A “gay bomb” made in America

The Pentagon sought in 1994 to build a bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.
US officials say the idea was quickly dismissed.
Edward Hammond, of the Sunshine Project, claim the gay bomb was still considered in 2001 and 2002.

New York. “Make love not war”. Scientists at the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory tried to get money to develop their own version of the slogan. In 1994, the lab requested $7,5 million to build a “gay bomb” with powerful chemicals that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting. On Friday June 15 2007, the Pentagon confirmed it had considered the idea but said it had rejected it soon after. “The army’s own records show that this is not the case, said in an interview Edward Hammond, the man who found about the “gay bomb”. In 2000, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate distributed a promotional CD-ROM to government officials to demonstrate the role of non-lethal weapons. And the “gay bomb” was included”.

Hammond used the Freedom of Information Act in December 2004 to obtain the laboratory’s documents about the project. He adds that the “gay bomb” was also included in the non-lethal weapons program the military leaders submitted to the National Academy of Science in 2001.

The “gay bomb” was mentioned in a research into what the Air Force Laboratory called “harassing, annoying and “bad guy”-identifying chemicals. Scientist were trying to develop chemicals that could be “sprayed onto enemy positions” and “attract annoying creatures”. The military papers mentioned that “stinging and biting bugs” and “larger animals would be candidates to be drawn to the enemy positions”.

The Wright laboratory envisioned a “gay bomb” that would purportedly turn heterosexual soldiers into homosexuals, causing what the proposal’s authors called a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” blow to morale. “To my knowledge, there is no such chemical that could turn an hetero sexual into an homosexual, Edward Hammond said. And if an aphrodisiac was that strong, it would already have been sold by major pharmaceutical companies”.

In 1999, Mr Hammond founded the Sunshine Project with Jan van Aken, a German biologist. Since then, both men have tracked chemical and biological weapons. “We should not forget that there is an ongoing research into weapons using narcotics, Mr van Aken said in an interview from Hamburg. There are programs in the United States, Czech Republic and Russia. We can exclude that this is happening in Switzerland and Germany. But we do not know what is going on in other countries”.

Jean-Cosme Delaloye

A similar and French version of this story was published on June 16 2007 in 24heures and Tribune de Genève in Switzerland.

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