Project X-Ray: The Bat Bomb

You think you know someone, and then you discover they developed the Bat Bomb.

Yesterday I wrote about Harvard Professor Donald Griffin and the work he performed studying the unique dance-communication of the honeybee. I was fortunate enough to assist him over two summers, and thought that I'd gotten to know a lot about him in that time.

He was in all respects a scientific gentleman of the old-school. Enthusiastic but thorough, curious but patient, and as precise as possible in his methods and his language. Nearly 80 at the time, he insisted on piloting the boat himself and lugging a heavy deep-cycle lead-acid storage battery across the marsh every. He was always frustrated that he couldn't carry two of them at once, "but then," he said, "I suppose one has to be auto-genetically realistic." (That's a pretty scientific way of saying, "Dammit, I'm old.")

As the founder of the field of Cognitive Ethology, he "set up the foundations for researches in the cognitive awareness of animals within their habitats". He might not have been an "animal rights activist" in the modern sense, but this was a guy who wanted to afford animal thinking a kind of respect and consideration which was completely ground-breaking for its time.

That's why I was so surprised to read this story yesterday, and learn that he'd worked on Project X-Ray. This was a plan to strap incendiary explosives to bats, pack those bats into bombs, and then drop them over Japanese cities in World War Two. The bats would then scatter across the cities, roost among the paper and timber buildings, and then spontaneously ignite.

When you see a swarm of bats emerging from a cave in Carlsbad Caverns, it's immediately apparent what a terrifying idea this was.

Dr. Griffin, working with the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), worked to develop this idea over several years. He started by gathering several bats from the caverns himself to test their load-bearing capabilities - something he started doing immediately, right in his hotel room!

He personally pitched the project to President Roosevelt, who signed off on it. It had some success in igniting a test village they constructed for the purpose. A few of the explosive-laden bats even got loose at one point and destroyed a building at the Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base. Kind of Pyrrhic victory for the researchers.

Despite this, they forged ahead, fine-tuning the explosives and designing an actual bomb that would carry the hibernating creatures, then wake them to disperse them from a height of 1000 feet. But the project was dropped as focus turned towards development of the atomic bomb, after an investment of $2 million.

We all knew Dr. Griffin had done some sort of research during World War Two, but we'd assumed it had something to do with his earlier work on bat echolocation, which led, after all, to the development of sonar and radar technologies. I chatted with the professor a lot about his previous research when we worked together, but Project X-Ray never came up. I can understand why he didn't want to share this story with me.

Again, from this article:

When a more mature Griffin became a proponent of consciousness in nonhumans, he questioned his support of weaponizing bats on ethical grounds. He believed that wartime mentality compelled him to support the project in his youth and he would not have supported it with the mind set he held later in life.

As morbid as the project was - for the bats as well as their targets - I can't help wondering if this would have been a more humane way of bringing a militarized enemy city to its knees than, say, splitting an atom right over it. Certainly the loss of human life would have been much lower, not to mention the effects of radiation poisoning that devastated the surrounding areas for generations. The death of a few million bats might get animal rights activists worked up, but the atomic bomb kills everything.

On the other hand, the thought of bats today delivering chemical or biological weapon payloads is perhaps even more terrifying, so maybe it's best that this idea was put to bed.

In any case, the project is a fascinating window into the psychology of war-time, that such destructive ideas can come from otherwise gentle minds.