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01/22/2005: "Your Tax Dollars @ Work"

You'd think we had seen the pinnacle of Dr. Strangelove-style military schemes with the 1957 British plan for a seven-ton plutonium land mine kept warm and operative by a flock of chickens. But noooo. To go totally off the deep end, you need the brain trust of superpower. In 1994, officials of the Pentagon seriously considered a proposal to develop a chemical agent that would inspire homosexual urges in enemy troops. Declassified documents recently released to The Sunshine Project under the Freedom of Information Act, contain a proposal from a laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for funding of non-lethal "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals." "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior," reads the document, which proposes a number of other "non-lethal" chemical weapons, among them one that would inflict "severe and lasting halitosis" in enemy combatants. Now, the Pentagon has confirmed that these were real proposals, but insists that they was dismissed out of hand. "It was not taken seriously," Marine Capt. Daniel McSweeney told the Boston Herald. "It was not considered for further development." McSweeney's assertion would be reassuring if true. But sadly it's not. The plan received further consideration as recently as 2001, when it was submitted to the National Academies of Science, the nation's pre-eminent scientific advisory organization, for review.

From Good Morning, Silicon Valley