George Michael last week at Wembley? A half-liter watermelon-sake martini? Neither. The gay bomb was a $7.5 million dollar Air Force chemical weapon project proposed in 1994. Here it is as told by CBS channel 5 local news in San Francisco. (Note that the TV guys misspelled “soldiers” “subsequently” and “irresistible” in the original. What was it Christmas yesterday?)
A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.
Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”
Edward Hammond, of Berkeley’s Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.
As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”
The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.
“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviewing the documents.
“The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay,” explained Hammond.
The Pentagon told CBS 5 that the proposal was made by the Air Force in 1994.
That’s just the top half of the story. The full version includes a video report that features the Sunshine Project’s Hammond detailing how the document trail would never have existed if the genius plan had been as hastily rejected as Pentagon officials say it was. Hammond thinks it was batted around for years.
The second-best part of this story—after the fact of its being reported—was choosing an image to post with it here. Runners-up after the jump.