- [Dan] Warning, what you are about to see
could be disturbing to some viewers.
Viewer discretion is advised.
(suspenseful music)
Imagine military superpowers around the world
enlisting beloved sea creatures to search and destroy.
(dolphin squeaking) - They're very loving,
they're very friendly.
- But then, pop.
- The dolphins would ram any suspected enemy.
- How about building a swarm of robot assassins?
- We've armed these robots, we've taught them to think.
We've taught them to work together.
- It's not that hard to imagine
having your own private drone swarm army.
- Or turning corpses into killers.
- Men in the Mongol army are dying in droves.
- They're bloated bodies.
When they hit,
(choir singing)
they're exploding on impact.
- These are the weapons so surprising,
they are truly unbelievable.
(dramatic music)
It's 1941 and Britain is getting hammered by Nazi Germany.
The Luftwaffe is reigning bombs down
on London and other cities,
as U-boats wreak havoc along Allied shipping routes.
Desperate for something that can turn the tide of war,
British special ops come up with
something we can only call unusual.
(intense music) (flames raging)
- They procure rats with the idea
that they can use these rodents, that will usually go unnoticed,
as weapons of mass destruction.
- They take the bodies of recently departed rats,
they fill them with explosives,
and then stitch their little bodies back together.
- They would make sure that these explosive rats
would end up in the coal piles of a steam train, of a ship,
of a factory, and then when the shovel full of coal
would be thrown into the furnace,
the explosives would ignite, causing death, causing damage,
causing problems for the German war machine.
- So the plan is launched.
They have the rat bombs, they have the supply ready to go,
and they just need to ship them into Germany
where they have an agent on the inside who's to ensure
that they're distributed in ways
that'll cause the maximum amount of damage.
- [Dan] Off goes the shipment of rigged rats.
Everything seems to be going to plan.
That is, until the Germans smell a rat.
- The Nazis intercept the rat bombs,
but it's not a total loss.
- The German army is now paranoid and every possible rat,
every possible rat haven environment,
becomes a potential explosive threat.
- The fear of this threat is so extensive that
they even display what one of these rat bombs looks like
at German military schools.
Ultimately, British special ops determined
that this is a far better consequence
than they had ever intended with the rat bombs themselves.
- An inordinate and disproportionate
amount of attention is now directed
toward the cadavers of rats,
when maybe what the enemy should be doing
is looking out for something else.
- Not to be outdone by Britain,
the US deploys their own exploding mammal to end the war.
Oddly enough, this one flies.
(explosion booming) (tense music)
- The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor,
the United States enters World War II,
and we're trying to come up with any, any clever idea
to end the war as quickly as possible.
- In Pennsylvania, this dental surgeon by the name
of Dr. Lytle Adams thinks that he has the ideal remedy,
the ideal weapon for the United States.
- Adams is a part-time inventor
and he is also a man who enjoys exploring caves.
And one day he's touring around caves in New Mexico
and he sees bats hanging everywhere, and he thinks,
"What if we weaponize them?"
- His idea? Strap explosives to bats
and release them into enemy territory.
- This is absolutely a stroke of genius.
Dr. Adams knows that bats can carry more
of their body weight than birds.
They fly faster than birds.
- The way this can work is that you can chill the bats down
to around 40 degrees and they enter a hibernation state.
- Each hibernating bat is fitted
with a little incendiary device of napalm.
These hibernating, bomb laden bats
can then be loaded into a canister
and that could be carried up aloft in a B-25.
Once released, the bats would naturally wake up
when they hit warmer air.
- They will then flutter off
and find whatever building they possibly can and roost.
- So these bats make their way into the eaves of buildings,
into attics, into crawl spaces,
and then when the timer goes off, the napalm is ignited
and then kabam, (explopsion booming) they explode.
- How did this plan even get greenlit?
Dr. Adams has friends in very high places.
- Adams knows the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.
He writes her a letter describing what he wants to do.
She then shows that letter to her husband,
the president of the United States,
the Commander-In-Chief of the American military.
