Thanks to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the chemical and biological weapons watchdog group, the Sunshine Project, has uncovered an American military project that never came to fruition: the gay bomb.

According to the BBC, the military “envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale.”

The catalog of other bizarre weapons listed in the 1994 proposal that the military ultimately did not create include a chemical that would encourage wasps or agitated rats to attack enemy troops, a weapon that would render human skin intolerably sensitive to sunlight, a chemical that would induce “severe and lasting halitosis,” and a weapon that, in the BBC’s polite language, would “simulate flatulence in enemy ranks.”

The BBC tartly quoted one of the official and ethnocentric reasons the flatulence bomb was scrapped: “people in many areas of the world do not find faecal odour offensive, since they smell it on a regular basis.”  
  
The bigoted heteronormativity of the gay bomb and the curiously offensive nature of the proposals do provide an odd comic relief against the grim backdrop of the American military’s most recent incidents in Abu Ghraib, other prisoner detention centers in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in Guantanamo Bay. The military might, however, devote less time pondering the tactical validity of flatulence and more time creating strategies of reconstruction for the nations that America has further destabilized.    

Mimi Hanaoka