Better Living Through Chemical Warfare

by Garry Reed

Keen-eyed observers of the Mad Scientist wing of the American military research complex have noted that the Pentagon is at it again.

With so many billions of taxbucks tied up in building last century's mega-weaponry, such as fighters and bombers and aircraft carriers and Humvees sprouting grenade launchers and Stinger missiles, one would think there would be nothing left over for dabbling in the development of "non-lethal" esoteric futuristic Weapons of Mass Derision.

One would be wrong.

Last summer it was the Gay Bomb. Reports from CBS3.com in Berkeley described experiments with a form of chemical warfare designed to turn rampaging enemy soldiers into raging homosexuals after exposure to a hormone bomb, causing them to jump each others bones and forget all about fighting.

Gay groups, quite naturally, were outraged. Turning whole armies of men into homosexuals could cause their entire protected class to loose its politically advantageous minority status.

Other Machiavellian machinations, dating back to the 1990s, according to Wikipedia, have included a Halitosis Bomb, Sweating Bomb, and Flatulence Bomb, causing some to speculate whether these concepts were actually the work of top-secret government labs or snickering adolescent males.

Then came word from Wired in January of this year about a Smell Of Fear Bomb. The idea here is to isolate the pheromone produced by the human body when the human in the human body reacts to great peril, bottle it, turn it into a chemical weapon and drop it on enemy soldiers, thereby causing entire divisions to turn tail and run like the British at the Battle of New Orleans.

So now, operating on the principal that where there's smoke there's more smoke, a crack team of clandestine libertarian investihackers set about extracting the following data from heavily redacted documents obtained through the little-known Freedom of Information About Really Stupid Wasteful Military Boondoggles Act.

Here's what they purportedly found.

The Disco Detonation Device was developed in the 1970s. American soldiers, attacking at night, would be bathed in powerful disco strobe lights. The enemy, seeing them appearing and disappearing in sudden rapid jerky surreal motions, wouldn't know what to shoot at. Simultaneously, the enemy would be bombarded with rapid-fire arcade video game laser lights simulating an intergalactic firefight from Space Invaders, further confusing foreign combatants unfamiliar with American snickering adolescent male culture.

In other experiments, an attempt was made to develop a Hunger Bomb. The idea was simple – make the enemy too hungry to fight. In secret tests, bomb bursts above the heads of volunteer American troops released chemical molecules that produced powerful olfactory scents that simulated turkey dinner with all the fixin's and Mom's apple pie. Unfortunately, the tests always proved inconclusive. Every time it was tried the molecule cloud drifted back into the researchers' bunker and they immediately broke for lunch.

Inevitably, however, Cal Tech and MIT trained scientists have repeatedly returned to the Snickering Adolescent Male Protocol.

The Scatological Warfare Research Center at Doniker AFB has been working on what they call the Uridef Bomb, a typical military acronym for Urination-Defecation. Extract of Beer sprayed over a battlefield will make soldiers stop fighting and pee ("you can't buy beer bombs, you can only rent them"). This will be combined with the chemical constituents of refried beans and jalapeno peppers, creating an urgent need to defecate. This attack will also be carefully coordinated with Psyops who will air drop toilet paper, thereby enhancing the urgency. In a devious stratagem, the tissues are impregnated with itching powder to further discomfit the enemy.

(The tissues have been nicknamed "The Pentagon Papers.")

It's been noted, however, that a TP party with itching powder won't work on Middle Eastern peasant armies since those people have no clue about toilet paper.

Unfortunately, a libertarian proposal to minimize the possibility of constant warfare by adopting a noninterventionist foreign policy was summarily rejected by the United Liberal-Neocon War Party.