CNN January 14, 2005
SHOW: ANDERSON COOPER 360 DEGREES 7:00 PM EST
COLLINS: Elaine Quijano tonight. Elaine, thanks.
360 next, an avalanche near Park City, Utah. Rescue operations under way right now. We're bringing you the latest as it unfolds.
Sex, bombs, and angry rats. The Pentagon dreams up some creative ways of incapacitating enemy troops. Wait till you hear the details.
Also tonight, Bush unplugged. The president shares a confession and a regret.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART 1")
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They'll be here any minute!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Not to worry, not to worry. We are now armed with mighty joints.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mighty joints?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE), let's go, (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Quickly, after them!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've got to -- we've got to...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get moving. We've got to stay loose, you know? Let it cool. Let the coolness get into our vertebrae.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go, men! Go northward. You go southward. I'm going to walk here around in a circle.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COLLINS: I don't know how you can't laugh. Mel Brooks, incapacitating opposing armies in his movie "History of the World, Part 1."
As far out as that weapon was, it seems to fall right in step with some proposals for the military. According to one magazine, researchers were tinkering with some bizarre weapons ideas. Now, we want to be clear, these ideas were rejected long ago. So think of this as an entertaining diversion of what ended up in the trash bin.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) COLLINS (voice-over): Consider modern combat. Could an enemy love itself to death? According to the Sunshine Project, a group which tracks research on chem- and bioweapons, the Pentagon has reviewed plans to develop various nonlethal weapons, including a so- called gay bomb, an aphrodisiac weapon to make enemy soldiers so irresistible to each other, morale would plummet.
Other weapons ideas dating from 1994 at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, unleashing wasps or rats on the enemy. And a chemical to cause such severe halitosis, it would gross out the enemy.
The U.S. Marines, issuing a statement today, saying ideas are submitted from many sources. Quote, "None of the systems described in that proposal have been developed."
JOHN PIKE, DIRECTOR, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: It's no surprise that they would be looking at all kinds of ideas to how to incapacitate enemies on the battlefield. Some of them might actually work. And the problem is that in developing any of these weapons systems, you know in advance that half of them are bad ideas. You just don't know in advance which half are the bad ones.
COLLINS: One of the bad ones predates the psychedelic '60s, the era of make love, not war. In the '50s, according to globalsecurity.org, the Army's Chemical Corps launched a project called Psychochemical Agents and tested the hippie drug LSD. The idea was to release it from airplanes and make the enemy hallucinate. It didn't work, and LSD was dropped.
Can you picture the U.S. striking back with bats? Project X-Ray was launched during World War II. The military's idea was to attack using bats wearing tiny explosives.
PIKE: Under the theory that when the bats went home to roost inside Japanese houses, that the firebombs would go off, and be able to burn down Japanese housing. By the time the atomic bombs were dropped, they still hadn't figured out how to make it work, and then the war ended.
COLLINS: Pike says it's impossible to know what the military is actually testing right now. But he says hope springs eternal the military will come up with ways to incapacitate the enemy without having to kill them.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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