The Dumbest Military Projects

Added: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]Since the dawn of time, humanity has had an unhealthy obsession with finding creative ways to destroy his fellow man.

[00:00:08]And today, in the 20126th year of our correct and only Lord and Savior, there are much more ways to wipe someone off the face of the earth than there are ways to make love. War isn't simply about fighting. No, no, no, no, no. That would be far too boring. It's about taking the full power of human engineering and creativity and asking the question, can this actually work?

[00:00:35]And occasionally that leads to breakthroughs. Weapons that are terrifying, sure, but at least they make sense and work. They do the thing that they were meant to do. But sometimes someone somewhere for no reason at all has an idea so aggressively detached from reality it should have been laughed right out of the drawing room. Shut down and never spoken of ever again.

[00:01:05]Instead it got fully funded. Sometimes Bill and expectedly failed spectacularly in the most predictable of ways.

[00:01:16]So, let's talk about the dumbest ever military projects.

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[00:04:17]So, let's start with an explosive one.

[00:04:22]Anti-tank dogs.

[00:04:25]Welcome to World War II. Desperation was high, resources not so much, and manpower even less. And someone in the Soviet Union saw man's best friend and in their infinite Soviet wisdom decided that the best way to deal with the German tanks that were knocking at their door was to strap 10 kg of explosives onto a [ __ ] dog and then attach a little wooden lever sticking out the top of him and then sending that dog sprinting straight at the enemy, specifically the enemy tanks.

[00:05:03]The idea being that the dog would get under the tank, the lever on the dog's back would hit the underside of the tank, triggering the explosives, and boom, tank gone, alongside the poor bastard dog. The whole thing actually started back in the 30s at a Soviet military dog school, but it didn't really kick off until 1941 when Germany decided to pull what we like to call a dick move. And suddenly everyone was scrambling for a solution to the German tank problem. So as an avid dog trainer myself, I was very very interested in how you actually train a dog to suicide charge an enemy tank. And it turns out it's very simple. you starve it and then place food under a tank, specifically a Soviet T34 tank, which was one of their own tanks since they didn't exactly have a whole enemy tank to use for the training. And then they repeated the process over and over until the dog learned that crawling under tanks equals food. They also threw in some gunfire and explosives to desensitize the dogs in the process. And congratulations, you've got yourself your very own four-legged guided missile with no understanding whatsoever of what's about to happen. There was a tiny tiny tiny little miscalculation with this entire plan. However, the dogs were trained exclusively with Soviet tanks, which ran on diesel, while the German tanks that the dogs were supposed to attack ran on gasoline. Basically, no difference to a human, sure, but to a dog with their sense of smell. That's the difference between a hunk of metal and a food dispenser. So when these dogs were finally deployed into actual combat with real and much louder gunfire explosions and chaos, well things went exactly as you think they did. The dogs all started to panic. And because dogs are loyal, they would run straight to the Soviet lines to the safety of all of the familiar scents. Out of the first batch of 30 dogs, six of them detonated inside the Soviet trenches, killing or injuring everybody in there.

[00:07:38]And three of the dogs were actually captured by the Germans. The rest of them, well, they just ran away.

[00:07:49]They just scattered and ran away as far as they could. Some got shot before they could even get close. Others just simply failed to trigger or they had to be dealt with by their handlers when they came back to Soviet lines strapped with a bunch of explosives on their back. The others that did fully get away, well, they just wandered the battlefield or the [ __ ] forest or whatever for perhaps the rest of the war, creating one hell of a hazard for literally [ __ ] everyone.

[00:08:24]Oh, look, a dog. Oh, he's a good boy. To be completely fair, there were reports of some success. One story from the Battle of Kursk claims that 16 dogs managed to destroy 12 German tanks. And that sounds very impressive until you realize that it's the Soviet Union we're talking about. They absolutely love their propaganda and just making up numbers that make them sound amazing.

[00:08:53]And they later even claimed that over 300 German tanks were all destroyed using this method.

[00:09:01]Just like Vicil Zaitv totally killed over 200 enemy soldiers and most of them were officers. Mhm. Yes, that totally happened.

