Nuking the Moon
And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Best Left on the Drawing Board
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- ¥950
発行者による作品情報
"Compulsively readable laugh out loud history." Mary Roach
Bomb-carrying bats. Poisoned flower arrangements. Cigars laced with mind-altering drugs. Listening devices implanted into specially-trained cats. A torpedo-proof aircraft carrier made out of ice and sawdust. And a CIA plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon ... just because.
In Nuking the Moon, Vince Houghton, Historian and Curator at the International Spy Museum, collects the most inspired, implausible and downright bizarre military intelligence schemes that never quite made it off the drawing board. From the grandly ambitious to the truly devious, they illuminate a new side of warfare, revealing how a combination of desperation and innovation led not only to daring missions and brilliant technological advances, but to countless plans and experiments that failed spectacularly.
Alternatively terrifying and hilarious, and combining archival research with newly-conducted interviews, these twenty-six chapters reveal not only what might have happened, but also what each one tells us about the history and people around it. If 'military intelligence' makes you think of James Bond and ingenious exploding gadgets ... get ready for the true story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As International Spy Museum historian Houghton recounts in his entertaining first book, driven by pressure to gain an edge over WWII and Cold War adversaries, some of the U.S.'s smartest researchers dreamed up crazy military and espionage schemes that were ultimately consigned to the dustbin. He begins with "Acoustic Kitty" the project's official name a CIA plan to turn cats into listening devices (in one iteration, an antenna was woven down a test subject's spine) that failed because cats, stubbornly difficult to train in even simple tasks, made poor spies. He moves on from other, often cruel ideas involving animals to plots such as "Operation Monopoly" (the aborted digging of a tunnel to allow for spying on the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.), a proposal to try redirecting hurricanes by exploding nuclear bombs inside of them, and several other frightening projects involving nuclear weapons, including the book's titular idea, in which a young Carl Sagan was involved. "When innovation and desperation meet, trouble will usually follow. If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is the drunk uncle," Houghton quips. Alternately terrifying and hilarious, this book leaves the reader wondering what bizarre schemes are in the works in today's top-secret corridors of power.