- FDR hands the idea over to the US Army Air Force,
along with the $2 million check and says,
"Go develop bat bombs."
- There have to be those who think if the president,
President Roosevelt wants this,
then there's gotta be some science here,
this there's gotta be something here that's worth pursuing.
There also has to be those folks who are thinking to themselves,
"This is literally bat (beep) crazy, how can this work?"
- [Dan] To pull this off, Dr. Adams needs bats,
a whole lot of them.
- Adams chooses the Carlsbad Air Base
because it's right near a system of caves
that have a population of roughly nine million bats.
So it's perfect, they'll be able
to have an unlimited supply of bats
and be able to test them using Air Force airplanes.
- [Dan] There's just one question now.
Do these flying mammals have what it takes to win a war?
- The day arrives to do the first test
without incendiary devices.
So they take thousands of bats
and then drop them over a farm.
They fly down to the ground and they fly into the barn,
they fly into hay bales, fly into the house.
They're doing exactly what they hoped that they would do.
- After the successful test with the unarmed bats,
the army gets a little bit ambitious
and that same day, decides to do a mini test
with six armed bats.
- [Dan] Six unlucky bats
strapped with timer-rigged napalm capsules.
Again, what could possibly go wrong?
- They're getting ready to put them into the casing
when suddenly the bats wake up,
they come out of hibernation mode and they fly away.
These bats fly all over the Air Force base.
They get into a control tower, they get into a hangar,
they go under a fuel tank.
Some of them fly into an automobile nearby.
Turns out it's the general's automobile.
And they detonate.
- The test of the bat bomb is such a success,
it demolishes the military base,
but it means it works, it works perfectly.
- [Dan] Unsurprisingly, there is one person
who is not very happy with the outcome.
- Our army Air Corps general is pretty much fed up
with this project because it blows up his car.
It sort of puts a blemish on his record.
So it's handed off to the United States Navy.
- But the US Navy has other priorities.
And the Navy, uninterested
in developing this program further,
turns it over to the United States Marine Corps.
- When the Marines take over this project,
they move the operation eventually to Utah,
where they build a model Japanese village,
and they're able to destroy this model village
using these incendiary bats.
- [Dan] Despite this initial success,
the Marines quickly learn bats aren't always cooperative.
- Sometimes they don't wake up from hibernation,
so when they're dropped out of a plane,
they just kind of fall and land wherever.
- They find that when females are pregnant
and males are in the vicinity of the pregnant females,
that the males become agitated to such a degree
that they're no longer predictably capable
of delivering the explosives as intended.
And there's really only about a five month period
in the calendar year during which
the bat can be reliably used for the delivery of explosives.
And the big problem there
is that the war goes on 12 months a year.
- As the team is working through all these difficulties,
in parallel, there's another effort underway
to shorten the war, and that is the atomic bomb project.
So eventually the bat bomb is simply discarded.
(stamp thumping)
- [Dan] More than a decade later,
France dreams up a different type of aerial weapon.
- The year is 1954.
France has just lost the first Indo-China war
and they're trying to figure out what can we do in future
to mobilize our troops so that they are transported
to places faster, while at the same time,
having some type of weaponry
that can take out heavy ordinance on the opposing side.
- So what they come up with is this idea
of mounting an anti-tank gun, a massive gun onto a scooter,
but not just any scooter, an iconic scooter.
- [Dan] The very word Vespa evokes visions of scooting
through sun-kissed Italian hills,
not these two wheeled killing machines.
- In 1956, the French debuted
their heavily militarized Vespa complete with the bazooka
that is able to take out a tank.
Here's the thing, it only costs about $500 to make,
whereas a tank costs around $200,000 to make.
So if your $500 weapon can take out a $200,000 weapon,
I'd say it pays for itself after one usage.
- [Dan] Cost effective for sure,
but does it actually work on the battlefield?
- The French actually used the bazooka
in the French Algerian war.
What they do is they parachute the scooter out
of a plane along with two soldiers.