[00:09:12]Also, for a lot of people that have been asking for vic for Madlads for a very long time and are wondering why I haven't done it, that's why. But in reality, the program was an absolute disaster. And by 1943, the project was quietly abandoned and the dogs were reassigned to roles that actually made sense, like mind detection or message carriers. You know, things that didn't turn them into adorable sprinting liabilities. Now, let's move from the Soviets and go and see if the United States had any better animal related ideas.

[00:09:56]Bat bombs.

[00:09:59]Bat bombs.

[00:10:02]Bat bombs was a plan made up by a Pennsylvania dentist of all things named Little S. Adams, who on the literal day of Peril Harbor visited the Carl'sbad Caverns, absolutely beautiful place, by the way. And he looked at the thousands of bats flying around and he thought to himself, "Man, nature sure is magical. I wonder what would happen if we strapped bombs to it.

[00:10:32]Peak American mindset. And somehow that absolutely [ __ ] mental idea made it all the way to the White House.

[00:10:41]Roosevelt then read it, approved it, and got it funded. So what was the actual plan? Well, you would take a bunch of Mexican free-tailed bats, call them your cute little caped crusaders. You would then cool them down by literally refrigerating them until they entered hibernation mode. And then you would stuff over a thousand of them into a bomb-shaped casing after gluing each bat with about 15 g of nap. You would then fly over Japan at dawn and drop the bat bomb. The bat bomb would then open and mad air. The bats would all wake up and then scatter all across the city where they would then nest in the wooden roofs and attics of all of the buildings because at this time Japan's buildings were about 90% all made of wood because haha broke ass [ __ ] And then while all of the bats are nesting in all of the buildings, their timers would go off and boom, Japan is on fire.

[00:11:47]Sounds stupid enough that it might actually work. And you know what? It actually did, but not as controlled as they had hoped for. Because on May the 15th, 1943, when the first major field test was happening, everything was going according to plan until a bunch of the bats managed to escape too early. And because bats are bats, they all flew off screeching in all directions and started to burn down the entire military base.

[00:12:21]The hanger, the control tower, the barracks, the fuel storage, and in some cosmic sense of humor, the [ __ ] general's car. Fortunately, no one died, but the military basically couldn't do anything but watch as their weapons project and their own facility went up in flames. So, after that little accident, they said, "Fuck you and [ __ ] your [ __ ] bats." And they handed the project over to the Navy, who then handed it over to the Marines. And the best part is after an actual proper test at Dougway Proving Ground in Utah, the bats worked perfectly. They spread out hidden buildings and within an hour, the entire fake town that the military had built was burnt to the ground. It was relatively cheap as well because they only spent around $2 million on this project and they were planning to deploy 1 million bats by mid1944.

[00:13:23]But then the Manhattan Project came around and all of the funding and priority went straight to that because let's be honest, the Manhattan Project was a little more effective. Continuing the list of animal related weapons and again Japan being the target. Please welcome the absolute [ __ ] Scooby-Doo episode that was Operation Fantasia. It was pitched in 1943 by Ed Salinger, a businessman who had run an import export business in Tokyo before the war. He looked at Japanese folklore and thought to himself, "Yeah, I could absolutely weaponize that." And he sold the idea to the OSS as the ultimate SCOP. Basically, scare the Japanese people who believed in Kitsune. Today, it would be considered the OC of many people who just didn't fully commit to being a [ __ ] furry. But in the past, it was a mystical fox spirit that could shapeshift, glow in the dark, and it was considered an omen that something terrible was about to happen. So logically, the next step was to make it real. The first version of the plan was already extremely [ __ ] stupid.

[00:14:48]flying foxshaped glowing balloons all over Japan at night while undercover agents on the ground ran around blowing fox whistles and pretending that they were possessed.

[00:15:02]To be completely fair, that is a lot better than my idea of just shoving nine foxtail butt plugs up someone's ass, filling them full of amphetamine, and then just unleashing them on the town's folk. But anyway, that somehow wasn't autistic enough. And version 2.0 0 was to actually capture foxes from China and Australia and then cover them with glow-in-the-dark radiumbased paint and then let them loose around Japanese villages at night.

