Stench Warfare nytimes.com
[ oops, I lied, this one is too good to resist. The last last idea of the day ]
By STEPHEN MIHM
Armor-piercing shells, laser-guided weaponry and cruise missiles are all well and good, but as any military expert can tell you, they don't count for much in urban plazas crowded with civilians or inside buildings filled with terrorists or in any of the many other complicated combat zones of the 21st century. One possible solution? Stench warfare.
The search for smells that can be used against enemy combatants -- by making them throw up, become dizzy and possibly flee the battle arena -- has become a serious business. Most efforts now under way fall under the aegis of the Defense Department's obscure Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, which began its quest for the ultimate adversarial aroma a few years ago. Now it's seeing results.
The effort was spearheaded at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research institute based in Philadelphia. Pamela Dalton, a resident scientist, rose to the challenge of developing ''psychologically toxic'' odors -- smells that would cause sniffers to lose their appetites for aggression. But this challenge came with a catch: the military wanted an equal-opportunity odor, something offensive to everyone, everywhere, and not just to members of certain cultural groups.
And so the search began, with Dalton focusing her attention on odors that might prompt a universal human reaction. ''We brought in food and let it ferment and rot; people donated animal carcasses, blood and other things,'' she explains. Dalton analyzed these odors, reducing them to their component chemicals. Other smells, most notably that of human excrement, could be synthesized from known chemical ingredients. (''Someone had already done the dirty work,'' Dalton says.) She and other colleagues then tested these on a number of volunteers.
In the end, Dalton arrived at a chemical cocktail containing the olfactory essences of two universally despised odors. The first, which she describes as ''rotting flesh -- squirrels, people, steak, a mixture of all that,'' left volunteer test subjects begging for mercy. The second was a variation on that old favorite, human excrement, a scent Dalton describes as reminiscent of ''the worst outhouse you've ever stumbled on.'' Put these together, add ''a hint of sulfur'' and a dash or two of some mystery ingredients and voila! Dalton created a scent so foul, so nasty, that she informally labeled it ''decomposing body lying on freshly laid human waste.''
How to deliver a smell like that to the enemy is another question altogether. As Dalton says, ''Deploying an odor is a little bit more complicated than spraying your room with an air freshener.'' And it's a little bit more hazardous too. Which is why the ball is now back in the Army's court, as military scientists search for a way to weaponize it. |
