
The batty, explosive history of bats in the military and a new idea - wallflower
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2018/07/02/the-batty-history-of-bats-in-the-military-and-why-this-new-idea-just-might-work
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hoodwinkers
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.

~~~
TooBrokeToBeg
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.

~~~
Someguywhatever
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.

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atanpur
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.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
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.

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

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pmalynin
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-N-2_Bat)

~~~
24gttghh
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.

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

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dsfyu404ed
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.