[00:15:30]They tested this on American soil at Rock Creek Park, Washington DC using about 30 glowing foxes and it worked somewhat. They managed to scare some people in the area, but the foxes just started to lick and rub off the paint after some time because radium paint isn't exactly durable. Then in a separate 1945 test in Chesapeake Bay, they tried dumping painted foxes into the water to simulate a sea drop. The foxes swam just fine, but the glow-in-the-dark paint just instantly washed off, leaving you with a bunch of wet but completely normall looking foxes. Also, fun fact, radium paint is extremely radioactive.

[00:16:21]So, you now had a bunch of radioactive foxes running around contaminating entire neighborhoods. So before a single glowing fox could ever make it anywhere near Japan, the entire project was scrapped. Now after multiple countries were all busy weaponizing animal cruelty, Germany looked at it and thought, "Okay, let's remove the animal part and let's just try building something very, very, very big and also very, very, very retarded."

[00:16:55]The Paris gun. This absolute monster of a machine was built during World War I by a company called Crop, who were the biggest weapons manufacturers in Europe at the time. It was designed by Fritz Rousenberger and it was officially called the Kaiser Wilhelm gun, but everybody just called it what it was actually used for, the Paris gun, because its entire purpose was to set as far away as possible and shell the ever living [ __ ] out of Paris like a long-d distanceance middle finger. You see, by 1917, the Western Front had turned into a giant, miserable ship pile of a stalemate. Nobody was really moving, and everybody was stuck in the trenches just chucking artillery at each other, hoping that something would change. So, Germany said, "Fuck Paris in particular. Let's bomb them from so far away that they can't do [ __ ] about it." And when I say far away, I mean it. This [ __ ] thing could hit targets at over 130 km away, which by today's standards doesn't sound that far, but this is World War I we're talking about. That was [ __ ] unprecedented at the time. So, how the hell do you even build something like this? Well, first you take a naval gun, which is already [ __ ] massive, and then you stretch the barrel out to about 34 m long, and then you stuff it with specially designed shells that were both enormous and somehow underwhelming at the same time. You see, each shell weighed about 106 kilos, but it only contained about 7 kilos worth of explosives.

[00:18:47]So, you were basically firing a very large hunk of metal that had slight anger issues. The funny part was how the thing actually fired. It launched shells at around 1,600 m/s. And those shells would travel for about 3 minutes, just hanging there in the air and reaching about 40 km in altitude, which is the stratosphere. By the way, Germany soft invented space travel just to [ __ ] bomb Paris.

[00:19:23]I respect that actually. But because the shells were up there in the air for so long, they actually had to take into account the rotation of the Earth when they were aiming. Not wind, not distance, the actual rotation of the [ __ ] planet. Starting on March the 23rd, 1918, they fired it from a hidden position in a forest near Creppy On Leon. No sound, no planes, just some random ass 106 kg shell dropping from the sky from seemingly [ __ ] nowhere.

[00:19:58]And people in Paris had absolutely no idea what the [ __ ] this was or where it was coming from. Now, this is where everything all started to fall apart.

[00:20:11]Literally, despite the size and distance that this thing could do, the results were underwhelming.

[00:20:20]During its entire use, the Paris gun fired around 360 to 360 shells total, about 20 a day at most. And the total casualty number was around 250 people killed with about 620 people wounded.

[00:20:41]Tragic of course, but for something that massive, that complex, and that [ __ ] expensive, you are absolutely not getting bang for your buck, which is ironic coming from a gun that's the size of a [ __ ] building. And the aim on this thing was absolutely [ __ ] horrendous. I mean, the target was literally a [ __ ] city, and this thing was still missing it by miles. It wasn't hitting strategic locations. These shells were basically landing wherever the [ __ ] they felt like. And the most famous hit was actually on Good Friday on March 29th, 1918 when a shell collapsed the roof of a church during a service, killing around 90 civilians.

