"US Air Force Looked at Spray To Turn Enemy Gay"

Dan Glaister, London Guardian

"Make love not war" may be the enduring slogan of anti-war campaigners but
in 1994 the US 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? And 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 in a CD-Rom
produced by the US military in 2000 and submitted to the National
Academy of Sciences in 2002. The documents show that $7.5m 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 several proposals for the military use of chemicals
that could be sprayed on to enemy positions. "One distasteful but
non-lethal example would be strong 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 some aerosol spray and change their
sexual behaviour is ludicrous."