- Suddenly, you have French paratroopers
who, once they land on a drop zone with their Vespas
and their M-20 anti-tank recoilless rifles,
they can move from place to place very rapidly
and they constitute a significant threat
on the battlefield.
- Even though the Bazooka Vespa looks awesome,
it still isn't really much of a match for the guerilla warfare
that's happening on the streets of Algeria.
- In the end, the Bazooka Vespa puts up a pretty good fight,
but the Algerians put up a better one and win the war.
But I still want a Bazooka Vespa.
- The Bazooka Vespa is honorably discharged
after a production run of just over 600.
- It's 1942, deep into World War II,
the Nazi U-boats are blowing Winston Churchill's ships
out of the water.
It's time for an unconventional plan of attack,
ice the Nazis.
(tense music)
- The most effective way to destroy all of these U-boats
is through air cover.
Unfortunately, it's World War II.
We don't have planes that can really fly very far
and those that can fly far, can't carry much armament.
Well, we could build aircraft carriers.
- The problem is there is a scarcity
or shortage of metals like steel and aluminum.
These are the structural materials that you would use
to build a traditional aircraft carrier.
- [Dan] Then, scientist and inventor Geoffrey Pyke
has an unusual proposal.
- As crazy as it sounds,
Geoffrey Pyke ultimately develops this idea
that we could introduce the unsinkable aircraft carrier
and that it could be an iceberg.
- [Dan] How can a floating iceberg possibly function
as an aircraft carrier?
Incredibly, inspiration comes from the Titanic disaster.
- The Titanic was supposed to be an unsinkable ship
and an iceberg took it down in minutes.
So everyone, the Navy, passenger ship liners,
every maritime entity is terrified of icebergs.
The International Ice Patrol is born
and their job is basically
to just torpedo the hell outta icebergs.
(explosion booming)
- What they find is that ships
are really not good at sinking icebergs.
You can direct the biggest guns
that a Navy has toward an iceberg
and you're barely going to chip a little chunk off of it.
- [Dan] Thinking outside the box,
Pyke creates a plan to convert icebergs
to aircraft carriers.
Somehow. the project is green lit by Churchill.
- Of course, this idea has to have a really good code name
and Pyke calls it the HMS Habakkuk,
which is a play on the prophet Habakkuk
from the Old Testament, who was able to do the impossible.
- [Dan] And just what does the impossible look like?
- Pyke draws up the blueprints for his aircraft carrier,
which is made almost entirely of ice.
He flattens out the top of it to use as a runway
and hollows it out
so there's a big cavern in the middle to serve
as a shelter for the planes.
- [Dan] More than four times the size of the Titanic,
it will be the largest warship ever built.
- It's not going anywhere fast,
we're talking about eight miles an hour,
but it's torpedo proof,
and it's got anti-aircraft guns on it,
and you can launch fighters off of it.
So how cool is that?
- [Dan] Building a huge warship from ice is one thing.
Keeping it from melting is another challenge.
- Pyke creates this kind of indestructible material.
It's 14% wood pulp, 86% ice, he calls it pykrete.
And this is going to reinforce the hull of what he believes
is going to be an indestructible floating airstrip
for the Allied forces to retake U-boat Alley
from the German war machine.
- If the Allies can pull this off, Churchill will have
the most incredible secret weapon in the war.
- They decide that they're gonna build a prototype
of the Habakkuk on Lake Patricia in Canada.
They have kind of an endless supply of ice.
Ultimately, it's about 60 feet in length.
It's not the most attractive thing.
It is described as sort of a floating, frozen shoebox.
However, when they shoot a ton of torpedoes at it,
it stays afloat and is relatively unscathed,
further proving this could potentially be a game changer
in the Allied war effort.
- [Dan] After the successful test,
Churchill decides it's time to build the mile-long Habakkuk,
but that's much easier said than done.
- The entire operation demands more
in the way of raw materials and resources
than ever dreamed of.
It requires steel, steel as a part of this cooling system
that will make it possible
for the iceberg to survive longer.
And steel is a valued commodity
at this stage during the Second World War.