[00:21:32]Now, call me crazy, but I wouldn't exactly consider that a high priority military target. And the Paris gun itself was actually destroying itself every single time it was fired. After about 60 or so shots, the barrel would start to warp and bend to the point where it had to be replaced. And every single time that happened, some poor bastards had to drag in another 34 m long barrel to replace it. So at the end of the day, they ended up with the most overengineered gun on the planet that constantly missed its target, did absolutely [ __ ] all damage anyway, even if it did hit, and the barrel had to be replaced every two or three days during a war where steel is scarce and is kind of very [ __ ] important. Eventually, the Allies managed to push back the Germans in 1918. And in a final act of [ __ ] you, the Germans destroyed the gun along with the blueprints so that it wouldn't fall into enemy hands. And so, the enemy couldn't build one themselves.

[00:22:39]Although, considering that the thing was extremely expensive and was practically [ __ ] useless, I doubt anyone would want to. However, they did it again. Just when you think that Germany would learn its lesson with overdoing and over complicating, they came back in World War II with new patch notes and said, "Surely, surely it'll actually [ __ ] work this time if we just made it even bigger."

[00:23:09]Enter the Schwer Gustav designed again by crop in the 1930s with Hitler personally giving it the thumbs up in 1934 because of course he [ __ ] did.

[00:23:22]That man was on so much [ __ ] meth.

[00:23:25]But anyway, the goal was to build something even bigger to again target France. But instead of Paris, this time they were specifically targeting the Magino line.

[00:23:38]Man, Germany really hated France.

[00:23:42]I wonder why. But anyway, the solution to this was to build an 80 cm caliber railway gun.

[00:23:52]80 [ __ ] cm. This entire monstrosity made the Paris gun look like a peashooter. The barrel alone was 32 m long, but fully assembled, that thing stretched to over 47 m. It also stood about 12 m tall, which is the size of a [ __ ] fourstory building, and weighed around 1,350 metric tons. And to even just move this monstrosity, you needed specially built curved tracks just to aim it. Just to [ __ ] aim it. I mean, if you want to adjust your aim by a few degrees, congratulations. You have to build whole ar railway tracks. And the shells came in two flavors. 4.8 8 ton high explosive shells that could travel up to 47 km or a 7.1 ton concrete piercing shell designed to punch through fortifications.

[00:24:55]Those shells could burrow deep underground before exploding. One report saying it could even go as deep as up to 30 m of earth or up to 8 m of reinforced concrete. On paper, this thing was an absolute [ __ ] monster. In reality though, it was a complete logistical nightmare. To even get it operational, you had to transport it with 25 different pieces, all using special trains. Then you had to spend three whole weeks assembling the [ __ ] thing with somewhere between 1,400 to 2,000 men. And then after all of that effort, it finally saw action in 1942 during the siege of Sevastapole.

[00:25:41]That was its time to shine. That was what it was built for. And what did it do? It fired about 50 shells.

[00:25:53]That's it.

[00:25:55]That's a rate of about one shell every 45 minutes. Now, to be completely fair, it did manage to do some damage, even blowing up an underground ammo depot.

[00:26:08]But again, it had the exact same problems as the Paris gun. Impact was minimal, accuracy was [ __ ] [ __ ] and the effort to operate it was absolutely insane. And again, the barrel was still destroying itself in the process and had to be replaced constantly. They even built a [ __ ] second one. This one was named Dora, but Dora basically just sat around doing absolutely nothing except being the world's heaviest and most expensive paper weight. By 1945, as Hitler was playing one-man Russian roulette, Germany did what Germany does and blew the entire thing up again for the same reasons as the Paris gun.

[00:26:54]probably for the best because at the end of the day, I'm not going to lie, if a weapon needs its own [ __ ] railway system, a 2,000 men around the clock workforce and its own [ __ ] calendar schedule just to function, maybe, just maybe, it's it's not worth the effort. If German overcompensation doesn't tackle your fancy, may I introduce you to Project Habacook, where the British tried to freeze an entire aircraft carrier into existence. It all started in 1942, courtesy of Jeffrey Pike, a British inventor working under combined operations, a special British military unit during World War II alongside Lord Louie Mountbatton, a highranking British military leader during the war. And given that surname, I doubt I have to explain who he is. Pike's pitch was, "Steel is scarce. Ubot are anally dominating us and carriers keep getting sunk. So, let's try to build an unsinkable aircraft carrier out of something that the enemy can't just torpedo to death. The plans got put in front of that fat little [ __ ] Winston Churchill and he approved them. So, what was the actual plan?

