Potential > Actuality

Occasionally, there comes along a target so dumb, so slow-moving, and so worthy of being derided, that every comic angle that you don't exploit will inevitably seem superior to the one you actually take. And this preposterously offensive proposal, which tells us so much about the link between masculinity, stereotypes, and militarism in the minds of military planners, requires us to optimize our derision. So, no, I wont be telling you that this isn't a proposal I can get behind, and I wont be telling you that the weapon, in fact, turned out to be techno, nor will I tell you that the lab got the idea from a movie they saw in an adult theater in the Mission district. No, my friends, however long and hard I, uh, thought about this, I could never ever mock this more savagely than it mocks itself.

With no further ado:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

"The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviwing the documents.

Hat tip to realclear politics.