Cluster Headaches: Inside the US Army's Would-Be Mind-Control Bombs

It's been the Holy Grail of American defense for generations: War without death. Buying into this oxymoron requires either a stubborn faith in the moral compasses of those in power or an ample dosing of, say, 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate, the military incapaciting agent commonly known as BZ. Or both.

But there was nevertheless a time when the US took the idea of deathless war to its then-logical endpoint by actively seeking to not just minimize battlefield casualities but to completely do away with the notion of dying in combat. The dust was settling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the boys were coming home (at least those who made it out alive), and all the carnage and horror of global warring were at long last shrivelling into history's ditches like a slug in salt. Americans were tired of death. Done with it, even.

Of course, conflict is seemingly unavoidable. So if wartime death, and thus lethal weapons, was suddenly passé by 1945, how were weapons researchers and developers with the Department of Defense to go about setting the theatre of war to stun, not death? If all the just wars of the future were to do away with death, what sort of weaponry would provide the luxury of an otherwise nontraumatizing means of quashing enemies without slaughtering them?

Easy: Drugs. Specifically, nasty stuff like sarin, SV, PCP, and incapacititating compounds like BZ. This shift toward mind- and behavioral-control became the preserve of the Army Chemical Warfare Service, whose soldiers by the end of WWII "believed they were proprietors of an awesome weapon with yet unrealized potentials," as Reid Kirby writes in Paradise Lost: The Psycho Agents. The trick was figuring out just how to drop all tomorrow's psycho-bombs. How do you covertly dose a mid- to full-size enemy brigade?

The army had been tinkering on a few potential vehicles—small-arm grenades, smoke machines, flying spray tanks and ballistic-missile warheads, among others--for administering the goods. But only two--the 175-pound M44 generator cluster and the 750-pound M43 BZ cluster bomb—would reach mass production. Both were designed to be dropped from the air, spraying out bomblets on descent. Both utilized BZ.

It's called "Buzz: for a reason. BZ is odorless and virtually undetectable. Unless you were standing directly next to the M44 cluster bomb (pictured at right, full schematic here), which could carry 40 gallons of BZ; unless you were in close enough proximity to either the M44's main vessel or one of its 126 bomblets to get a good look at those billowing white plumes of mystery smoke, there's little chance you'd have known you were about to go full-on crazy for a while.

Once it takes hold, the Buzz can be long-lasting and beyond disorienting. Sometimes for days on end, subjects dosed with BZ remain locked in a stupor that at turns stokes hallucinations, auto-phantom behaviors (picking, plucking, stripping naked, etc.), anxiety and terror and, perhaps most crucially, a blotting out of certain memories of the trip, which not surprisingly could be marked by a near-total loss of willpower.

It is a hell of a drug. Of all the far-flung cocktails and chemicals coloring the US military's sordid history of drugs experimentation and mind-control projects on unwitting and/or exploited research subjects, BZ holds a particularly grim place.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.