Dumb idea bombs

There's been a sort of half urban legend, half meme rolling around the blogosphere that, after more than a week of ignoring it I suddenly have something to say about.

Choosing at near random (because I loved her title) here's how Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors introduces the topic:

Who’s Afraid of the Big Gay Bomb?

According to this report from the local CBS affiliate in San Francisco, an Air Force lab in Ohio proposed in 1994 that the Defense Department develop a “Gay Bomb,” a hormonal weapon intended to ”turn” all enemy soldiers into homosexuals who would be “more interested in sex than in fighting.”  The proposal failed.

She said it here.

Pretty much everybody (or everybody I've read) has taken one of two lines on this: 1) if true it was motivated by a pretty wretched, uninformed sort of homophobia and/or 2) what do you expect from the military? Both are absolutely excellent points (though on #2 if my tax dollars must be spent on weapons development at all I have an expectation that it would be spent intelligently by non-stupid, post-adolescent researchers.)

But rather than credulously accept the story because it confirms too many of my preconceptions I'd like to call somebody's bluff: by 1994 cognitive psychology was sufficiently advanced that... pretty much anyone who could read a Discover magazine understands that the human brain, limbic system, and endocrine system is sufficiently complex and redundant to make such a specific behavioral alteration, and in particular *only* such an alteration pretty, um, implausible.

I mean look at the breakdown of requirements:
- An dispersible agent of some sort that works from a distance.
- That alters the brain *just enough* to changes someone's sexual orientation (assuming they weren't already gay, of course)
- While not altering it enough that they *don't mind*
- So that they'll be demoralized and not want to fight
- And even if the did want to fight they'd instead feel uncontrollably compelled to have sex with each other.
- That would have to also overcome the standard post-orgasmic male refractory period
- And the all-too-common problem men have with premature ejaculation
- So they couldn't just give each other 30-second quickies every couple of hours and then keep on fighting
- Even when our guys, *with guns,* show up to kill or capture them
- That could be defended against by our guys so they didn't start uncontrollably having sex with each other *or their enemies) if the wind changed (e.g. gas masks?)
- That the other guys wouldn't be just as likely to have (thus ruling out gas masks.)

Oh yeah, and

- That would be easier to develop and deploy than a simpler weapon that made opponents laugh uncontrollably
- Oh wait, I think they might be testing it on me right this second!

I'm not saying the story's a *complete* urban legend just because it's too good to fact-check. But even if such a program was proposed, and even if it came as a directive from the fevered brain of an overzealous Congressional backbencher on a committee with relevant oversight, I just don't see it ever getting past even the pre-Windows-95 PowerPoint stage before it, well, bombed.