[00:28:24]build an iceberg aircraft carrier about 600 m long, 90 m wide, over 60 m deep, and weighing over 2 million tons. And it would be made of pyrete, which is 85% ice and 15% wood pulp. It is stronger than concrete, resistant to bullets, melts incredibly slowly, and literally has a self-heal passive. if you just slap some more pyrete on there and refreeze it. Pyrete is actually a rather fun material that you can [ __ ] around with because you can just make this [ __ ] in your house. There are actually a bunch of videos of people messing around with it and in its defense, it is actually extremely durable. There's even videos of people trying to blow the stuff up and they are barely making a dent in it. So, in theory, you've built an aircraft carrier that can't sink, can't really be penetrated, and can be repaired with [ __ ] water and sawdust.

[00:29:30]The obvious question was, how in the actual [ __ ] do you keep that thing frozen at all times? Because despite the fact that Pyrete's very, very strong and it does melt very, very, very slowly, it still does melt. And that was going to be a bit of an issue. But what they planned to do was to run refrigeration pipes throughout the entire vessel powered by diesel electric systems to keep the giant popsicle from turning into a puddle. And its top speed, a jaw-dropping 7 knots.

[00:30:05]Not really that impressive, but hey, it could carry around 100 to 200 aircraft complete with a runway, hangers, and repair bays. And before you assume that this entire idea just melted on arrival, it didn't. And they actually tested it.

[00:30:25]First in a London meat locker basement to prove that pyrete was actually ridiculously tough. And then in 1943, they built a 1,000 ton prototype measuring about 18 m long using conscientious objectors as labor. These were people who refused to fight in the military for religious or moral reasons.

[00:30:48]So the state just kind of went, "Fuck it. We'll find another use for them."

[00:30:52]And the worst part, the thing actually [ __ ] worked. A single one horsepower motor actually kept the thing frozen all throughout the summer. It handled waves, heat, and abuse. This stupid [ __ ] idea was actually kind of viable. So why didn't we end up with iceberg aircraft carriers roaming the Atlantic? Because time passed the idea. By late 1943, the situation in the Atlantic improved. better longrange aircrafts, escort carriers, better anti-ubmarine technology, and the Ubot were already getting their [ __ ] kicked in without the need of a frozen mega structure. Meanwhile, building even just one of these things would require hundreds of thousands of tons of wood pulp as well as massive amounts of steel for the engines and cooling systems, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of not using steel. and it would need somewhere around 30,000 men working on it for months. So the cost and time of actually building the thing exploded and suddenly it didn't seem like the cheap and simple solution it was originally intended as. So the project was scrapped and the prototype was left to melt and it actually took three full summers to finally melt. But parts of it still actually lie at the bottom of Patricia Lake. To cover one more British streak of absolute stupidity, let's briefly talk about the great Pangend Drum.

[00:32:35]fittingly named after an 18th century poem about something ridiculously big and pointless like Nicholas Sturgeon. This absolute [ __ ] fever dream came out of the British Admiral T's Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development, also known as Weasels and Dodgers, in 1943.

[00:32:58]You see, Britain had a bit of trouble getting through all of the German 3 m thick concrete sea walls. So, in comes Sublutie Neville Shoot, a British aeronautical engineer and novelist. And he says that the best solution to this little problem is not careful engineering, but a giant explosion on wheels. And they did exactly that. They literally just slapped two giant wheels on a one-tonon drum absolutely packed with explosives and then strapped about 60 to 70 rockets around the wheel rims and just called it a day. They hoped that this contraption would roll from the landing craft straight up to the beach defenses at 100 km an hour. It would then slam into the enemy walls and leave a nice big hole in them. And you know what? Out of all of the stupid [ __ ] that I've written about in this video so far, this is the thing that I had the highest hopes for because it was so autistically simple that it might actually just work. And the bouncing bombs that the dam busters used actually worked. So why not this? They tested the prototype in September of 1943 at Westward Hall, which by the way was a public area. So civilians were just sitting there casually watching a top secret weapon being tested. And it did look promising right up until the thing started gaining speed. And then it started to violently rip itself apart with its own inertia. The problem was the rockets. Some didn't ignite at all.

