Schneier on Security

Roger • June 12, 2006 7:42 AM

It’s odd that we got so many Wikipedia links, without any links to the Wikipedia article about this “weapon”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb
The 1994 report which gave rise to this was the response to a request for some totally off-the-wall speculation about possible nonlethal weapons, and out of three pages of wacky ideas, just one sentence was about the supposed homosexual aphrodisiac. Needless to say, this “gay bomb” was a three day wonder with the world’s press (in January 2005) — which ignored all the other notions, which were just as wacky but not as salacious.

Later in the same 3 page report, they acknowledged that the idea itself is pure sci-fi; no such materials are actually known. (Since then, bremelanotide has been identified as probably the first real aphrodisiac, but it isn’t even in the ball park of being effective enough to cause people to lose control of themselves, even if administered directly, and has no effect on sexual orientation.)

So if this little saga tells us anything, it is what a bunch of careless sleazes some journalists are.

On the other hand, there has been serious experimentation with psychotropic nonlethal chemical weapons. BZ was already mentioned above. BZ, which was originally studied in the late 40s and 50s, does actually seem to be close to ideal for a nonlethal weapon. It has a very high therapeutic index (~2,000), making the risk of overdose very low; the effects wear off within a couple of days; and the main effects are confusion, listlessness and automatic behaviours, rendering the afflicted largely harmless with a minimum of distress. (Unfortunately a major side effect is heat stress, which can be serious in hot weather.) It is almost a pity that it is listed on schedule 2 of the CWC; it seems far more humane than conventional weapons.

Roger • June 13, 2006 7:48 PM

@AG:
I think your point was probably that they are made to be used against civilians. If so, I disagree. Many weapons have been used against civilians, and a few — fortunately, a very few — have even been designed to do so. But the great majority have not. Your list, even though selective, demonstrates this:
* V2: one of the few indeed designed specifically for use against civilians; but
* Firebombs: originally designed for use against fortifications, used against both armed forces and civilians;
* Nuclear bombs: while obviously intended to shock the Japanese into surrender with their immense destructive power, there was long debate over targeting, and purely military targets were only reluctantly and ultimately rejected on the grounds that delivery could not be guaranteed to be sufficiently accurate. In the end, both bombs were targeted at military installations inside cities of considerable military significance. During the Cold War, the overwhelming majority of nuclear weapons were targeted at military installations.
* Chemical weapons: so far to date, the overwhelming majority of victims have been soldiers.

A less selective list makes it clearer: high explosive artillery shells, machine guns, tanks, flamethrowers, bounding fragmentation mines, armour piercing bullets, etc etc. All designed for military use.

Partly this is because civilised society abhors the targeting of civilians in war — with certain exceptions such as arms factories, government offices, etc. But also, there is little need to design new weapons to target civilians; the old ones still work (consider the Interahamwe machetes in Rwanda.)