona Hospital Emergency Department. Unfortunately, that director was fired before we arrived and replaced with another director. Something about the new director did not seem quite right, but we were too inexperienced to pull the plug on the job and look elsewhere. As it turned out, the new director was not only personally unethical, but professionally unethical as well. The main source of the problem was that Gena wanted to apply the best appropriate medical technology to give the patients care according to the standards of the American College of Emergency Physicians, while the director's objective was to make a lot of money for the hospital and himself, and not make waves with the established attending physicians in Altoona. Things came to a head when Gena repeatedly complained about attending physicians who refused to come in to see their critically ill patients.

Around the same time, it became clear to me that, as much as I enjoyed working with my colleagues at Dikewood, there was no future in EMP testing. At Gena's suggestion, I sent my resume to the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, close to my parents' home in Delmar. I had a good interview with the Electromagnetics Program at General Electric Corporate Research & Development (CRD) and I was offered a job with a 33% increase in salary over what I was making at Dikewood. The extra money was welcome because our first child, Gregory, had been born in October, 1981, just a month prior to my interview. We set our sights on the future and left Altoona.

Last update: July 02, 2000