[00:34:45]Some burned faster than the others, and some of them just straight up came flying off the [ __ ] thing and went rocketing in all random directions, which meant the pan drum didn't roll straight. They were all just veering off in random directions. In one particular field test, the steering cables actually snapped. So, the engineers, soldiers, and civilians who were all watching the test all ran for their [ __ ] lives as this one-ton monstrosity started whipping around doing [ __ ] wheelies.

[00:35:20]And also, one rocket that got detached actually came whipping past the crowd, almost killing the film crew who were recording the test. The Brits figured out that the chances of this thing blowing up the enemy walls were pretty much equal to the thing just blowing themselves up. So in early 1944, just before D-Day, the entire project was scrapped and instead they went with the Hobart's funnies, specialized tanks that shockingly worked and actually did the thing they were supposed to do. Moving on from World War II and entering the Cold War era, where instead of calming [ __ ] down a little bit or, God forbid, learning literally anything from nuking Japan, the US decided to escalate its weapons development in one of the most aggressive ways possible. And nowhere was that more obvious than the flying war crime that was Project Pluto. This project was started on January the 1st, 1957 by the US Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission at Lawrence Levermore.

[00:36:29]Project Pluto was meant to create an engine for something called a supersonic lowaltitude missile or SLAM. The idea was to build a missile that can't be shot down, has basically unlimited range, and can just keep going forever.

[00:36:48]And they achieved that by putting a whole ars nuclear reactor inside the missile. Instead of using normal fuel, the missile would suck up air at the front at insane [ __ ] speeds and then shove it through an open nuclear reactor core and then blast it out of the back for thrust. Basically, no fuel tank needed, just raw nuclear power. And it could reach speeds of up to Mach 3. And because it didn't need fuel, it could stay up in the air for weeks, if not months. Oh, and it also carried multiple hydrogen bombs because, well, why the [ __ ] not? Now, all of what I just said sounds pretty impressive, but what I purposefully didn't mention is the reason why it managed to achieve Mac 3.

[00:37:40]You see, to get to that speed, the entire thing had to be relatively light.

[00:37:45]And to achieve that, they discarded some parts during the building process.

[00:37:50]Mainly, and most importantly in hindsight, they discarded the nuclear shielding.

[00:37:58]Usually, it takes tons of heavy shielding to protect everyone from the radiation and the payload. So, the engineers basically said, "We can make it safe or we can make it fly. Pick one." And to avoid radar detection, the thing was designed to fly as low as 150 m altitude. So, as it's flying over a country, it's not just delivering bombs.

[00:38:24]It's spraying absolutely everything underneath it with radioactive exhaust and poisoning absolutely everything in its path. And yet with that rather severe design flaw, if you ask me, they still decided to build a working version of the engine. The Tori2A in 1961 and the even bigger Tory 2C in 1964. They fired the Tory 2C at full power in the Nevada desert on a railroad test rig. It worked perfectly, which became a little bit of a problem because the test site became so radioactive they basically had to shut down the entire site. And someone asked a question that should have been asked way, way sooner.

[00:39:16]What would happen if we actually launched the thing? You can't test it without flying it. And you can't fly it without the thing irdiating absolutely everything in its path. your enemy, you, your allies, your own country, your [ __ ] Doug, literally everything.

[00:39:34]One engineer later commented on it, describing it as, and I quote, "A flying Chernobyl that also dropped nukes."

[00:39:43]Meanwhile, intercontinental ballistic missiles were already working, were cheaper, and faster, and also didn't require turning the entire [ __ ] planet into the Fallout universe. So on July the 1st, 1964, just weeks after the first successful test, the entire project was cancelled after about $260 million had already been sunk into it.

[00:40:11]And you guys wonder why you don't have free healthcare. Still deep in the Cold War and somehow circling right back to animal related stupidity, the CIA decided that instead of investing money in producing better cameras and better microphones, why don't we turn a [ __ ] cat into the microphone?

