“RATS, BUGS, BOYS: ATTACK!”

Instead of using guns and bombs, let’s attack the ene­mies of free­dom with bugs, rats, and horny gay men.
That seems to be the sen­ti­ment behind a 1994 Air Force pro­posal, unearthed by bioweapons-​​watchers at the Sunshine Project.
The doc­u­ment — enti­tled “Harrassing, Annoying, and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals” — strings together a cou­ple of ideas for non-​​lethal agents that could mark an oppo­nent, tem­porar­ily change his behav­ior, or “attract annoy­ing crea­tures to an enemy posi­tion.“
Were any of these pro­pos­als ever approved? I doubt it. But, boy, do I love the idea of Pentagon pro­gram man­agers dream­ing up ways to use “sex attrac­tant chem­i­cals for bugs” as weapons. Or employ­ing a “‘sting/​attack me’ chem­i­cal that causes bees to attack.” Such an agent “would espe­cially effec­tive for infil­tra­tion routes,” the paper observes.
“Rodents and larger ani­mals would [also] be can­di­dates to be drawn to enemy posi­tions,” accord­ing to the pro­posal. So would other “sting­ing and bit­ing bugs.“
But as irri­tat­ing as a swarm of bees or rats might be, it’s noth­ing com­pared to the dis­trac­tion gen­er­ated by a man in heat. No won­der, then, that the Air Force doc­u­ment calls for “chem­i­cals that affect human behav­ior so that dis­ci­pline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected. One dis­taste­ful but com­pletely non-​​lethal exam­ple would be strong aphro­disi­acs, espe­cially if the chem­i­cal also caused homo­sex­ual behav­ior.“
If, for some rea­son, mil­i­tary sci­en­tists couldn’t come up with an effec­tive, sprayable Spanish Fly, well, there are still other pos­si­bil­i­ties to be explored. For instance: “a low tox­i­c­ity com­pound” that cre­ates “severe and last­ing hal­i­to­sis.“
Bad breath, in other words.
THERE’S MORE: As if sprays to induce homo­sex­ual dal­liances and rat attacks weren’t prob­lem­atic enough. In 1997, the Army let loose a pro­posal, call­ing for the “prepa­ra­tion of an ‘odor index’ to match known dis­agree­able odors to a spe­cific cul­ture, political/​religious group or geo­graph­i­cal region.“
The work looks lov­ing back on a 1944 project, “Who Me,” that gave French resis­tance fight­ers lead foil tubes, packed with chem­i­cals that pro­duced a “fecal odor.” But the plan back­fired, this doc­u­ment notes, “when it was found that peo­ple in many areas of the world do not find ‘fecal odor’ to be offen­sive.“
It’s one of a num­ber of Pentagon brain­storms, to try to tar­get cer­tain eth­nic or geo­graphic groups with non-​​lethal chem­i­cal weapons. The Sunshine Project details more here.
AND MORE: On the Defense Tech forum, reader DB drops some sci­ence on the poop-​​smell project.
AND MORE: These ideas “might not be so far away from real­ity as [they] might ini­tially seem,” the Sunshine Project’s Edward Hammond says in the forum.

January 6th, 2005 | Bizarro | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.