- The cost of building the full Habakkuk ship
will be two and a half million pounds.
- That's where Churchill just says it's not worth it.
He cancels development of the HMS Habakkuk
and stops all testing in Canada.
- [Dan] Think water-based weapons can't get more weird
than an iceberg aircraft carrier?
How about weaponizing Flipper?
- Dolphins are kind of the hippies of the sea.
They're very loving, they're very friendly.
We don't think of them as helping a war effort.
- [Dan] But from the Cuban Missile Crisis onwards,
trained dolphins are successfully deployed in Vietnam
and Iraq to complete missions no human would dare take on.
- Dolphins show an incredible acuity
in terms of spotting mines below the surface of the water.
Essentially, they use their echo location
to determine where the mine is.
- If the dolphin finds a mine,
the dolphin will ascend to the surface and tap a buoy,
at which point the animal will be given a reward.
- [Dan] Next, the Navy tries using dolphins as assassins.
- So in Vietnam, these dolphins
have a hypodermic needle attached to their snout.
Gas is inside of it.
The diver who gets poked by the gas, they don't die.
They just float to the surface.
- It might seem like the dolphin is being friendly,
but then pop, you get stabbed with this hypodermic needle
and you're rocketing to the surface
where they can be apprehended.
- [Dan] Incredibly, dolphins are still being used
as secret weapons today
and the US isn't the only superpower relying on them.
- The Russian Navy has two dolphin pens
near the Sevastopol Harbor in the entrance to the Black Sea.
- Famously, the Russians move these dolphins
to patrol this key tactical harbor in Sevastopol
to protect the ships that are incredibly high value
to the Russian war effort.
- The Ukrainians are using divers
that can conduct attacks against Russian naval bases.
And in response to that, the Russians
have introduced weaponized dolphins.
- They are tasked with anti-diver operations
to stop any potential sabotage.
The belief is that the dolphins
would ram any potential human being below the water,
thinking they were a suspected enemy.
- [Dan] And it's not just dolphins
serving their countries.
Can you imagine a whale in the role of 007?
- The Russian Navy has spy whales patrolling the Arctic,
running surveillance, protecting its ports,
protecting its ships,
and letting it know where the enemy is.
- [Dan] This Russian secret weapon
is about to become not so secret and you won't believe how.
(mysterious music)
- A bunch of Norwegian fishermen are out
and a friendly beluga whale just kind of swims up
to their boat and they realize it's wearing some kind
of a strappy harness thing, sort of like a GoPro rig.
- And when they look closer at it,
they find that in Cyrillic characters,
it says, "Property of St. Petersburg."
It provides evidence that the animal has been equipped
with this package of equipment that was made
by the Russian Federation.
- [Dan] As for the fate of the beluga whale spy
that the Norwegian fishermen found.
- The funny thing is, that whale essentially defects
and goes to Norway where it is renamed Hvaldimir,
as an homage and maybe poking fun at Vladimir Putin.
- This beluga James Bond
is certainly living his best life in Norway.
If the idea of whales
as a weapon strikes you as truly strange,
wait 'til you see our next unbelievable weapon.
- In the late 1950s, the US is looking for a way
to take down communism.
Their solution?
A weird weapon that might be too explosive.
(tense music)
- At one of the peaks of the Cold War,
the US Navy and the US Air Force
are the two services leading the way
in America's nuclear arsenal.
(explosion booming)
But the Army wants to find some way
to use nuclear devices in its own activities,
notably in the field.
- What if, on the battlefield,
a confrontation with Soviet Russia,
we have a portable nuclear weapon,
a nuclear bomb attached to the end of a bazooka?
That is a battle winning idea.
(tense music)
- [Dan] They call it the Davy Crockett
and it packs a potent punch.
- The Davy Crockett weapon system
fires a 20-ton nuclear warhead.
Anything in its immediate vicinity
is gonna be reduced to ash, rubble.
(explosion booming)
- It's great at eradicating your enemies.
It's also great at eradicating your allies.
- [Dan] Therein lies the King
of the Wild Frontier's little problem.
