In 1994—five years after the Berlin Wall fell—Pentagon scientists at Wright Laboratory in Ohio officially proposed developing a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other, requesting $7.5 million ($15 million today) to figure out if they could weaponize homosexuality. This wasn't some forgotten relic from the paranoid 1950s; this was post-Cold War military thinking at its finest, occurring simultaneously with the implementation of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," creating a spectacular institutional contradiction where one branch of the military was discharging gay service members for "undermining unit cohesion" while another branch was trying to undermine enemy cohesion by making them gay.
The proposal—buried in a document wonderfully titled "Harassing, Annoying and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals"—also featured other gems like halitosis bombs, flatulence weapons, and chemicals to attract angry wasps, proving that when you build an institutional machine designed to produce insane weapons, it keeps producing insane weapons long after the war that justified its existence has ended. The “Gay Bomb” never advanced beyond the proposal stage, but its documented existence in properly filed, stamped, and preserved government archives serves as a perfect monument to what happens when unlimited budgets meet limited common sense, reminding us that somewhere, right now, someone with a security clearance is probably proposing something equally absurd that will make us laugh in 2055—if we're lucky enough to see it declassified.
Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?
-Daniel P. Douglas
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