“Make love not war” may be the enduring slogan of anti-war campaigners, but in 1994 the United States Air Force produced its own variation on the philosophy. What if it could release a chemical that would make an opposing army’s soldiers think more about the physical attributes of their comrades-in-arms than the threat posed by the enemy? Thus the “gay bomb” was born.
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 on a US military CD produced in 2000 and submitted to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002.
Documents show that $7,5million was requested to develop the weapon. The documents released to the Sunshine Project — under a freedom of information request titled Harassing, Annoying and Bad Guy Identifying Chemicals — includes proposals for the military use of chemicals that could be sprayed on enemy positions. “One distasteful but non-lethal example would be aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behaviour,” says the proposal from the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.
The Pentagon did not deny that the proposal had been made: “The department of defence is committed to identifying, researching and developing non-lethal weapons that will support our men and women in uniform.”
Aaron Belkin, director of the University of California’s Michael Palm Centre, which studies the issue of gays in the military, said: “The idea that you could submit someone to aerosol spray and change their sexual behaviour is ludicrous.” — Â