Last month, a nine-member team of government experts headed to a U.S. military base on the Marshall Islands to explore the possible health effects of a radar on the Kwajalein Atoll.

If all goes according to government plans, the U.S. will move this radar to the Czech Republic to become part of its European missile-defense shield.

Upon their return, these experts assured the public that the planned radar base — to be erected on the Brdy military grounds, some 90 kilometers (56 miles) from Prague — will not pose any known health risks to the local population.

But, as the Defense Ministry puts the finishing touches on a detailed report of the experts’ findings, which officials expect to publicize later this month, local scientist and nongovernmental organizations continue to voice their criticism over the methodology with which the government is analyzing information about the radar base’s possible health effects.

“[The government] is deliberately adjusting the controlled information in the midst of a propaganda war with the public,” says Karel Dolejší, spokesman for the local branch of global watchdog organization Greenpeace.

Dolejší’s statement is a reaction to an Oct.10 Defense Ministry presentation of the preliminary findings from the Marshall Islands expedition, intended to mollify local fears that the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the radar will have a negative impact on the health of those living in its vicinity.

During this presentation, ministry experts capped the radar’s maximum energy output at 170 kilowatts, which is well below the Czech legal limit.

According to Dolejší, this new information contradicts an April presentation at the Senate, when Defense Ministry expert Ladislav Košner characterized this same amount as the radar’s median output. The maximum output of the radar was mapped at 0.8–4.5 megawatts, or up to 26 times higher than the amount currently publicized by the ministry.

When questioned about this discrepancy, “Defense Ministry experts simply called the matter a misunderstanding,” Dolejší says. “Does that mean [Košner] presented senators with completely inaccurate information?”

Additionally, the April presentation alleged that the input of the entire radar base will be between 3 to 4 megawatts, while the radar itself will have an input of 1.2 megawatts. This, according to Dolejší, is another suspicious fact. “If this data is true, it means the government’s experts are trying to convince us that the [radar] has an energy force … of around 14 percent. In a car engine, this level reaches 30 percent.”

Questioning conclusions

Greenpeace is not the only organization criticizing the publicized government data regarding the radar’s possible health risks. Prompted by the requests of Referendum2007, a local civic group that advocates a public vote on radar construction, two radio-electricity experts from the Brno University of Technology (VUT) reviewed an August government document analyzing the radar’s possible health effects on the Brdy area population.

On Nov. 12, the VUT experts, Zbyněk Raida and Jiří Šebesta, announced that they’d found the study to be “seriously deficient” due to inaccurate data and flawed methodology. “As a whole, the work that went into this study can be considered very low-standard and topical,” Raida and Šebesta wrote in their final statement. “If a college student presented this study as his final thesis, it’s almost 100 percent certain that he would fail.”

The study’s biggest flaw, according to Raida and Šebesta, is its use of faulty entry data, which is not only inconsistent, but often completely inaccurate. “It’s impossible to formulate an accurate analysis based on the given entry data,” they write. “It’s bewildering that the authors of this study consistently use an inaccurate unit for … basic quantities. One can only infer that they don’t comprehend its physical significance.”

In response to Raida and Šebesta’s critique, the Defense Ministry explained that the government experts who conducted the analysis had access to classified data that could not be disclosed in the document’s public version.

When compiling the August study, “experts were working with technical information that was … given to them by the U.S. side,” says Defense Ministry spokeswoman Monika Machtová. “While the Czech Republic was happy to have this data at its disposal …, it unfortunately created a situation where some of the questions raised by the VUT critique could not be explained.”

To justify the questionable methodology used in the analysis, Tomáš Klvaňa, the government’s spokesman for the radar, explains that the August publication is only a preliminary report. “The VUT experts treated this report as a scientific study, which is a misunderstanding — the government never even had those ambitions,” he says. “The document should not be interpreted as a technical analysis, but as a hygienic report.”

Regardless of the technical inaccuracies publicized in the government’s reports, it is still clear that the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the radar will have no harmful effects on the population, says Chief Public Health Officer Michal Vít, who participated in the Marshall Islands expedition.

“This isn’t the only radar in the world — we have decades of experience with non-ionized radiation,” Klvaňa says. “There is no substantiated evidence that suggests that such an apparatus would be harmful to people’s health.”

Upon receiving the government’s response, Raida has distanced himself from his earlier claims. “The Defense and Health ministries have provided information that makes my earlier assertion passé,” he says. “It’s a subject I would rather not come back to.”