Radio One's Scott Mills and his team have been having a lot of fun with the news that the Pentagon considered a "gay bomb". This is a theoretical chemical weapon which makes the opposing forces suddenly irresistable to each other, putting them off their...ahem...stroke.
In fact, I was suspicious of another "Big Kidney" spoof story here and could only, at first, find mention of it in rather dubious places. However, the Guardian reported on it today. But it appears that it was only a rather loose idea:
Far from being the product of conspiracy theorists, documents released to a biological weapons watchdog in Austin, Texas confirm that the US military did investigate the idea. It was included in a CD-Rom produced by the US military in 2000 and submitted to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. The documents show that $7.5m was requested to develop the weapon.
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I reckon that somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon there is an Office of Extreme Planning where they consider just about anything that has even the remotest chance of being of use, so as to make sure that they get there before the enemy.
ReplyDeleteMore seriously, I'm sure this all emanates from the post-Vietnam crisis of confidence in the US military, where they started to wonder if they were fighting war the wrong way (with, you know, guns and stuff) and whether they could harness all that hippy power that seemed to have beaten them at home.
War, sadly, is a dirty business. If you're going to bomb people, you're still best using high explosive, shrapnel and prosperous.
Thanks Tom - that's an interesting observation about Vietnam/hippies.
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