- It uses radioactive material,
and the men who are deploying this device
are going to be very close to it,
so they're at risk of radiation poisoning.
- What they actually tell them to do
is safely fire the weapon, hide behind cover.
Don't look at the bright flash, get away as quickly as possible.
That way you don't suffer from nuclear fallout.
- [Dan] Believe it or not,
friendly fire radiation isn't the only issue.
- Deploying nuclear weapons on a battlefront
is a guaranteed way to start an escalation
to global nuclear war.
It won't just stop with the Davy Crockett.
- The army starts recalling the weapon.
The official reason
is that they are not accurate enough for combat.
(explosion booming)
- Well, I think the threat of possibly ending civilization
as we know it merits a change of pace
to a weird weapon of less destruction.
(pensive music)
- The year's 1991, we are in the Somali Civil War.
At the time, the United Nations is sent there solely
as a peacekeeping force.
They don't have any weapons, nor do they want any weapons
that are going to lead to a lethal end.
- There are very few less-than-lethal weapons
out there that aren't truly less than lethal.
Rubber bullets will kill people.
You can use a taser, that can kill people.
- [Dan] UN forces need a new kind of weapon
they can be 100% sure is non-lethal.
- The UN decides that their non-lethal approach
is going to be a sticky foam gun.
It's kinda like the proton pack from "The Ghostbusters."
(foam whooshing)
- [Dan] But what this weapon discharges
is far different from subatomic particles.
- You have a backpack on your back
with a hose that goes over your shoulder
and you spray your victim with a foam
that once it hits air, it hardens up
and expands onto your victim.
(foam squirting)
- The gelatinous sludge hits them, it overwhelms them
to where the person, covered in this foam, loses the ability
to manipulate their arms and legs
because they can't struggle against it any longer.
- [Dan] In theory, it sounds like the perfect weapon.
In practice, not so much.
- When the sticky foam gun is fired at someone,
it does take several seconds for the chemical to harden
before it finally holds someone in place.
- So that person, if they're dangerous
and you hit 'em with the foam,
they're gonna remain dangerous for a few moments
before the foam incapacitates them.
- [Dan] But the biggest issue of all?
- If you don't aim exactly right,
you can get it in someone's mouth or nose
and you can suffocate them.
Eventually, the plan is scrapped
and they shut down this program for this sticky foam gun,
mostly because it does have the potential for lethality.
(foam whooshing)
- [Dan] What could be weirder than a weapon spewing foam?
How about one that makes you spew?
- America is trying to figure out all sorts of ways
to take out anyone that might want to harm the security
of these United States, foreign or domestic.
One of these weapons is created
by the Department of Homeland Security
and it costs $1 million to produce,
and it is known officially as an LED incapacitator.
- It looks like a flashlight,
but instead of having one big light bulb, it has a series
of small LED light bulbs that flash at different colors
and different intensities in a waving pattern.
- Let's say you have somebody coming at you,
an unarmed attacker, so you can't use lethal force,
but you wanna stop them.
You could hit them in the face with this LED incapacitator.
They'll stop and then you have to worry
about cleaning them up after you get them in handcuffs.
- [Dan] That's because of the LED incapacitator's
unpleasant side effect, giving it a rather fitting nickname.
- The puke ray gun.
(man vomiting)
- If your stomach is not up to par,
you'll vomit on yourself.
- With these bright LED lights that are
being targeted at an individual or a group of people,
they're also changing colors very rapidly
and can lead an individual to experience a bout
of dizziness, vertigo, if you will,
which could then lead to someone puking.
- [Dan] In 2008, the LA County Sheriff's Department
funds testing of the puke ray gun.
Can it possibly work?
- While the LED incapacitator does get the job done,
the LA County Sheriff's Department also thinks about,
well, what happens if the nefarious people
get their own puke ray gun
and then they in turn use it on us?
- [Dan] Ultimately, the government shelves the project,
but it's not the last we hear of the puke ray.
- A few years later, a hacker by the name of Limor Fried,
who goes by the name Ladyada,
is able to recreate the puke gun.
