US Navy spent years trying to turn ‘dumb’ sharks into lethal Cold War suicide bombers
MILITARY experts ditched dolphins because they were too intelligent and would 'disobey orders'
AMERICAN military chiefs spent a fortune trying to turn killer sharks into remote-controlled Cold War suicide bombers, it's been revealed.
The astonishing revelations were uncovered during research for a new book called Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War written by Mary Roach.
The idea was that bombs would be strapped to the shark, which would also wear a box on its head which had a compass and could communicate with mission control aboard a nearby warship.
Steering electrodes were also inserted into the shark's shoulders that was also connected to the box.
If the shark then started to swim off course the box would send out an electric shock to one of the shark's sides to get it to swim towards the desired target.
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The MIT report's authors noted shark expert and former director of Mote Marine Laboratory, and marine engineer James Snodgrass said sharks were preferred over dolphins as they were too smart and could not be trusted to follow orders.
The report details that tests - named Project Headgear - were carried out with the sharks on tethers and four versions of the headgear were developed between 1958-1967.
But although manually shocking the sharks worked initially, later tests in swimming pools had disappointing results because the sharks unsurprisingly never played ball.
If the electrical signals sent to the shark were too weak, the shark simply ignored them, but if the signal was too strong, the shark began to make "radical and even violent movements" and wouldn't change its course as requested.
In the end, none of the sharks would continue swimming in the desired direction towards an enemy target for more than half an hour, or three-quarters of a nautical mile.
The report stated that a separate study carried out by another group of researchers found that sharks were not suitable for carrying any kind of payload of any type of weight as, well, they are not donkeys, and the project was declared to total failure.
"It's a system perhaps better suited to land targets and land mammals. A pack animal – a donkey, say, or a mule – is accustomed to carrying loads and responsive to simple left-right directional irritants, like bits and spurs," writes Roach
"Today of course, the US military has drones to do this work. Who needs donkeys? Homegrown terrorists, perhaps. Live donkeys are sometimes laden with explosives and let loose in a target area.
"I imagine an on-board command guidance system might come in handy. Project Headgear strikes me as a system whose time may have returned. Is there such a thing as a mandatory reclassification review?"