The batty, explosive history of bats in the military and a new idea | Hacker News Reader

The batty, explosive history of bats in the military and a new idea

washingtonpost.com

26 pointswallflower11 comments

Everything about the old story of the idea to arm a large quantity of bats with incendiary explosives, to attack a fire-prone city reads like information that might be fed to suspected moles in a counterintelligence operation.

The idea being that you wouldn't knowingly jeopardize real plans, by gambling their exposure among an untrustworthy audience, but, since counterintelligence is an understood expense, allocate some funds for seemingly outrageous boondoggles, and see if those secrets circulate.

  The bat bomb plan was stamped “top secret” and 
  assigned the suitably sci-fi code name Project 
  X-Ray.

Figure there were three types of people that were granted access to the classified information, while it was still classified: those hunting for moles, suspected moles, and authorized individuals kept unaware of the mole hunt, but confirmed as definite non-moles. Assume FDR was probably clued in on the nature of the exercise.

Why take it so far? Probably victimization by sunk cost fallacy, plus persistent suspicion and paranoia. Plus, when the time came to retire the project, it might have gained some extra inertia all its own.

I suspect it would have been slightly more effective in terms of cost vs result than you might think.

So even if it started as counter espionage it may have continued based on results being more effective than initially supposed.

This story was part of a news report sourced by the daughter of a general on NBC. I saw it between 1987ish (I may be off by a year).

> The project never recovered from this ignominious retreat, and it was canceled in 1944.

It was "cancelled" after a shockingly effective test because the first A-bomb was going to be ready. Multiple projects were going on in parallel. Because bat-instigated fire was still an uncontrollable and unpredictable force to unleash on a population, it was wisely cancelled (the research kept, which is all that mattered) in favor of a more pointed and well-understood system. A big targeted explosion.

I don't think that the effects of the bomb were as well understood as we imagine, I think that unleashing the bomb on Japan was also a test. It was targeted at civilians and they just HAD to see what it would do, they knew that what it would do was going to be bad, but they didn't really know how bad. IMO they didn't really care how unpredictable or targeted it would be, they knew it would affect Japan only though, so thats all that mattered.

This is really a dream i keep getting on and on. In the future we will genetically breed very large eagles, saddle them, and fly them to get from place to place. Everyone in future will have a pet eagle, like everyone has a pet dog now.

I like this dream, but think you need to pair it with a dream of cows the size of elephants as each day the eagle will need to eat a 1000 pounds of meat.

Lab grown meat or the eagle is genetically engineered to be a veagle

I was rather disappointed that this article wasn’t about the worlds first guided missile, that was used to hunt ships in the pacific in WW2 — it was called the Bat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-N-2_Bat

I hate to be that guy, but it was a guided bomb. The Germans made the Fritz X, also a glide-bomb, and it came before the Bat.

I believe the V-1 is still the first "guided missile", i.e. self-propelled.

There's a great episode of The Memory Palace about this: http://thememorypalace.us/2009/01/episode-4/

Times were different during WW2. No stone, no matter how wacky, was left un-turned in the search for victory. They thought about building an aircraft carrier out of ice. They paid a bunch of academics to figure out if it was possible to make big explosions by splitting atoms (spoiler: it works very well). It should come as no surprise that they investigated releasing a bunch of explosive bats on the enemy. "Look what wacky thing was done because there was a slim chance it might somehow lead to victory" is a low effort (if interesting) article.

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