Original subtitles

warning, what you are about to see

Could be disturbing to some viewers.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Imagine military superpowers around the world

Enlisting beloved sea creatures to search and destroy.

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,

They're exploding on impact.

- These are the weapons so surprising,

They are truly unbelievable.

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.

- 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.

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.

- 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, 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 crazy, how can this work?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

- 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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

this russian secret weapon

Is about to become not so secret and you won't believe how.

- 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.

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

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

- It's great at eradicating your enemies.

It's also great at eradicating your allies.

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.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

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."

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

that's because of the led incapacitator's

Unpleasant side effect, giving it a rather fitting nickname.

- The puke ray gun.

- 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.

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?

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.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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?

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.

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.

- 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, my god,

We've got the same thing that they got.

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.

- So jani beg khan's original idea

Was to just stink these people out.

But now he's realizing, 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.

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?

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.

- 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.

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.

- 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.

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.

on the night of February 10th, 1970,

Just after dark, the us forces hit the play button

On what they call, operation wandering soul.

- In the first tape, a young girl is heard

Calling to her father and a man answers,

"who is that, who's calling me?"

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."

- 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.

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.

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."

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?

- 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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

>>>>oakislandtk www.opensubtitles.org