All it takes is a quick trip to Sears
where she buys some cheap LED lights
and she hooks them up to a battery
and a fan she ripped out of her PC.
- And it works.
(lights whooshing)
Her homemade puke ray gun actually works
and it only cost $250.
And somehow, it cost the Homeland Security Department
almost a million to build the same thing.
(light whooshing)
- It's 184 BCE
and Hannibal is an naval battle with King Eumenes II.
At stake, control of what is now Turkey.
Luckily, Hannibal has a genius plan
that will go on to inspire a long lineage of weapons
designed to launch weird things at the enemy.
(tense music)
- Hannibal has one ship.
Eumenes, 425 ships.
425 versus one?
Eumenes is gonna crush him.
- Hannibal has an idea.
He tells his men to create what are essentially snake bombs.
- Hannibal and his crew,
they take these very, very venomous snakes
and they put these snakes in clay pots,
then put these clay pots on catapults
and fling these clay pots into the air at the enemy ships.
The snakes come exploding out of these clay pots
and immediately they're agitated,
which means they're gonna start attacking anything
that's near them, which happens to be Eumenes II's sailors.
- In a naval military conflict, the last thing you expect
to be launched at you are snakes.
(soldiers yelling) (snakes hissing)
- Hannibal wins the day and ends up ruling
that stretch of the sea, at least for now.
- Snakes on a boat?
Sounds like a pretty good movie idea.
But Hannibal's catapult tactic has nothing
on one devised by the Mongols.
- So it's the early part of the 13th century
and the Golden Hoard, a mighty massive military force
led by Genghis Khan, overtakes most of Asia,
is on their way to Europe,
and takes over the Crimean Peninsula.
- The Genoese, Italian traitors from Genoa,
they'd love to have power
and a trading post in Crimea from the city of Caffa.
- The Mongols strike a deal
where the Genoese can stay in the walled city of Caffa
and they can trade from that city.
- All goes really well for some time
until we have a new Khan, Jani Beg.
Jani Beg Khan wants Caffa back.
The Genoese refuse.
So, what are they to do but besiege Caffa
to get rid of the Genoese traders?
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] Two years in,
the Mongols develop a serious problem.
- Suddenly, men in the Mongol army are dying in droves.
- Jani Beg is seeing his soldiers fall left and right.
He's thinking, how are we gonna continue a siege like this?
- At the same time, the Genoese look over this wall
and they're starting to see this powerful Mongol army
writhing in pain on the fields, vomiting, just bleeding.
And they think to themselves, we've won.
They're too sick to fight.
There's no way that they're gonna be able
to take over the city from us.
We get to keep it, the day is ours, hurrah.
- [Dan] That's when the Golden Hoard
of Mongols' fearless leader devises a plan
that is both unbelievable and, well, disgusting.
- They filled a trebuchet with their most foul smelling,
worst looking, rotting, bloated corpses
and launched them into the city in the hopes
that the smell alone will drive the residents out.
- They're bloated bodies, they're corpses.
So when they hit, they're exploding on impact.
Just stuff is just oozing from all sorts of gaps
and crevices in these bodies.
- The Genoese are inside going, man,
we know we have to do something with all these dead bodies.
So they start loading them into wagons
and carrying them to the river and dumping them in.
(water splashing)
- Problem solved, right?
Nope, turns out the Genoese
are victims of a new form of warfare.
- As they're collecting these bodies
and starting to dump them, they're noticing
that they're also starting to get sick,
and they're also starting to have the same symptoms
that the Mongols did outside of the city.
They are now writhing in pain and they realize, oh my God,
we've got the same thing that they got.
- [Dan] What the Genoese got
is none other than one of the most infectious diseases.
- The disease that Jani Beg
and the Mongols have hit the Genoese with
is the Bubonic Plague.
(tense music)
- So Jani Beg Khan's original idea
was to just stink these people out.
But now he's realizing, oh my God,
I can get them just as sick as my men.
So the bodies keep coming over the wall.
