Is there really anyone who somehow denies the evidence of smoking causes harm? I think a better example here would have been cellphones causing cancer. That's still up in the air(though personally, I'm assuming that cellphones are harmful and do my best to keep mine a couple of inches away from my body..... just in case).
There is no debate that smoking causes harm. However assume for the sake of argument that smoking increases one's chances of getting cancer from 10% to 90%. If someone smokes, then gets cancer you cannot definitively link that specific case of cancer to the smoking. When you have a large sample, you can demonstrate the link, but you could still only say X% of people who smoke and got cancer got cancer from smoking; you cannot say who the X% are.
Ah, okay. I think I get that. So OP was saying that we'll never know if anyone got killed by the leaked cables, but someone probably did. I'm not sure I agree, but now I understand. I think some operations may have needed to be changed up a bit, but in the world of espionage... yeah, kinda hard to say exactly what particular action leads to someone getting discovered and killed. It's usually a chain of events, all important in their own way leading up to the conclusion.
That said, I think the path of smoking tobacco --> illness/failing health is more clear than leaked-info --> death.
There is a theoretical way they could cause problems, though, which needs more investigation. DNA can conduct. It may be possible for DNA molecules to act as antennas and have a current induced in them from electromagnetic waves passing through.
Some researches believe that part of the mechanism used to detect and repair damage to our DNA involves sending a current through the DNA and looking for anomalies. Externally induced currents could interfere with that damage detection and repair.
There are some pretty amazing and subtle things going on in our cells.
Note that I'm not presenting the above link as absolute proof but merely as something that causes one to think about it. It is not 100% clear cellphones are safe. Maybe 99.999999%, but not 100%.
