Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

As CNO, King was well briefed on a new and secret weapons system also scheduled for mid-1945: the atomic bomb. He assumed that the bomb would have a much better chance to end the war. So why waste time, physical and intellectual resources, and money on a plan whose success could at best be considered a long shot? Project X-Ray was scrapped.

AND THEN WHAT?

As you might expect, Dr. Adams was devastated when his program was canceled. Seemingly, it wasn’t so much a desire for personal glory as a firm conviction in his idea. Until his death at the age of eighty-seven, he believed that Project X-Ray, if it had been allowed to mature to fruition, would have caused more damage than even the two atomic bombs. He also argued that the war could have been won with far fewer Japanese civilian deaths. Although his bat bombs would have set Japan ablaze, he maintained, innocents would have had the time to evacuate areas before they were consumed by the inferno (time that atomic bombs did not provide). What we know today about the firestorms created through the conventional bombings of Tokyo and other Axis cities makes this a dubious claim. But we are now in the realm of the counterfactual—unprovable in any regard.

After the war, Adams shifted to other inventive pursuits. He had an idea to reseed part of the desert with pelletized seeds sprayed from his airplane. And, of course, fried chicken.

Donald Griffin only spent a short time with the project, but later would seriously question his role in what he considered the unethical weaponization of animals. He continued to make his name in the field of biopsychology, contributing to the understanding of animal thinking and consciousness. He coined the term “cognitive ethology,” which dealt with the scientific and objective observation of the influence of awareness and intention on the behavior of animals. (In other words, how do animals think, what do they believe, are they rational, how well do they process information?) In his obituary in the New York Times, Griffin was credited with what he might have considered to be the ultimate compliment: He was “the only reason that animal thinking was given consideration at all.” One shudders to imagine the final thoughts of an explosive-laden bat emerging from induced hibernation to blow up an airplane hangar.

Louis Fieser continued to develop high explosives and incendiaries. His most famous invention, napalm, was fitted into bombs that were produced by the tens of millions, and still has considerable effect on war to this day. But Fieser was more than just one invention. He was a true polymath. A prolific writer of books (the most interesting titled Arson, an Instruction Manual ) and articles/research papers (over three hundred in his career), he conducted cancer research and worked on chemotherapy efficacy, aromatic chemistry, steroids, and a bunch of other things like carcinogenic hydroquinones, napthoquinone antimalarials, and other things that neither I nor my spellcheck understand.

Finally, Project X-Ray lived on in one more way. Pieces of its design were used for Project Orcon, an equally perplexing plan by famed psychologist B. F. Skinner to train pigeons to fly guided bombs against the Germans. The pigeons would be trained not to fly with bombs attached like Adams’s bats, but rather to peck at a control screen, steering the weapons into strategic military targets.

That’s a story for another day.

The Allied strategy for winning World War II in the Pacific Theater of Operations was relatively simple: Capture a key island in the western Pacific and use it as a launching point for the invasion of yet another island (and so on). Eventually this will lead you all the way to the main islands of Japan (Japan is an archipelago, so “islands,” not “island”), and victory. The so-called island-hopping campaign, also known as “leapfrogging,” was quite successful. More than a few historians have argued that this strategy, coupled with the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet (effectively cutting off the nation from military supplies and even basic goods), would have ended the Pacific War even without the introduction of the atomic bomb.

But success came with a heavy price:

• Guadalcanal(1942–43)—7,100 Americans killed in action, 7,789 wounded.

• Tarawa(1943)—1,696 killed in action, 2,101 wounded (in only four days of fighting).

• Peleliu(1944)—2,336 killed in action, 8,450 wounded. (The casualty rate—dead and wounded combined—was as high as 70 percent on some missions on Peleliu.)

• Iwo Jima(1945)—6,821 killed in action, 19,217 wounded.

• Okinawa(1945)—12,520 Americans killed in action (almost another 8,000 died of disease, accidents, and so on), 55,162 wounded.

At the time, some military analysts predicted that as many as a million Americans could be killed trying to invade the Japanese main islands. This is probably an unrealistically high number, but it would be hard for anyone to argue—at the time or today—that an invasion of the main islands would not have caused an unacceptably high number of casualties.

The problem wasn’t the warfighting skills and bravery of American servicemen. The problem was that the Japanese refused to quit. In most cases, to a man, they refused to surrender. They fought to the death, for Japan and for their emperor, taking with them scores of American Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

Clearly, something had to be done. Even a successful invasion of Japan would quickly become a Pyrrhic victory if hundreds of thousands of the Greatest Generation were sacrificed to the cause.

Of course,something was being done. In laboratories, institutes, and universities across the United States some of the greatest American, Allied, and immigrant scientists and engineers were developing technologies that would radically and permanently redefine warfare. And we’re not just talking about atomic weapons here. Progress was being made across the board in radar, cryptanalysis (codes), rocketry, jet propulsion, materials engineering, thermodynamics, battlefield medicine, statistical analysis, chemistry of explosives, industrial production capabilities, early stages of computer science, and exploding bats—to name just a sampling.

While some scientists and engineers toiled on projects focused on the physical world—the guns, bombs, aircraft, ships, tanks, and related technologies of war—others investigated ways to use the human mind as a weapon. Psychological Operations (or “PsyOps”) have, in one form or another, been used in warfare for all of recorded history, but this concept truly reached maturity during the Second World War, when organizations such as the Office of Strategic Services realized that PsyOps could constitute a significant force multiplier—a way to dramatically increase the effectiveness of our troops in the face of a determined and relentless enemy.

OSS director William Donovan was a major proponent of PsyOps. Within OSS, he formed the Morale Operations Branch in 1943 to target both the general population and the military forces of the Axis powers. In a speech he gave shortly before the Morale Branch was founded, Donovan explained his rationale:

In this war of machines, the human element is, in the long run, more important than the machines themselves. There must be the will to make the machines, to man the machines, and to pull the trigger. Psychological warfare is directed against that will. Its object is to destroy the morale of the enemy and to support the morale of our allies within enemy and enemy occupied countries.