He has no shame in throwing these men,
flinging them over the walls,
just watching them explode on impact
and getting these Genoese people sick.
- [Dan] The Black Plague trebuchet
is easily the weirdest example
of biological weaponry in human history
and its impact will reach far beyond the walls of Caffa.
- The Mongols retreat south of Caffa
and all the Genoese abandoned the city,
board boats towards Europe.
And what they begin to do in their retreat
is spread the Black Plague through Europe.
- Is Jani Beg Kahn responsible for infecting most of Europe
and killing 25 million people?
Hard to say.
One thing's for certain,
by flinging diseased bodies over a wall,
he devised an impressive weapon of mass destruction.
- Inflatable tanks, dummy military camps,
it's all part of a bold operation aimed
at defeating Hitler during World War II.
- During the buildup that precedes the D-Day invasion
in June 1944, Allied forces engage
in a significant psychological operation,
we create a ghost army,
an army that does not actually exist.
- The US Army wants to lead the Nazis to believe
that their numbers are far greater than they actually are.
Make it look one way to provide cover
for the real troop movements that are taking place
in other spaces, more critical spaces.
- We create encampments that are populated by no one.
We play recordings of the sound that would be a part
of a regular military camp.
We famously create inflatable tanks,
tanks that on the ground,
if you looked at them from 10 feet away,
you'd realize that's an inflatable tank, what is that?
But to a German photo reconnaissance aircraft
at 25,000 feet above, looking down and taking photos,
it's gonna look like a real tank.
(tense music)
- And so, they are a masterful deception unit,
which actually does in fact, fool the Nazis
and gets the Nazis to divert resources away
from the real operations.
- [Dan] But the most unconventional use
of ghost warfare happens much later, during the Vietnam War.
It's perhaps the US military's
weirdest psychological weapon ever.
(tape squealing)
- The war in Vietnam in the early 1970s is guerilla warfare
and you can't always fight fire with fire.
- Bullets and bombs are not demoralizing your enemy enough.
You need something more.
So you call up your psychological warfare friends
in that battalion and they give you a few ideas.
In this case, recordings of souls.
- [Dan] Could an enemy, unfazed by superior firepower,
be vulnerable to something more supernatural?
- American military officials believed
that they can capitalize on some of the superstitions
of the Vietnamese people, particularly around death,
and this idea that if a person dies in a space
that's not their homeland, that they'll be condemned
to wander for all eternity.
What if they were to come up with a psychological operation
that would play on those fears?
- Well, a bunch of naval sound engineers gather in Saigon
and they hire South Vietnamese voice actors
and they create these very eerie,
spooky sounding recordings that will trigger these fears
among North Vietnamese soldiers.
- What they do, is put these little speakers
throughout the jungle, up in trees, all camouflaged,
and run the wires back to base.
- [Dan] On the night of February 10th, 1970,
just after dark, the US forces hit the play button
on what they call, Operation Wandering Soul.
(recording in Vietnamese)
- In the first tape, a young girl is heard
calling to her father and a man answers,
"Who is that, who's calling me?"
- [Dan] It's like "Good Morning, Vietnam," only haunted.
Another recording features the crying, screaming,
and laughing of women and children.
It's designed to be impossible to sleep through.
The aptly named tape, "No Doze."
(crying on recording)
- The North Vietnamese soldiers know that they're speakers
and they start using 'em for target practice,
not 'cause they're scared by them, that they feel
that their ancestors are calling them back home
to not die far afield.
They're firing at them 'cause they're annoyed by them.
- As the program seems to be found not really working
as intended, they double down and they say,
you know what we really need to do?
We need to broadcast these sounds
and spooky things from helicopters.
Helicopters that are simultaneously dropping
leaflets urging people to surrender,
urging people to give up.
- [Dan] Screeching cries of Vietnamese women
and children blasting from armed choppers
do prove terrifying, just not to the intended targets.
- It doesn't really have an effect on the Vietcong.
What it does do is scare and really affect the locals,
and the villagers, and the farmers.
They're hearing these sounds and they're deeply disturbed.