[00:40:33]That would be an amazing way to spend our time and money. And they named this Operation Acoustic Kitty. This project came out of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology in the early 1960s where they tried to surgically turn an ordinary domestic cat into a covert listening device. And when I say surgically, I really do mean it. They implanted a microphone inside the cat's ear canal, drilled a radio transmitter at the base of its skull, stuffed a battery pack into its abdomen, and then weaved an antenna into its tail so that it could transmit the audio back to the handlers. essentially creating a furry cyborg with the sole purpose of wandering near targets like the Soviet embassy or the Kremlin and then record and transmit the conversations.

[00:41:30]Obviously, that didn't happen because it's a [ __ ] cat and it couldn't follow orders long enough to complete a mission without getting distracted by literally anything else.

[00:41:44]They tried to solve that problem with surgery again by wiring the cat's brain in a way that could override its natural instincts like hunger or mating behavior. Because if you chuck enough money and surgeries at a cat and turn it into a [ __ ] servtor, it will just magically stop being a cat. So after 5 years of extensive testing, countless surgeries, as well as throwing $20 million at the project, they were confident enough to try it in the real world. And the one and only field test involved releasing the cat in a park near the Soviet embassy in Washington DC so it could hopefully wander over and eavesdrop on someone important having a conversation because you know there's only literally millions of [ __ ] people that probably hang around in that neighborhood and you know they're just kind of banking that just the cat just so happens to go up and oh my god it's a guy that works in the What were the chances of that [ __ ] happening?

[00:42:44]the cat out of everybody there, the cat's going to walk up to the [ __ ] Soviet guy. Yeah. What What were the chances of that actually [ __ ] happening? Well, it turns out less than zero because just a minute into the operation, the cat immediately ignored everything it was trained to do, wandered off, walked right into the middle of the [ __ ] road, and got run over by a [ __ ] taxi, effectively ending the entire mission before it even started.

[00:43:16]Money well spent. To end it on a happy note, one former CIA officer later claimed that the cat actually survived.

[00:43:25]It had all of the equipment removed and it managed to live out a normal life afterwards.

[00:43:31]I would like to believe that because why would the CIA lie? The CIA would never lie to the public for their own benefits. I am absolutely sure that that cat ended up completely a-okay. And now for the final entry. Without a doubt, the dumbest one and the most obvious as to why it was dumb. As we leave the Cold War behind and enter the beautiful '9s, the US goes full gas no breaks and tries to turn their enemies into homos.

[00:44:05]They were going to develop a gay bomb.

[00:44:09]In 1994, the US Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, submitted a three-page proposal as part of a larger $7.5 million research request into so-called non-lethal weapons. Later in 2005, these were revealed to be titled harassing, annoying, and bad guy identifying chemicals. And among those ideas sitting there was the proposal to develop a chemical weapon that would act as an extremely powerful aphrodesiac.

[00:44:43]One that would cause the enemy to literally become gay for each other and too horny and too busy [ __ ] to actually fight. Just to appreciate how seriously unserious this entire lab was, the same document also suggested a halattosis bomb to give the enemies unbearably bad breath and also a flatulence bomb to make them constantly fart.

[00:45:11]A fart bomb.

[00:45:15]I kind of want a fart bomb.

[00:45:19]the things I would do. Now, unlike most of the previous disasters, this one thankfully never made it to the testing phase because the military took one look at this [ __ ] document, probably called the entire department gay and then closed that schizophrenic [ __ ] the [ __ ] down. So, there were no prototypes, no field tests, and no unfortunate steamy homoerotic incidents. just a collective agreement that this should probably not go any further. It did however manage to achieve something that none of the other projects had managed at this point. It won a Nobel Prize in 2007, specifically the Egg Nobel Prize because the idea was so [ __ ] stupid. And this feels like the perfect note to end the video on. Because if there is one thing this entire journey proves, it's that no matter what era, no matter what technology, and no matter how serious the situation, humanity has an incredible ability to take the best and brightest our species has to offer and still produce something so [ __ ] stupid that it makes you wonder how we ever managed to survive long enough to invent anything useful at all.

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[00:46:41]YEAH.