They're scared to leave the house.
It shuts down civilian life.
- [Dan] Eventually, Operation Wandering Soul
becomes an invisible footnote of the Vietnam War,
but all is not lost.
- Cool fact, Operation Wandering Soul
inspires the famous scene in "Apocalypse Now"
where the helicopters are moving in on a position
and they've got speakers on the outside of them
and they're broadcasting for everyone
to hear, the famous Wagner piece, "Ride of the Valkyries."
So if nothing else, Operation Wandering Soul
inspired a famous piece of filmmaking.
- We've long known
that artificial intelligence is the future.
There's AI that can write you a shopping list,
park your car, or even detect illnesses.
But did you know that soon, there will even be robots
that can seek and destroy by their own free will?
(tense music)
- The current state of robotic weapons
has a human in the decision loop when it comes
to pressing the button to kill someone.
In the future, that human will be removed through some sort
of AI enabled technology.
(explosion booming)
- Artificial intelligence, machine learning,
computer vision, facial recognition,
all the new technology that's out there
could be embedded into our weaponry
so that it could be autonomous.
A drone no longer needs a controller, an operator to say,
"Kill this person, drop this bomb."
It's gonna figure it out on its own.
- What we're going to begin seeing more and more
are the autonomous drone attacks.
The drone is pre-programmed.
So you release the drone
and the drone flies toward its target,
attacks and neutralizes that target,
and then makes its escape from the scene of crime.
- [Dan] If one killer drone capable
of independent thought doesn't scare you, how about a swarm
that can coordinate without humans?
- So in the same way that a school of fish
or a flock of birds can move around in space
and coordinate with each other
without a lot of explicit communication,
a decentralized drone swarm can move around in space
and coordinate its behavior with its neighbors.
- That ability to share information at electronic speed
is what makes them so ridiculously powerful.
- [Dan] Strange as it may seem,
there's already a race underway to build drones capable of this.
- The United States, China, Russia,
they're all developing different incarnations
of drone swarms.
So the Pentagon has conducted tests
where they dropped hundreds of micro drones
out of a fighter jet, equipped with explosives
to carry out kamikaze attacks.
In real life, the military is testing this.
- [Dan] Even more frightening,
these drones can be programmed to have a mind of their own.
- Scientists in China have developed a swarm of drones
that can very quickly navigate through a bamboo forest.
- The ability of the drones to communicate
with each other allows them to track a human target
that's walking in the bamboo forest.
Even if the view of an individual drone is blocked,
it is aware of the view of the other drones at the same time.
So it is impossible for that human
to escape the view of a swarm.
- Now, imagine we take the same drones
and we're looking for someone.
So we give the data of what someone looks like.
Through facial recognition,
they could then search for this person,
and if we arm them, we can make them search and destroy.
- So you could have a drone swarm of 5, 10, 50,
100 drones, maybe 1,000,
and the drones will develop a strategy for attacking
and they can improvise within that overall strategy.
All of this not being guided by human hands,
but by artificial intelligence.
- I don't know about you, but this sounds
a lot like "The Terminator" to me,
or the kind of science fiction you hope never becomes fact.
- It's not that hard to imagine
having your own private drone swarm army.
If you've just had the technological means,
you can use this powerful technology
to do whatever you want.
- [Dan] It leaves us wondering,
is it possible to create something so powerful,
so autonomous that we are no longer in control?
- There will be a point where a drone swarm
that has artificial intelligence
will become smarter than we are.
- We've armed these robots, we've taught them to think,
we've taught them to work together.
What happens if they turn around and bite the hand that feeds it?
- We might be releasing this artificial intelligence
that will eventually turn on us, not as a result
of some science fiction script or screenplay.
It will kill whoever encounters it
and we might be releasing, on ourselves, our own undoing.
(suspenseful music)
- We've seen weapons that can stop the enemy
through absolute destruction, freeze them in place,
disable them with fear, even defect to a new home.
If history repeats itself, as we know it often does,
weapons of the future will be more than weird,
they'll be unbelievable.